So instead of fucking over google with an antitrust ruling like they very much deserve, we're going to fearmonger about how much it might hurt the ✨ sole saviors of the web ✨ Mozilla, who's finances are apparently entirely dependent on the company primarily responsible for ruining the web. Looks like a narrative, smells like narrative, to get the public to turn against the antitrust ruling.
this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2024
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This has been well known for years. Just because it's news to you doesn't mean it's a conspiracy.
While we're at it, we should add Microsoft to the antitrust case...again.
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"sole saviors of the web"
Lol I mean that's also a strong narrative you're pushing
apparently that needed a /s
Haha apparently, my bad
Honestly, I'd like if the browser could become truly independent from google ad money. Then mozilla devs would have to focus on the browser and come up with a donation program like thunderbird for example instead. I'd prefer to pay and know how the money is used. I absolutely hate the google dependence
Nobody donates to these things.
Yeah. 99% of users click nag screens off right away. I do too, unless I use that application/service extensively.
You should read Thunderbird donation statement.
They got 6 million USD of donation back in 2022.
https://blog.thunderbird.net/2023/05/thunderbird-is-thriving-our-2022-financial-report/
There might not be any devs without that sweet google funding.
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Mozilla corp is trash and deserves to fail. The non-profit Mozilla however, can remain and steward Firefox and friends just fine.
I support the things that the Mozilla Foundation puts on its website, even their manifesto. Even, begrudgingly, the insistence that we must balance the needs of human beings against the needs of corporations.
Even if those things contradict what Mozilla Corporation is doing with their browser.
But the Foundation is just a thin wrapper for the Corporation, so I'm not sure how that would work.
balance the needs of human beings against the needs of corporations.
I support this if it is a 1:1 scale.
Corporation can be human, but each corporation only counts as 1.
We can balance 9,000,000,000 people against a few thousand corps no big deal.
TIL. Super disappointing. Thanks for the additional info. I've changed my mind. Mozilla can just go poof completely.
Why would the foundation have members? It's not a coop, after all. It's not the Linux Foundation model, either, which is "bunch of companies get together and decide on how to spend their money". It's much closer to the Bosch or Zeiss model, "We're doing business but are owned by noone and instead of handing out dividends we throw money at some charitable stuff" -- though Mozilla is way more charitable than either of them.
The board is bound to the Foundation's statutes, and it can't just change them. They're required to steer the foundation such that its actions benefit the free and open web, if you think they're doing something else, sue them. Or get oversight bureaucrats to investigate or however that works in the US.
The board is the Corporation. Why would they be bound to the Mozilla manifesto? They seem to be destroying its spirit right now.
If "just sue them" is the only way to hold Mozilla accountable, how low they have fallen!
And an executive is suing them. For discrimination.
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Paid for by what money?
Open source existed before money. Corporate backers came in because the product was successful, not because they thought it was a sinking ship.
So the proverbial one guy in Nebraska and a few dozen like him can work on Firefox in addition to their day jobs?
so the worldwide open source community can actually take over the project, in the full knowledge that their pull requests will actually be merged.
That can work for small improvements but not for active development at the pace of Chromium and its forks.
I see this a win.
Firefox's core users don't really care what google does, Mozilla tries to maintain feature parity with Chrome only to win the non-FF users over.
They could cut their overpaid clown executive team jfc... these parasites are everywhere, leeching.
FF will survive, it is open source lol
jfc do you have any idea how fast the web evolves? Firefox already struggles to keep up with changing web standards and operating system features. It took them until December 2019 to implement one particular feature Chrome had since 2010 with a vendor prefix and since early 2016 as a fully-released feature. It took them until 4 weeks ago to implement an OS feature that existed since 2019 and which Chrome added that same year, and Edge had by 2022 at the latest.
You cut their budget, they'll necessarily lose developers. Yes, maybe they can minimise how many developers they lose by becoming more lean, but it's a fantasy to think that becoming "more lean" could actually prevent them from losing paid developers. And any volunteer developers are also necessarily going to be spending less time and effort on their contributions than a full-time paid employee would.
Cut their budget by 86% and they go from "barely keeping up" to "utterly falling behind".
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OK cool, let's conservatively say every C-suite member gets 10 million. I don't know how many of those there are, but let's conservatively say 10. That only leaves us with a funding gap of 400 million. Any idea how to close that?
The foundation staff pay is public, and not that high. The corporation pays corporate wages.
Not all software needs to be backed by money. Money helps, of course, and I would support a non-profit financially that is focused purely on browser development. Right now, the only game in town doing that is Ladybird. But honestly, I think building upon a firefox fork makes more sense than starting from scratch.
You're saying Firefox could exist, and keep up with security updates and website compatibility, without being backed by money? (Or based on a couple of donations?) Any convincing evidence that could make us trust that that's possible too?
Many such pieces of software exist both backed by non-profit foundations, and not. Before the Linux kernel was running the world, it was primarily maintained by volunteers. Also consider the myriad of Linux distributions that don't have corp overlords. Or pick a *BSD. Or anything you watch video content with: ffmpeg, vlc, mpv. Or even various programming languages such as ECMA Script, Python, Ruby, C, C++, etc. Hell, even Lemmy fits into this category. There literally is a whole slew of software not directly backed by money and still maintained that literally runs the world.
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Perhaps it could be state funded? It worked for PBS for a time and it still mostly works for the BBC. Why not a browser? A truly independent steward for the open web is important and it doesn’t seem like Google is capable of that.
I'd absolutely be in favour of that, preferably funding from several states. But I'd prefer getting that in place before losing the main source of income.
Seems like a good idea except for how often these states already force their own spyware and backdoors onto projects. Ideally, the state would fund it, but given their history, I'd prefer costs were covered by user donations as the interests of the users are the only interests I trust. We are the only group that is truly independent of competing interests.
Crowd funding and donations obviously have their own drawbacks. Maybe we can find a work around to avoid the privacy violations of states in the future, but I don't have a simple answer for how to accomplish this. The way the FOSS community operates is currently the best alternative I've seen, but I'm sure it's not always lucrative for developers. People need to be compensated for their labor and our current systems tend to put development interests at odds with user interests.
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Force Google to separate from Chrome and it'll be less of an issue.
Isn't it open source?
Won't random Devs that care about Firefox just keep working on it?
Yes and no, if Firefox org falls, open source community will continue to develop necessary features like security updates, but features will drag behind. Eventually a new player will emerge and we will bury it out back with Netscape, ie and aol explorer.
Mozilla org isn’t the concern. Mozilla Corp, the for profit company, makes Firefox and has to worry about things like revenue for the most part. Mozilla org used to develop it and could fold it back in if it went really bad, it would definitely hamper development but being the premier browser is more of a Corp goal than an org one. Most likely the corp will just find a different search partner again (Google hasn’t always been default).
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taking down a 90% monopoly will have side effects? impossible.
lol yes... if we don't let google to keep its monopoly they will take FF from us
86% of Mozilla's revenue came from the agreement keeping Google as Firefox's default search engine
That explains a lot. I've only recently switched back to Firefox after Chrome took the throne years ago. I still use Google's services for now, so wanted their home page as my new tab page.
The only way I could find to do that was by using an extension, but every so often I get a warning from FF that my new tab page has been changed, and it gets reset. I looked up a way to stop the warnings, and found a Mozilla blog post with comments from staff claiming that it's a security feature.
Apparently the only reason that you might not want to start with the FF start page is because you've been hacked 🙄
I have one of those anti-capitalist takes where if taking down one company takes down another company, then the system is probably broken.
Which we know it is, but not enough know it is.
That isn't really a anticapitalist take. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that the tech industry isn't super healthy.
In fact we probably need more competition
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I doubt the judge will want to kill Chromes only alternative. They aren't going to make the monopoly stronger
They probably "only" need to break the deal with Apple. I think that's the big one being a problem.
Mozilla could be overlooked in the grant scheme of things, and Google would want to get as many users as possible.
Goddammit no, I'm not going back to fuckin Chrome
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