He claims that in Germany he can make a lot of money at this. If he can then it means he's taking an open source project and doing something with it to make money. It doesn't even sound like he's closing the source of his fork (assuming he would even have this option). It's not the most efficient thing but if he really can make money with this I don't see much fault in it. It's risky because someone else could just push these changes back to Chrome killing his revenue stream.
Sure, it's just that the whole thing has a big "Google's all about stealing your data" vibe in its advertisements.
When in fact Google would be happy to take his patches, and most of those data-sharing features are improving the user experience (like type-ahead suggestions etc.).
