Andrew Torba, co-creator of Gab (social network) has announced plans to create a new browser. His reasons center primarily on his expectation that Google is going to block Gab’s upcoming ‘comments engine’ browser extension & prevent it from being available in the Chrome Store.
While listening to him (see URL below), I was thinking to myself: ‘Why doesn’t he just look into partnering with Brave?’
Seconds later, Torba said “… so why don’t we fork Brave, because Brave has done the best in terms of using privacy, ad blocking, etc.… it’s open source, so we can just fork it…” (after which he went on to criticize Brave for its apparent decision to use BAT instead of bitcoin, etc.)
An interesting turn of events. I have briefly read Brave’s explanation about attention tokens, but not in much detail and not comprehensively. But I had the idea that one could use Bitcoin with the browser in association with the Attention Tokens.
Anyway, I like Brave and Brendan, and I like the uncensored Gab.
MeWe seems pretty good too, and has some cool with Tim Berners Lee’s endorsement.
Open source sure rocks! The Bazaar vs. the cathedral, eh,…
I also should mention Eric Raymond’s excellent article on the open source culture. I couldn’t find the link quickly but he talked about how Open Source projects evolve and there is a sort of “spontaneous order” that emerges. Bad idea forks fade away, good ones persist, a practice emerges generally of credit where credit is due, and so on.
Another talks about the importance of maintaining the meritocratic tradition in the culture. (It relates highly to code and UI quality).
That recap does not do justice to his presentation.