On 1/27/21 2:43 AM, Massimiliano Torromeo wrote:
Google might even decide that they don't want to invest resources on the sync infrastructure anymore and kill it altogether and it would be their right to do so, and not even all that surprising given the amount of dead google projects over the years. Sure, but that would be fine and no one will bat an eye about it. What is not fine is the thing you describe below.
The only thing that I find distasteful is that this all feels like an attack on chromium, linux distrubutions and their maintainers, since they don't seem to have any valid reason to withold access to their apis other than to draw more users to their proprietary variant of the browser. This is them trying to control the market by crippling the Chromium browser.
Even so that doesn't make chromium any less Free Software or undeserving to be in the repos. If anything that would still keep some users away from Chrome since I suspect most users would resort to installing something like "chrome- bin". Except, honestly, I don't see this happening realistically. An AUR PKGBUILD will need the keys, which cannot be downloaded from an online resource, so they would have to be included verbatim on the AUR. Which would be in violation of Google's terms. We will get a Cease and Desist sooner or later.
Also, who knows, maybe this will make someone start working on a free alternative to google sync...
Yes, hopefully! -- Regards, Konstantin