Without a license your repo is technically not open-source, only source-available. A license says what people are allowed to do with the code, so if you don't add a license, they're not allowed to do anything.
Opera 12s source is also available, yet it would still be illegal for someone to fork it as it'sa closed licence. Available source is not open source—the difference is having a legal right to continue development.
There have been very interesting creations, like 10 versions of Windows on one live DVD, made by those who couldn't care less about the legal aspects. Such a "underground" browser would be an interesting thing indeed... there was a discussion here on HN about the source code leak not long ago.
Vivaldi is definitely proprietary so I seriously doubt that license you found is for the browser as a whole; it may just be for a library the browser uses internally, among many others.
it was the LICENSE file at the top level of the source archive. if that didn't apply to the whole of the source archive then it should have specified that.
it could of course be that the source archive is not complete and there are non-free dependencies, or that there are exceptions in some subdirectories
EDIT: the README contains this:
Use of original work by Vivaldi Technologies contained in this source code package is governed by a BSD-style license that can be found in the LICENSE file. Other works are governed by their original licensing terms.
those other works are chromium and a few other things, all on FOSS licenses. there is also no mention of other dependencies.
According to this answer from Vivaldi it sounds like the public source is only partial (the Chromium source code and any direct changes Vivaldi made to it):
> Vivaldi is not made available under one unified open source license. It does contain the Chromium source code with changes made to allow the HTML/CSS/JS based UI to run. All changes to the Chromium source code are made available under a BSD license and can be read by anyone on vivaldi.com/source/. Details in this regard are explained in the the README and LICENSE files within the package.
> In addition, our UI code is written in plain, accessible code for those who read HTML, CSS and JS. This means that for all practical purposes the Vivaldi source code is available for audit.
> Vivaldi also contains third party code. Licenses for these parts can be found in the source package and in the installed browser by navigating to vivaldi://credits
> Vivaldi runs as a React app on top of Chromium, but to make that possible, they had to make changes to the way Chromium works (likely how it handles extensions).
That’s really interesting — their UI is pretty fast and responsive, so even if it’s not FOSS it’s an interesting approach to dig into. Would anyone knowledgeable be able to compare this with the Electron-based approach most other Chromium customisers use?
thanks, you found the statement that i was unsuccessfully searching for.
what is disappointing is, that there is no explanation as to why.
one redditor claims to understand why vivaldi is doing that, but frankly, i don't.
if the UI source is public anyways, why not put it under a FOSS license? what do they have to gain from not making it open? and while they say i may read the source to audit it, why should i bother if i can't use the source and work with it? i am not going to audit closed source unless i am paid for doing so.
