> Google is willing to remove standards-compliant XML support as well.
> They're the same picture.
To spell it out, "if it's inconvenient, it goes", is something that the _owner_ does. The culture of the web was "the owners are those who run the web sites, the servants are the software that provides an entry point to the web (read or publish or both)". This kind of "well, it's dashed inconvenient to maintain a WASM layer for a dependency that is not safe to vendor any more as a C dependency" is not the kind of servant-oriented mentality that made the web great, not just as a platform to build on, but as a platform to emulate.
This is an attempt to rewrite history.
Early browser like NCSA Mosaic were never even released as Open Source Software.
Netscape Navigator made headlines by offering a free version for academic or non-profit use, but they wanted to charge as much as $99 (in 1995 dollars!) for the browser.
Microsoft got in trouble for bundling a web browser with their operating system.
The current world where we have true open source browser options like Chromium is probably closer to a true open web than what some people have retconned the early days of the web as being.
It's also 32 million lines of code which is borderline prohibitive to maintain if you're planning any importantly different browser architecture, without a business plan or significant funding.
There's lots of things perfectly forkable and maintainable in the world is better for them (shoutout Nextcloud and the various Syncthing forks). But Chromium, insofar as it's a test of the health and openness of the software ecosystem, I think is not much of a positive signal on account of what it would realistically require to fork and maintain for any non-trivial repurposing.
By these criteria no software is open source.
It seems like most open source projects either have:
1. A singular developer, who controls what contributions are accepted and sets the direction of the project 2. An in-group / foundation / organization / etc that does the same.
Do you have an example of an open source project whose roadmap is community-driven, any more than Google or Mozilla accepts bug reports and feature reports and patches and then decides if they want to merge them?
I don't know that road maps are any more or less "community driven" than anything else given the nature of their structures, but one can draw a distinction between them and the degree of corporate alignment like React (Facebook), Swift (Apple).
I'm agreeable enough to your characterization of open source projects. It's broad but, I think, charitably interpreted, true enough. But I think you can look at the range of projects and see ones that are multi stakeholder vs those with consolidated control and their degree of alignment with specific corporate missions.
When Google tries to, or is able to, muscle through Manifest v3, or FLoC or AMP, it's not trying to model benevolent actor standing on open source principles.
what's missing is social infrastructure to direct attention to this (and maybe it's missing because people are too dumb when it comes to adblockers, or they are not bothered that much, or ...)
and of course, also maintaining a fork that does the usual convenience features/services that Google couples to Chrome is hard and obviously this has antitrust implications, but nowadays not enough people care about this either