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Update about this topic
Floorp’s code is now fully public again.
Hello Floorp users, As some of you in the Reddit and Ablaze communities may have noticed, Floorp has recently gone closed-source.
This article discusses the reasons, causes, and future Floorp.
What Happened to Floorp?
Simply put, almost all of the code for custom shortcut keys, implementations of extensions working on the web panel, workspaces, split views, and private containers is now close-sourced.
What is the reason?
A year ago, when we announced Floorp 11, Floorp was a browser for which no fork yet existed.
Recently, however, there have been various forks of Floorp. I admit that collaboration on open source projects is great, but I have a strong sense of urgency about this.
I know it’s not nice of me to say, but Floorp has been in too much demand. It am surprise to me that companies and organizations would fork a fork that I had created when I was still a teenager, and at first I was happy about it, but it was not beneficial to me, and on the contrary, it was mentally draining.
There were forks that wanted to hide the fact that they were Floorp forks, forks that did not want to contribute to Floorp at all, forks that used the code for life and just changed the name of Floorp, and many other forks were born.
There are only a handful of people in this world who know anything about Firefox, and since Floorp currently has no advertising, my own salary is, of course, zero. It’s just not going to last.
I am not concerned about name recognition. In order to keep Floorp sustainable, we also need the maintainers of the forks to cooperate.
All of these causes are forking.
I also consider the maintainers of the fork: I am the only maintainer of Floorp, and if Floorp goes down, of course Floorp fork goes down too. This is the not good way.
What will happen in the future?
Floorp 12 is coming later this year. This version will include many amazing features.
Floorp is more than a browser. I want the name Floorp to be the name of the entire product.
There is some code in the closed source code to prepare for this. If these are forked, my hundreds of hours will have been wasted.
The Close-source License Will Be Changed?
Some privacy concerned users would have found the text so far sad. However, I did not write that I would remain a close source.
I have been studying line sense for the past few months. The purpose is to learn how to publish code that cannot be used for forking as open source.
The current form of Floorp is such that the project ends the moment I am gone.
I have to obligate the folks to choose whether they want to pay me or help me code.
The solution has already been found and I am working on getting some of the Floorp code ready to be released as Open-source LICENSE.
I know most of our users are concerned about the transparency of the code. (Just a note, I allow the use of the code if the fork is not malicious. In fact, I allowed FireDragon to use the code for free.
Finally
It was my fault for causing this problem, but it is an unavoidable part of maintaining Floorp for decades.
I am still a student and new to gaining good visibility through open source, so I will continue to research and develop.
Please give me a little more time so that I can bring back some of the users who have now left. Also, there is no problem to use the version that was open source.
I was sick two weeks ago and this forking issue the cause. Thanks to all users for your support.