What Is Google Hiding With Chrome?

Bevan Rudge

on

September 2, 2008

What Is Google Hiding With Chrome?

Google has announced their web browser Chrome. Many are excited while others remain skeptical. Currently I'm both; but a recent discovery has swayed me towards skeptical. Here's why. Google Chrome is available for download from google.com/chrome. However the open source project that Google promoted so heavily in the comic book announcement is called Chromium. It's website is chromium.org which redirects to code.google.com/chromium, which is a splash page to get developers and contributors on board. Chromium's issue tracker is hosted on google code under the project chromium at code.google.com/p/chromium (Code repository and other details are on chromium.org subdomains). This led me to ask, why is there both Chromium and Chrome? What is the difference? What's at code.google.com/p/chrome? Going to that url, google asks you to log in, then gives you a 403 forbidden error. It appears that chrome is a separate closed-source project, which without a doubt includes proprietary code in addition to chromium. What is google hiding from us? How open-source will Chrome really be? I have tested that the 403 forbidden error is not a mishandled 404 not found error. Go to code.google.com/p/somereallyunusualprojectnamethatdoesnotexist to test for yourself.

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I think there is some confusion about how open source licenses work - Google might have their own build which includes closed source components (probably just branding), but all the other code that goes into it is still open source.