And those projects are dependent on Google's perpetual goodwill to keep Chromium open and up to date. What if Google one day yanks the rug out from under them?
It's instructive to think about some history. Chrome's rendering engine, Blink, is a fork of WebKit. Before 2013, the landscape of browsers and browser-like projects were even bleaker than today: basically everyone depended on Apple's perpetual goodwill. Even Google, because Apple had a notoriously bad code review process for committing to WebKit itself. Then Google forked it.
You ask what if Google one day yanks the rug out, and the answer is, plenty of large companies will fork it.
Since GP was talking about dependence on Chromium, I was naturally talking about the dominance of WebKit at that time. WebKit had almost 100% dominance on mobile and ~60% market share on desktop. Of course by then everyone knew that mobile was the future so it was even fine to target just WebKit.
That applies to any project you fork or build. The team working on it can change licenses or stop development at any time.
Considering how many companies depend on working with Chromium there is financial backing for funding development if Google were to go away. It is the browser in the most favorable position for if this were to happen.
The difference is that most projects are of reasonable scope so that an individual or small team can take over maintenance completely if needed.
Web browsers on the other hand have become so complex that is no longer possible without an enourmous amout of resources so you really are dependent on big G to keep feeding you updates. This complexity is at least part due to the ever increasing number of standards and expanding scope that Google themselves are pushing for.
Microsoft is not and will never be the hero in any story.
> What prevents literally anybody from continuing to support Chromium? Has Microsoft ran out of competent engineers?
Remember that Microsoft failed at its promise of if we don't match Chrome bug for bug, that is a defect in Edge. They failed and they gave up trying. My personal conspiracy theory is that it costs well over a billion dollars a year, not including marketing dollars or bribery dollars, just to keep Chrome running.
I don't think Google will pull the rug on Chromium but then again all bets are off if Google has new overlords or if Google isn't making that USD 200B+ revenue year over year. Things feel permanent probably right before giving up the ghost. I think if Microsoft felt like it could avoid using Chromium with its own stuff, it would have never touched Chromium.
tl;Dr I doubt Microsoft will put in the money or energy it takes to maintain Chromium.
If chromium were abandoned they wouldn't really have a choice, would they? I guess they could migrate edge to run on top of firefox, but I'm not sure if they'd want to.
It's actually a little interesting, why did they choose Chromium in the first place over firefox, when Microsoft and Google are more directly competitors?
Sure, you can fork it but your fork will never reach the same level of security as the original simply because you cannot afford to put in the same effort as Google does.
My point is that these forks are futile because it takes only one major vulnerability - found by Project Zero and publicized with Google's might - to blow you out of business.
Project Zero notifies vendors before disclosing the vulnerability. They would also be able to provide a patch from Google assuming the code hadn't diverged too much since the fork.
