Googler, opinions are my own. I don't work on chrome or anything related.
Many companies put out free software to drive people towards their products, and Chrome with Google Search seems to be one of those. As many know, improving and maintaining Chrome is not free, and having Google Search being a default is one part of what helps pay for this work.
Yes, this is Google, yes, this is likely a tiny drop in the bucket for them, but at the same time, it's taking away potential revenue from Google.
If this was some smaller company that produced a product that had some default that pointed to one of their SaaS offerings or the like, there would be potential issues raised over the Debian maintainers changing this default.
Chromium isn't just gratis software ("free" has a different meaning), it's open source software. There is no implicit expectation that downstream users can't change it any way want[1] and redistribute the result, that's the whole point of the open source license that Chromium is released under.
Chromium is distributed under the 3-clause BSD license, so I totally agree with you that distros can do whatever they want with it (more details here: https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/licensing/ ). I'd imagine many people that work on Chromium would agree with this and are happy for distros to do what they'd like. If Google wanted to be pushy with the software, it could do some other kind of licensing saying people couldn't modify it and still use the Chromium branding, but they obviously chose not to do this.
My take from a business perspective is that Google produces Chrome and Chromium for a number of reasons. Good will to the community (with how permissive they are with the license), and having a stable platform to be able to build things like GMail and Search on-top of. But there is also the Ads side that benefits from Google Search being the default.
So I guess there are really many benefits for Chrome's existence, and Google Searching being a default is only part of that. But I still stand by my original post and reasoning.
Wow. Yes, that's how competition works. Are people at the tech monopolists really that entitled that they consider the entire world's purse strings theirs to control?
What a bizarre way to justify surveillance. Who said the web browser can't be sold instead? The browser and the search engine should not be developed by the same company, there are clear conflicts of interest there, but we all know why Google provides all of these products and services "for free".
> If this was some smaller company that produced a product that had some default that pointed to one of their SaaS offerings or the like, there would be potential issues raised over the Debian maintainers changing this default.
Well, thankfully this is Google, and not a small company then.
Many companies put out free software to drive people towards their products, and Chrome with Google Search seems to be one of those. As many know, improving and maintaining Chrome is not free, and having Google Search being a default is one part of what helps pay for this work.
Yes, this is Google, yes, this is likely a tiny drop in the bucket for them, but at the same time, it's taking away potential revenue from Google.
If this was some smaller company that produced a product that had some default that pointed to one of their SaaS offerings or the like, there would be potential issues raised over the Debian maintainers changing this default.