jr conlin's ink stained banana

Well, looks like Google is releasing a second browser, to compete with it's first, i'd imagine.

(Wait, "second"? Well, yeah. Mozilla is HEAVILY vested and invested by Google. The default search engine is Google, the default start page is Google, most of the financial income for the Mozilla foundation comes from Google, and a fair bit of the engineering resources come from Google. If that level of investment doesn't indicate a sizeable bit of ownership by Google, i have no idea what does.)

So, naturally, it makes sense that Google's new browser be based off of Apple's Webkit and incorporates a great deal of the functions found in Opera.

You'll be excused for wanting to stop and think about that for a minute. Or possibly put your head between your knees. i think some folks at Mozilla might be doing that.

It's all "open source" in the same way that Java was, where the code is released for you to play with, but none of the changes you want will be incorporated back in. Likewise, i'm willing to believe that should you want to fork a branch of this and call it "Anodized Aluminum", or something, you're probably going to get a few cautionary words of advisement from Google's legal department.

Personally, i think it's not a problem.

First off, Google doesn't have a stellar track record when it comes to things other than Search algorythms (and possibly web mail). Branching into client apps like this may not do quite as well as a number of folks believe. Secondly, unless Goog's planning on making this Fully Open Source, to the point where they give up control of the product for branching and core work, and potentially accept that features may be incorporated wholesale into that other Open Source web-browser without their direct control, you're not going to see the same sort of growth potential. Opera is a darn fine brower that a good many people use. It's also far behind in adoption.

Still, it bothers me that Google is effectively forcing a division of open source support for no good reason, other than they want to control a portion of that audience directly. This isn't anything other than a corporate move to try and edge out what could potentially be a competitive platform, while opening up more possibilities for monopolizing the desktop.