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Comment by naner | Hacker News Reader

They're ruining their brand image. It's hard to be considered trustworthy when it appears like you compromise your values due to financial hardship. It reminds me of the Ubuntu Amazon integration thing as well. One of the Cardinal rules of free software seems to be don't sell your users by forcing 3rd party integration nobody asked for.

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It's always interesting how this happens. Is it new executives how come to power and they never realize what the brand meant to users but see a short term stunt to get some extra profit and go for it.

It happened to Lenovo and other laptops when they started installing spyware (Superfish) on their machines. They basically ruined the brand image that took years to build up.

In the case of Lenovo the brand was sold by IBM to a third party who immediately drove it into the ground.

funny thing is that none if the issues have ever been found on the thinkpad libe, only the ideapad line.

True and I'd still look at Thinkpads if I had to buy a new machine, but knowing what they did with the E, Y, G and Edge series would make me always look a bit harder at other brands first from now on.

Yeah I get impatient with the "they need to make money" apologist argument. Oh, I get it, you're saying I should trust them because they're in it for the money like everybody else. Makes sense thanx.

Especially as a company with over $440M in assets, $330M of which is invested, with less than $60M/year in accounts payable and liabilities, that received $500M in royalties last year.

I think the real issue is mozilla essentially gets an infinite supply of money from parties like Google, no matter how shockingly incompetent they are.

No, they're not in it for money. In the end (the foundation owns the corporation), Mozilla is a non-profit.

They need money to achieve their mission though: maintaining a browser (in a landscape of evolving security challenges, performance & web standards) and research (e.g. projects like Rust, Servo & pdf.js originated that way) is not cheap. And currently it mostly comes from search engine deals. If they cannot get a similar one, it all collapses.

I can see why they try to diversify their income. That said, I don't agree with the way they do it here.

If they want to diversify they can work on other projects making money instead of fucking up their current userbase.

IMO coding missile software to pay for those projects would be a lot more ethical than what they're doing. Yeah I consider the ad industry and its privacy crushing consequences worse than weapons almost never fired.

"Non-profit" just means that shareholders don't profit. Nonprofits offer many opportunities for executives to personally profit.

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