My understanding is that MS’s contributions to Chromium are minimal so far and are mostly to address their own issues and priorities, but I guess such judgements are hard to actually quantify so they end up being subjective.
Yes, I probably should have said ‘Chromium’ instead of Chrome, but I had understood that the closed portions of Chrome & Chrome OS were just the telemetry and the media decryption module (and I like what they did to reduce that to a minimum and make it optional). Nothing like what has happened on Android where Play Services and the Play Store are substantial elements.
So, I still think of Chrome as effectively, truly open source and Android not so much.
I agree there’s a large gap between Chrome and Android on this...though I do think they’re on the same spectrum.
Agreed that MS has made their Chromium contributions in areas that are important to them, but then that’s always the case with all contributors to OSS, no? As of a year ago they’d made 1800 PRs from 160 devs. Of course, as you say, what counts as “substantial” is hard to quantify. A PR can be a small typo fix or a complete reworking of a core technology, so it’d take a lot of work to pin down substantial-ness, and then a person would still be arguing about if it was important or not.
Yes, it is just one factor.
My understanding is that MS’s contributions to Chromium are minimal so far and are mostly to address their own issues and priorities, but I guess such judgements are hard to actually quantify so they end up being subjective.
Yes, I probably should have said ‘Chromium’ instead of Chrome, but I had understood that the closed portions of Chrome & Chrome OS were just the telemetry and the media decryption module (and I like what they did to reduce that to a minimum and make it optional). Nothing like what has happened on Android where Play Services and the Play Store are substantial elements.
So, I still think of Chrome as effectively, truly open source and Android not so much.
I agree there’s a large gap between Chrome and Android on this...though I do think they’re on the same spectrum.
Agreed that MS has made their Chromium contributions in areas that are important to them, but then that’s always the case with all contributors to OSS, no? As of a year ago they’d made 1800 PRs from 160 devs. Of course, as you say, what counts as “substantial” is hard to quantify. A PR can be a small typo fix or a complete reworking of a core technology, so it’d take a lot of work to pin down substantial-ness, and then a person would still be arguing about if it was important or not.