[arch-dev-public] Chromium losing Sync support on March 15

[Massimiliano Torromeo]

In data mercoledì 27 gennaio 2021 01:12:39 CET, Konstantin Gizdov via arch-
dev-public ha scritto:
> > I mean, I also find the whole situation irritating and their arguments
> > actually insulting to our intelligence but there's no winning this.
> 
> That may be, but I don't agree this is an argument to go belly up.

The thing is, I don't even think we would be going "belly up" on anything.

At the end of the day, as irritating as it might be, google's apis were never 
open source or a part of chromium (except obviously the integration part) and 
even without access to these apis, the browser itself is very much Free 
Software under an OSI approved license.

Something that, for example, Vivaldi, which has users that swear by it, cannot 
really say (only partially).

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.

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.

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".

Also, who knows, maybe this will make someone start working on a free 
alternative to google sync...

-- 
Massimiliano Torromeo
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