Is the Chromium Flatpak "official"

[Russ Bain]

The Chromium Flatpak on Flathub has the publisher listed as "by The Chromium Authors". But it lacks a verified checkmark. And it says nothing else about the affiliation of the developers. I can see them on Github, but I don't know whether or how much these people have anything to do with the Chromium Project.

On Flathub, the listed publisher doesn't seem to mean much. For example the Jetbrains Webstorm flatpak is NOT published by Jetbrains, which is clearly stated in the description. The Firefox flatpak however bears a blue verification checkmark, as does the Telegram flatpak. In addition both Mozilla and Telegram websites link to their official flathub pages.

I see no such link for Chromium. Nor have I found any mention of Flatpak on the official Chromium pages.

So is the Chromium flatpak on Flathub "official" (and therefore safe to use) or is it "unofficial'?

[PhistucK]

Looks like it is unofficial.

The original poster of the following thread maintains it -

https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/chromium-dev/c/tBGJfqlcpEM/m/tveMcbElEQAJ?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer

☆PhistucK

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[Joe Mason]

In general the Chromium project provides source code but doesn't make any "official" distributions of that source. Browsers based on chromium will be built and distributed by a corporation (eg. Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge) or a project (such as many Linux distros that include a browser called "Chromium", which is maintained  and distributed by that specific distro, based on the chromium source + patches). The contents of those packages are vouched for by whatever corporation, project, or individual builds and distributes them.

In this case that would be the individual PhistucK pointed to. (I haven't personally confirmed that, just going by PhistucK's post.)

"The Chromium Authors" is the string used in copyright headers in the Chromium source. My understanding that it includes anyone who has signed the contributor agreement, thus assigning copyright of their code contributions to the Chromium project. (So, those are only the authors of the Chromium-specific source code - the full copyright of a Chromium binary also includes the authors of many open source libraries that are linked in.) I believe https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/HEAD/AUTHORS is the complete list of people covered by "The Chromium Authors".

(Note: I'm not a lawyer and don't officially speak for Google or Chromium on this, this is just my impression as a Chromium contributor and what I found from searching the source.)

So the publisher listed in that flatpak seems to be incorrect. "The Chromium Authors" are the authors of (a large chunk of) the code included in it, but not the publisher of the flatpak itself.

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[Joe Mason]

I just realized that "The Chromium Authors" in the flatpak is in the "developer_name" field, so it's referring to the developer of the code, not the publisher of the flatpak. So that actually does seem like the correct attribution.