i don’t want to offend anyone, but some open source/privacy enthusiasts dislike google, but why?? google has made chromium, android, etc and most of the things they do are open source, and not only that, they also support creative commons media or public domain. i know the privacy concernes they may have, but they would never do anything bad to you. i love google personally because of their commitment to open source software.
Chromium is open-source. Chrome is not and also happens to constitute a majority of the browser market, and Google has tried multiple times to cash in on this market share to benefit their primary business of advertising to the detriment of users (FLoC, Manifest v3, Web Environment Integrity).
Likewise, AOSP is open-source, but Google has been progressively dismantling it and making various components closed-source (most recently the dialer app).
All this to say, Google is absolutely not friendly to FOSS. As a corporation, they’re beholden to their shareholders above all else and they should be treated as an amoral entity, the same as every other publicly-traded company.
google isn’t amoral , i’m sorry but, what about the google employees who use debian?? or who use krita?? those people are changing the environment!! and the only case in which they can be seen as amoral, is when they are asked for data to the government.
Public companies are by definition amoral. They’re beholden to their shareholders and virtually every decision they make is informed by this obligation. Morality generally only factors into their decision-making insofar as it affects PR and thus the bottom line.
I don’t mean to say that Google or any other company is immoral. I use amoral to simply mean that they operate independent of morality. No public company, no matter how much you may like them, is your friend at the end of the day.
I’m sure they have some Firefox users too. It’s going to take a lot more than a few employees using Linux to convince me they wouldn’t steal both of my kidneys and leave me in an icy hotel bathtub.
Chrome itself isn’t the real problem, how they managed to get Chromium everywhere is. You have one real alternative and that’s Firefox (and derivatives) and it’s barely surviving, which sucks.
Sure, they might not get as much money directly from non-Chrome browsers, but they get to push standards through Chromium.
