“WASHINGTON (AP) — A judge on Monday ruled that Google’s ubiquitous search engine has been illegally exploiting its dominance to squash competition and stifle innovation in a seismic decision that could shake up the internet and hobble one of the world’s best-known companies…”
Chromium is open source but not free (as in freedom). In fact, it is developed by Google and only Google has the power to accept or refuse a PR.
As an example: Manifest V2 is going to be discontinued in favor of V3 on Chromium (and consequently Chrome) despite the outrage of the users and developers.
I thought it was not a licensing issue but rather that it if someone wanted to maintain the engine with MV2, it would get increasingly hard to do independently because of the sheer complexity.
Yup. Nobody denies you from forking Chromium and maintaining an updated version with MV2, but good luck doing that
I don’t think anything you said makes it not free, as long as you can fork it. The same can be said about most FOSS, since somebody, usually the creator, is in control of the repository.
That’s the point of FOSS - your repository isn’t becoming a democracy by virtue of using a permissive license, but it means somebody could outcompete you with a fork and effectively take over as the dominant project.