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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 14th, 2023

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  • stuck with the GPL forever

    If you accept a patch and don’t have the ability to relicense it, you can remove it and re-license the new codebase. You can even re-implement changes made by the patch in many cases, whether those changes are bug fixes or new features.

    If you re-implement the change, you do need to ensure this is done in a way that doesn’t cause it to become a derivative work, but it’s much easier if you have copyright to 99% of a work already and only need to re-implement 1% or so. If you’ve received substantial community contributions and the community is opposed to relicensing, it will be much harder to do so.

    A clean room implementation - where the person rewriting the code doesn’t look at the original code, and is only given a description of the functionality - which can include a detailed description of the algorithm - is the most defensible way to perform such a rewrite and relicense, but it’s not the only option.

    You should generally consult an attorney when relicensing and shouldn’t just do it casually. But a single patch certainly doesn’t mean you’re locked in forever.


  • I’m not the person you responded to, but I can say that it’s a perfectly fine take. My personal experience and the commonly voiced opinions about both browsers supports this take.

    Unless you’re using 5 tabs max at a time, my personal experience is that Firefox is more than an order of magnitude more memory efficient than Chrome when dealing with long-lived sessions with the same number of tabs (dozens up to thousands).

    I keep hundreds of tabs open in Firefox on my personal machine (with 16 GB of RAM) and it’s almost never consuming the most memory on my system.

    Policy prohibits me running Firefox on my work computer, so I have to use Chrome. Even with much more memory (both on 32 GB and 64 GB machines) and far fewer tabs (20-30 at most vs 200-300), Chrome often ends up taking up far too much memory + having a substantial performance drop, and I have to to through and prune the tabs I don’t need right now, bookmark things that can be done later, etc…

    Also, see https://www.techspot.com/news/102871-zero-regrets-firefox-power-user-kept-7500-tabs.html - I’ve never seen anything similar for Chrome and wasn’t able to find anything.