On Wed, 2009-12-09 at 08:48 +0200, A.J. Venter wrote: > Some of you may have noticed the news that google-chrome released an > official GNU/Linux beta yesterday. Chromium (the community project > it's built on) is BSD-licensed and obviously then free software > (though we may > raise queries about it's plugins/extensions at least the code is free > there) but the download page for google-chrome shows this agreement: > http://www.google.com/chrome/eula.html?hl=en&platform=linux&brand=CHFK > > Which is most certainly not compliant with most of the four freedoms. > My feeling at this stage, is that chrome is probably non-free and > chromium is free but problematic - but since I'm rather a fan of the > technology in it, I thought > I would seek some opinions about this understanding.
RMS asked me about this recently and here are the notes I shared with him then: There are two different things: Google Chrome and Google Chromium. Google Chrome is the name that Google gives to the browser that they build, test, and release. It is under a nonfree license that prohibits all distribution and modification. Google Chromium is the name that Google gives to the source code that they release for their browser. It's a large collection of source code, mostly because Google forks and incorporates various free software libraries into it, but I believe it is all free software. I do not believe any of the components they use released under the GNU GPL or GNU LGPL. It does include ffmpeg, and *parts* of that are released under the GNU GPL, but Google claims that they are not using the GPL-covered portions of the library and nobody has contested that claim. It is unclear what, if any, technical differences exist between Google Chrome and a built version of Google Chromium. Possibilities include: * Google Chrome includes support for video codecs that Google has obtained patent licenses for, and that support is either not included with Google Chromium, or not included by default during the build process. * The Google Chrome EULA makes reference to various features that would be odious to free software users: the browser automatically updates itself without warning the user or allowing them to intervene. It also automatically downloads a blacklist of extensions from Google; if the user has installed extensions on that blacklist, they will automatically be uninstalled. I'm guessing these features aren't in Google Chromium -- again, either by being absent from the source code or not included in a default build. Searching the web for confirmation on any of this hasn't yielded any success, unfortunately. [This might be easier to find now that Chrome has been released for GNU/Linux.] -- Brett Smith Licensing Compliance Engineer, Free Software Foundation Support the FSF by becoming an Associate Member: http://fsf.org/jf
