Google today announced a “Supporters of Chromium-based Browsers” initiative in partnership with The Linux Foundation, while detailing its contributions to the open-source browser project.
The goal of Supporters of Chromium-based Browsers is to “foster a sustainable environment of open-source contributions towards the health of the Chromium ecosystem and financially support a community of developers who want to contribute to the project, encouraging widespread support and continued technological progress for Chromium embedders.”
Sustainable funding of critical open source infrastructure remains a hot industry-wide topic of discussion and over the years we’ve heard from many companies and developers about how critical the Chromium project is to their work. They’ve also shared how they would like to support the continued health of the project, beyond direct engineering support.
It involves a fund managed by the Linux Foundation, with Meta, Microsoft, and Opera pledging support to Supporters of Chromium-based Browsers. (There are no changes to Chromium’s “current, existing governance structures.”)
We welcome this additional investment into Chromium’s commons and we’re looking forward to working with the other members of the Supporters of Chromium-based Browsers to ensure that it meets the needs of the wider Chromium community. At the same time, we remain committed to being the responsible steward of the Chromium project and to the massive investment necessary to keep Chromium working well for the entire web industry.
This comes in the context of the US government wanting Google to divest/sell the Chrome browser and Chromium.
Google also shared that its over 100,000 commits to Chromium in 2024 accounted for ~94% of contributions. Additionally, it “continues to invest heavily in the shared infrastructure of the Open Source project.” This involves:
- having thousands of servers endlessly running millions of tests
- responding to hundreds of incoming bugs per day
- ensuring the important ones get fixed
- constantly investing in code health to keep the whole project maintainable
All that translates to “hundreds of millions of US dollars in annual investment just for maintenance costs before any new feature, innovation or other business priorities can be addressed.”
Google explicitly said today that it has “no intention of reducing this investment.”
While we have no intention of reducing this investment, we continue to welcome others stepping up to invest more.
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