this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2025
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Android and Chromium. Is listing two projects that were created almost entirely by the same company and gifted to the Open Source world the best way to make your point? I mean, they sure are shafting us with Kubernetes too right?
I would say that Google is screwing us with Clang and LLVM except Apple and Microsoft contribute a lot to that too so they deserve some of the blame.
But, I mean clearly GCC is the better project. I mean sure LLVM resulted in Rust (corporate project), Swift (corporate project), and Zig but GCC is where the real innovation is. I mean GCC just added COBOL and Algol 68.
Chromium was created by the KDE community which needed HTML rendering in.. the 90s? Then it was taken up by MS competitors who wanted to make a rival of Internet Explorer and they "created" WebKit. Nokia, Apple, BlackBerry, later Google and many others contributed to WebKit which became Safari and eventually Chrome. At one point Google broke off from that codebase to create Blink.
I'll give you that you've got a decent narrative and I wouldn't have objected much if Google was the "Don't be evil" company it used to be in the late 2000s and early 2010s. Which is also when they acquired Danger and released their src as Android. We're not in that world anymore. I don't give a flying fuck where the innovation is because I can rely on GCC being here 50 years from now, when the current corporate players be long gone.
Again, I really wish we lived in 2015 when people (and I) trusted Google enough to make it trivial for me to advocate for their projects and products.