It does have to be free. It’s open source software. If they tried to charge money for Chrome, people would just use Chromium or one of the other browsers based on it.
Chromium is open source. Chrome is not. Open source also doesn’t mean that you can’t charge for the compiled binaries. But that isn’t my point. My point is that the reason it’s free is that you’re actually paying for it through the value of Google tracking and storing everything you do, but as a society have don’t have to structure services this way.
It does have to be free. It’s open source software. If they tried to charge money for Chrome, people would just use Chromium or one of the other browsers based on it.
Chromium is open source. Chrome is not. Open source also doesn’t mean that you can’t charge for the compiled binaries. But that isn’t my point. My point is that the reason it’s free is that you’re actually paying for it through the value of Google tracking and storing everything you do, but as a society have don’t have to structure services this way.
Chrome and Chromium are 99.9% the same. Source: I used to be a Chrome developer at Google.