Talk:Iridium Browser

Opening the "third_party" directory of Iridium's source, one can read https://git.iridiumbrowser.de/cgit.cgi/iridium-browser/tree/third_party/README.chromium includes that sentence:

Code in third_party must document the license under which the source is being used.

Taking a look at the sub-directories of "third_party", I noticed "unrar", which I believed was proprietary. And, indeed, https://git.iridiumbrowser.de/cgit.cgi/iridium-browser/tree/third_party/unrar/LICENSE says, among other things:

2. UnRAR source code may be used in any software to handle RAR archives without limitations free of charge, but cannot be used to develop RAR (WinRAR) compatible archiver and to re-create RAR compression algorithm, which is proprietary.

I also clicked on the "analytics" sub-directory because I found it "interesting" that Google Analytics is part of Iridium, "a browser securing your privacy" according to its website. There, the main file contains minified JavaScript (what does not qualify as "source code"): https://git.iridiumbrowser.de/cgit.cgi/iridium-browser/tree/third_party/analytics/google-analytics-bundle.js

https://git.iridiumbrowser.de/cgit.cgi/iridium-browser/tree/chrome/test/data/chromeproxy/extension/google-analytics-bundle.js is another version (as obfuscated as the first one) of Google Analytics, outside "third_party".

There is an unclear license notice in the middle of those obfuscated files:

Portions of this code are from MochiKit, received by The Closure Authors under the MIT license. All other code is Copyright 2005-2009 The Closure Authors. All Rights Reserved.

What portions? What MIT license (there are two)? Do "All Rights Reserved" to the "the Closure Authors" mean the default (proprietary) copyright?

Clicking on the issues in the "Blocked on" list on the left of https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=28291 one sees that Chromium's source code actually includes hundreds of files with "UNKNOWN" licensing, as reported by 'licensecheck'. Are there any declaration from Iridium's authors that they avoided all those files or somehow solved the problem?

It is sad that, when asked in https://github.com/iridium-browser/tracker/issues/93 "when the developers of Iridium can verify that it is entirely free software", one of the developers replies (and no other developer contradicts him):

yes we can confirm Iridium Browser is fully Open-Source! (...) fully Open-Source means 100% including any and all components, plugins, extensions, patches, snippets and everything else it is shipped with by default.

Given my little (and by no mean comprehensive) investigation, it looks like a lie...

The issues I listed above are present as well in upstream Chromium: just substitute the prefix "https://git.iridiumbrowser.de/cgit.cgi/iridium-browser/tree/" of the URLs with "https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/master/".

See also

• https://github.com/iridium-browser/tracker/issues/93