Update: They just open-sourced it https://github.com/Floorp-Projects/Floorp-private-components
cross-posted from: https://kbin.melroy.org/m/foss@beehaw.org/t/170330
See also https://forum.endeavouros.com/t/floorp-going-closed-source/52783
Unfortunately a lot of this seems in reponse to Midori, a seemingly hostile fork with a pretty suspcious website.
To some people all forks are hostile. This appears to be such a case. He just seems to be sour over people exercising the same freedoms he got from Mozilla upstream. Rules for thee but not for me. The free software community doesn’t need his obscure fork.
I disagree in this case. The majority of Firefox forks make it clear they’re a fork, giving credit to Mozilla. Midori seems to hide that they’re a fork while adding very little to the browser. Their website also takes donations while having a fake phone number and broken contact button. Hard not to see that as suspicious.
Edit: the dev was also completely ok with Firedragon switching to their codebase because they did so resepectfully.
I still disagree with what the dev did, but I get the struggle.