> But they won't learn that on their own

I think they're fully aware of this. They just don't care, because the goal of "get market share super high" has been reached, so now they have no need for it to continue being open.

I don't disagree about what that means we should do; I just don't think we should assume they're being naive here. It's like writing a program to play chess; you should select your move assuming the opponent is smart and will make the optimal counterplay rather than assuming weakness, and then if they end up being less smart than that, you're still in a good place.

Hard forking doesn't solve the problem of closed source.

If the goal of a hard fork is "the community will invest equal resources that Google does today" then you wildly underestimate how many engineers work on Chrome.

> Android wouldn't be what it is if it wasn't open source.

Yes, and now that they've achieved market saturation, it's time to pull up the ladder.

Thanks for all the free work, suckers!

> or turn to alternatives like Firefox as a new foundation.

With the way Firefox is heading, that might not be the best idea. Nowadays Mozilla seem more focused on riding the AI-hype wave than actually making an excellent browser people want to actually use.

The “we” in your post is interesting to me. Who do you mean? Individuals?

It's sad we lost ChromeOS. They got Linux, they got open source, they didn't make so so so many unforced errors.

Now that the chromebooks are also Android, it feels like the slide is only going to grow ever more fearsome.

> So we move. We force their hand

What do you have in mind?

LOL "start" using Firefox. I've been using Firefox for half a decade. There's zero I miss about Chrome.