this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2024
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Privacy
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Please don't excuse unethical and exploitative behavior by pretending that it's unavoidable.
There are examples of other funding models available; for example, what the Blender Foundation does. It turns out, if a FOSS effort focuses on their community, makes users feel involved and important, asks in good faith for contributions and suggestions, treats people with respect, maintains funding and organizational transparency, and has consistent ethical standards.. it can work out very well for them. No selling out required. No data harvesting required. No shady deals with Google required.
For the purposes of my argument I don't consider blender to be "very popular" in the same way that Chrome or even Firefox is. Blender has less than 2% of the number of users that even Firefox has. I think if Blender were to get Firefox-level popular (for example, over 100 million users), then it too would succumb to greedy corporate interests.
If you know of this funding model working successfully at the scale of 100 million users/customers or more, I would be interested to learn about it though.
Your statement did leave some wiggle room to quibble over what exactly "very popular" means, though I don't see how popularity is a useful metric when we're talking about free software which doesn't rely on user purchases for revenue. Ultimately it comes down to how funding the development of each software is accomplished, and whether that can be done effectively without selling out.
However, if we must compare funding strategies based on popularity, then we can. I'm not sure where you got your usage numbers from, but I'll use your percentage to normalize for the number of employees paid through the funding strategies of both examples to compare the effectiveness of the approaches:
For purposes of discussion, I'll assume that you are correct that Blender has 2% of the popularity of Firefox. Normalizing that for comparison, 2% of 840 Mozilla employees is 16.8 employees (round down because you can't have 0.8 of a person).
In other words, if Firefox were only 2% as popular as it is now (thus making it equally as popular as you say Blender is), Mozilla would be paying 16 developers with it's funding strategy.
Conversely, Blender is able to pay 31 developers using their funding strategy. This means that, even when accounting for popularity, Blender's funding strategy is 2x more effective than Mozilla's at paying developers to work on their software.
Again, I don't agree that popularity is an important metric to compare here, but even when we do so, it's clear that it is entirely possible to fund software without resorting to tired old capitalistic funding models that result in the increasingly objectionable violations of user privacy that Mozilla engages in lately. They could choose to do things differently, and we ought not to excuse them for their failure of imagination about how to fund their business more ethically. Especially when perfectly workable alternative funding models are right there in public view for anyone to emulate.
Its been a long time since I came acorss such a calm and composed discussion, this is just an appreciation comment. I do not have anything valid to add to this conversation
I agree. This is has been an absolute pleasure to read. Like a proper structured debate, where neither side is wrong, but they're both right.
I think what I was really trying to articulate is that eventually it seems to happen to everyone when they get big enough.
I could totally be wrong and I might be drawing unfair conclusions like most people, sure I will admit, but this is just how I feel about it. Maybe I shouldn't have said it so matter-of-fact because no I don't have any evidence that this always happens. A company might never get "too big", that's entirely possible too.