The cult of the free must die
quirksmode.org
quirksmode.org
Having people pay, even voluntarily, and having even a small reliance on those payments would just kill Mozilla more quickly without a visible leadership change first.
We discussed this yesterday at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24129794
For example, consider two features: AwesomeFeature - budget has $100 DumdumFeature - budget has $200
They currently receive $300 in donations, $50 of which have no strings attached. So there’s donation stream A with strings and $250, and donation stream B with no strings and $50.
Allocation looks like this: AwesomeFeature - budget has $100, funded with A$75, B$25 DumdumFeature - budget has $200, funded with A$175, B$25.
If I donate $25 and say “this can only go to awesome feature” the budgets after my donation end up as.
AwesomeFeature - budget has $100, funded with A$100 DumdumFeature - budget has $225, funded with A$175, B$50.
I’m not mad at anyone, I just want my donations to do as much good as I think they can do.
If they allowed targeted donations to firefox/quantum/rust/MDN I would donate, as I'm sure many other will. As it is, I don't and won't even if firefox were to fail.
Best Practical, the company that does most of the work on the open source RT ticketing system, allows for sponsoring specific features or fixes:
I’m curious, what unneeded side-projects do they have?
Also annoying is how they constantly kill useful features like RSS or bookmark descriptions.
I use Firefox because I still like it better than Chrome and I like to support free software, but it's obvious to me that Mozilla doesn't really care about their users and they're too busy chasing shiny things. I expect they'll keep losing market share until they become irrelevant and disappear.
[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Bluetoo...
Wikipedia relies on user donations, and yet they still spend vast sums of money on what might be described as frivolous side projects (eg. Wikipedia Zero).
Not so long ago (late 2000s) wikipedia ran on 39 servers, mostly squid proxies, and did not cost very much money to keep running. Given the increase in server performance I imagine they could run on a similar number of servers these days (maybe less with help from a CDN).
Now they spend nearly $100m per year.
So there is no guarantee that this would help Mozilla.
Compare the Wikimedia numbers given (nearly $100m per year to keep running) to Mozilla's, who last reported spending much more than that (over $173m) just in their non-software development spending.
Wikipedia raises more than it can spend, resulting in rising assets: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fundraising_statis...
You're saying that Wikimedia's spending is somewhat rational, whereas Mozilla's revenue might disappear as the result of a single party making a decision to walk away. You're not saying that Mozilla is a ragtag group of browser developers with barely any money. (There was too much focus on "Mozilla obviously doesn't [have the money to waste]" in the earlier reading.)
I just use Firefox with some extensions and have seen nothing like this. I also used Thunderbird briefly (like a month). What am I missing? Do you have specific examples?
If they really took “every chance to annoy their users” I think I would probably know it? The browser starts, I get to work, end of story. I get that Firefox has made some decisions people don’t like (Pocket and the suggested links on new tab) but that doesn’t mean they are annoying users on every chance or breaking my ability to work.
People in HN are specially sensitive to some issues that others don't care much about. Past year we had a series of news about Firefox sending data of some "experiments" and similar. It was difficult to disable. Two or three things like that, you don't need more to lose trust here.
Perception is Mozilla is not ran as an open source organization, but as an advertisement company with similar tricks to make users "engage with the product".
As someone who is annoyed now:
Partially true I'd say. I've also been surprised once or twice before by people who were oh so critical about Mozilla and then recommended using Chrome/Chromium or a derivative instead.
There's always been someone to hate on Firefox, at least since they introduced the awesomebar a long time ago.
And here I sit, wondering if
- it finally catched up with me what others had seen a long time
- if I changed
- if Mozilla changed
- or if I am the target of a successful smear campaign against Mozilla
I don't know. Right now however I want I want Google to work like in 2009 and my old Firefox extensions to work with the new supposedly (I think so, honestly, but I don't know) safer API, I want corona gone and I want my insanely powerful laptop to feel insanely powerful instead of sitting here waiting for a double digit GB more RAM to arrive :-/
No, everyone cared. Firefox went from market dominance to a rounding error usershare and consistently dropping. HN users aren't a significant enough portion of browser traffic to account for more than 0.001% of that. People who dropped Firefox because it broke and never replaced (or made impossible to replace) two extensions that they used are many orders of magnitude more significant in that downfall.
A browser that sold itself on its openness and extensibility is only slightly more open than Chromium, and explicitly limits its possible extensibility to wherever Chrome chooses to set it. Firefox has relegated itself to being a wonky Chrome that isn't connected to Google services. Nobody would choose that over Chrome except out of nostalgia or stubbornness. This is why Google pays all of Firefox's bills.
Personally I think the decline of Firefox usage had a lot more to do with Chrome’s performance superiority and objectively better stability for close to a decade. For close to 10 years, until the release of Firefox Quantum in late 2017, Firefox was stuck on a model where browser processes were shared between tabs. Chrome was the first browser to go process-per-tab with its release in 2008.
Process per tab was huge. Flash was still everywhere but tabs had just become a thing and people’s browsers were crashing more and more due to this combination. Mobile was barely a thing. Chrome grew and grew. If a tab crashed it didn’t take down the whole browser session. It was isolated. It’s comparable, for heavy web surfers, to when operating systems got protected memory, multithreading, and preemptive multitasking. A new world of performance.
Today the web is more stable because Flash is gone, mobile has helped push websites to be less piggish on memory use (I mean, obviously they are still pretty bad), ad blockers are more common, and so it’s easy to forget the history. But I switched from FF to Chrome in this period and then came back after FF’s Quantum update, which brought in process (or thread?) per tab, and after Chrome got tied in ever closer to Google’s tracking business.
It's something more complicated, to balance resources with stability. I don't know the rules, but for example I have 3 windows with ~700 tabs split across them, which appear to be using 6 processes with 193 threads. (Also I use Auto Tab Suspender, so that probably influences it as well)
This stuff bugs power users, but if you watch people who aren't in the power-user set, it's pure usability poison to them. Ditto UI elements moving around after an auto-update. Confuses the living hell out of them. It's about as far from good UX as you can get—a mediocre UI that never changes is far better UX than a good one that behaves unpredictably, and I mean from the perspective of normal people, not HN nerds.
Sure, workflows I'm used to change, and sure they add in the odd experiment from time to time that is later abandoned, but it's at nowhere near the frequency Google does the same thing. Yes, Google cops a lot of criticism for this, but language used to criticise Google pales compared to level of vindictiveness I see thrown at Mozilla just in the comments here. It's like they been betrayed by their own mother.
It's even harder to explain given Firefox has clearly gotten better over the years. It's a bumpy ride like all software changes, but it's faster, more reliable, and more standards compliant than ever before. Yes, addon compatibility has been sacrificed to make that happen, but happened for a pretty good reason unlike say Google removing the interfaces that allow ad blockers to work effectively.
In the process they've made some hard core advances in the art, like Rust, and like WASM. From where I sit they've been more effective at this recently than Google. And yet what we hear about here is how Pocket doesn't work as they like. Really - does it matter, compared to the amount of good work that comes out of Mozilla?
Isn't this a symptom of being detached from reality? In a sense that they are in their bubble, and didn't had the need to look outside of it?
Maybe that's the problem, they didn't have to make it work because the money was already there.
A company employing ~1000 people, with $500m+ revenue, is not a small company. It's not even mid-sized. This is a large multinational, only seeming small when compared with FAANG.
Mozilla, is at best, a small-cap software company. Calling them mid-sized is probably not wrong either, but would be closer to being wrong than right imho.
2017 they had a net income of ~$90m.
Looks like they spent like the money will be flowing forever.
How come i've only seen universities do this?
Software is an exception in this since you basically only have free cash, there are no physical assets as such.
And why don't they? Decades ago, having cash reserves was a Good Thing.
We need to get at the root of the issue and that is that companies have gotten used way too much on government bailouts and redistributing everything possible to shareholders/customers.
The problem started with people like Carl Icahn.
If your company has too much cash, someone will attempt take control to carve it up and get their hands on the cash.
So, every business basically runs fairly close to cashless or even carries debt in order to avoid corporate raiders unless they have SO much cash that nobody can even hope to buy them (see: Apple).
But relatively it probably applies to bigger manufacturing companies as well. Hell, it probably applies to Amazon (the retailer, not AWS).
That's perhaps the most genius thing in the Amazon system: the actual amount of cash bound in warehoused inventory is negligible - they only have the risk for stuff they directly sell. For all the other products, the sellers are on the hook towards the manufacturers.
Essentially they are an online Walmart with next to zero of the risk a real Walmart has because most of their inventory risk is shifted towards the "sellers"...
They would pay net-10, which was unheard of, most of their big buyers habitually paid late. The local grocery chain would pay 60-90 days late on a 30 day invoice. The cash in hand was worth sometimes losing a little money.
Because in the end, when shit hits the fan like with the 'rona, the government will be conveniently pressurable to bail you out. Personally, I rather have government bailouts than mass bankruptcies - but bailouts should come with "strings attached" like, let's say, a requirement to always keep one year of expenses at a reserve to avoid the need for future bailouts.
sort of a short sighted view if that's really the case - since the cash being in the company's books, or in an endowment, is still value owned by the owner. The small penalty of it being illiquid shouldnt be a problem.
Look at how quickly oil and gas companies implode when there is a price shock.
The stockholders though would probably say that they can just supply the capital themselves, if the business is in trouble.
However, in Mozilla's case, the owner of the corporation is a non-profit, and (to me at least) it'd make a perfect sense to set up something like this.
If the best thing the business can think to do with the money is put it in the stock market or a low-interest cash account, which anyone could do, investors usually demand that the money is returned to them (via dividends or share buybacks) so they can choose what happens to it.
If every business has an endowment, what are those endowments invested in?
Harvard's endowment is invested in profitable business to raise money. It's a non-profit so it doesn't pay out the profits. A profitable business invests its funds itself or returns them to the owner institutions, who chose whether to keep funding the business.
Imagine, in the abstract, an organisation that wasn't exactly accountable to anyone with a half-billion dollar pot as the prize for whoever ended up in charge. Can't possibly end well. Brand that with a "Mozilla" logo and the situation doesn't change much.
If anything, I think - paradoxically, but as I do for all charities - that Mozilla is acting responsibly if they are burning through all their cash. If they fall on hard times that is more a signal that they've lost the faith of the internet at large than a marker of financial imprudence.
A charitable foundation with no doners should be wound up. Otherwise it'll just invite corruption. Exceptions for tiny amounts of money, but not for the sums Mozilla is dealing with.
I think money corrupted Mozilla and turned it into another VC powered YC company where talent left and product and engineering management created a replaceable r&d team without passion .
For many charities, probably, yeah. But Mozilla being in the position that an endowment more or less funds at least 'support' level of maintaining a fully independent browser beholden to absolutely no one, even if literal zero money is flowing in otherwise - that's a nice thing to have.
It does invite corruption, and in the end, if nobody cares about mozilla (the browser), it should indeed go away, but 'being cared about' and 'raking in the dosh' aren't quite the same. Sure, you can turn care into cash (donate buttons and the like), but if you don't have to, that's nice. Mozilla (the browser) is likely to die if the funding that they CAN provide is a decent salary but nowhere close to what other companies could possibly offer – _and_ nobody cares about it.
Here's what I mean by that last one: I'm sure PKK (author of linked article), for example, could be convinced to do the job of quirksmode/MDN for a salary. And that salary does not have to be close to what PKK could get as a freelancer or at google or whatnot, but it should at least be somewhat representative of his particular skillset. Effectively, then, PKK is still donating - a lot - namely the difference between the salary he'd get vs. the salary he could get, but he gets something in return: Working on a thing he likes to do more, and contributing to the open web.
Had firefox been raking in millions a month off of user donations, and spending it all on the projects they were spending it on, you might be right: That's fine, and if the money dries up, they downsize - that'd be a better way to do it vs. setting up an endowment.
But that is NOT what happened. Firefox got most of the running funds via e.g. having google as default search engine. That is a cashcow that may at some point run out; at the very least you are too beholden to too few parties, and that itself is far more likely to be 'corruption' (as in, have the same downsides) than a charitable foundation with more cash than carers. Turning THAT windfall into an endowment does strike me as a wise move. Especially if you earmark that endowment for a limited purpose (presumably, earmark it for team gecko and very few other parts of moz).
Wherever these management types continue to fuckup company for their lavish lifestyle, such things happen.
I feel like Mozilla does not understand the "old-internet" which it prostitutes to sell itself to users. Lawyers, Amazon extensions, this is how we are fighting Fake News!
So what's the next step for Mozilla's mission for protecting your privacy? Re-new that contract with your #1 anti-privacy competitor [0] and continue selling free things.
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/barrycollins/2020/08/13/mozilla...
Oh, and I would happily pay/donate to Mozilla for Firefox and Thunderbird, but not for all the other "adventures" they went after. VPN service... As if there were not enough of those already...
And are they a corporate, a charity, or a corporate non-profit? Charities very often pay substantially lower salaries, the tradeoff being you feel you contribute to a greater good. That's how I thought of them, but the wage bill doesn't match up.
They started with Firefox, and they should have stopped with Thunderbird.
Plus, their main competitors are Google, Microsoft, and Apple. They do pay their executives a substantially lower salary.
How much does the team lead for Safari or Edge make? They're competing with a team in Google, Microsoft, and Apple, not with the company as a whole.
not-for-profit organization:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Foundation
and the Mozilla Corporation, "established on August 3, 2005, to handle the revenue-related operations of the Mozilla Foundation":
No they are not. People seem to not understand that there is Mozilla Corporation, the one who pays the salaries, and Mozilla Foundation.
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/ puts it like this:
there’s a non-profit Foundation at the heart of our enterprise...
The Foundation is also the sole shareholder in the Mozilla Corporation, the maker of Firefox and other open source tools. Mozilla Corporation functions as a self-sustaining social enterprise – money earned through its products is reinvested into the organization.
With over 1,000 full-time employees worldwide, Mozilla Corporation employee compensation is benchmarked to market by role and level balancing total compensation between individual and company performance with a pay-for-performance compensation model...
For VPs and above, we benchmark compensation against a blended peer group comprised of 70% similarly-sized public and private tech companies and 30% non-profit organizations.
Mozilla Foundation non-profit programs are carried out by 80 employees and thousands of volunteers around the world.
Unlike the Mozilla Foundation, the Mozilla Corporation is a tax-paying entity, which gives it much greater freedom in the revenue and business activities it can pursue.
More information about revenue:
Today, the majority of Mozilla Corporation revenue is generated from global browser search partnerships, including the deal negotiated with Google in 2017 following Mozilla’s termination of its search agreement with Yahoo/Oath
And:
The Mozilla Foundation is funded by donations and 2% of annual net revenues from the Mozilla Corporation, amounting to over US$8.3 million in 2016.
And Google, at least in the early years, seems to have controlled as much as 90% of the Mozilla Corporation Revenue. I couldn't find the current figure, but the above links mention Google as currently a major financer still.
>And Google, at least in the early years, seems to have controlled as much as 90% of the Mozilla Corporation Revenue. I couldn't find the current figure, but the above links mention Google as currently a major financer still.
Google paid most of their corporate revenue. The last reported year, 2018, was the first under the new contract, and looking at revenues you can guess how much smaller it was then the Yahoo one. If I remember correctly, the contract information will be on the detailed financial report released this year.
To build a browser capable of taking any market share away from Google and Microsoft, available in 90 languages with regular updates, you probably do need numbers around there.
For comparison, I repeated the experiment with Mozilla's gecko-dev repo, and got 480 people committing - still a lot more than I'd thought. I guess I'll see how this holds up with the downsizing in a month.
[edit] Though - only 199 with a Mozilla email address. Though I don't have a Chromium comparison here.
git log --oneline --pretty=format:'%ae' |sort |uniq |wc -l
The job was also different. Compare someone trying to get into shape with someone trying to maintain their current body weight.
Early Mozilla did a lot of good work. Leadership during the 2010s undid almost all of it in ways that were predictable.
It may not require 1000 employees, but 100 is probably not enough. And that is still not easy to fund with volountary donations.
(2) You are assuming a technical level of competence that most people don't have. Even if they do, they often would rather just pay for something simple that works rather than have yet another thing to maintain.
(3) Yeah, Apple would be as trustworthy to most people. But they aren't doing it. A service that doesn't exist isn't a real competitor. I think there's a real potential in this space for a non-shady company, and Mozilla seems like the best candidate.
So what benefit do you get by purchasing VPN access from Mozilla vs. directly from mullvad? I don´t see any from a security/trust perspective.
Also everyone is writing Mozilla wrong around here. It´s not Mozilla. They changed it to Moz://a. How much did that rebranding cost? Was that money well spent? So many bad decisions.
- warez: piracy (or copyright infringement if not on the sea)
- open source: cares about user's rights, not price.
- "4 free": freeware. Does not care about rights, only price.
Relatedly, you are very much encouraged to sell free software https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html and free speech does not mean cellphone contracts with voice for $0/month.
Benefits of strong copyleft or BSD-style copyright is another matter of discussion.
They have had years of ~$500M of revenue. I don't consider this small.
So it seems more like they've been losing marketshare despite investing in Firefox. Google has much more money to spend on development, and can potentially also make popular sites like Youtube or GMail work best in Chrome.
I use Firefox and I hope it will get more popular again. But I'm baffled how many people seem to think that if only Mozilla tried properly, the users would come flocking back. All the evidence suggests that most users go to Chrome no matter what they do.
Mozilla wants to have a say in how Google makes web standards. To do that effectively they need to keep up with Chrome. Admittedly even then Chrome's massive market share makes arguing against Google difficult. Apple sometimes joins the conversation but only when it directly affects something they're currently interested in.
I also consider reverting to "nagware" a huge step back. Either you sell a product, monetize part of it, or offer it for free - giving it away "for free" while sneaking in a shower of requests for money is the worst possible outcome.
Sure, you could argue that Firefox doesn't track you like Chrome does. That's basically their whole marketing message. People who care about this already use Firefox, the rest just doesn't care.
Ask any power user that used Firefox 5 years ago:
- fix the extension API
- re-enable styling
- hire someone to look after the ux-team :-D (yes, I'm also one of those who dislike the moving awesomebar ;-)
Yeah, it tracks you more: https://twitter.com/jonathansampson/status/11658588961766604...
If you mean in about:config 1: they change it and add hidden options all the time (you have to browse the code to find them) and 2: this is about the first run, all of that data will be sent before you have the chance to open about:config.
> The code is all yours.
So is the Chromium code.
Regardless, considering Mozilla's trademark policy it can't technically be disabled in firefox.
> Seeing as your original comment said Chrome ...
Firefox contains proprietary components too (such as EME) that you can't modify. The code is all yours in Chrome as much as it is for firefox.
I personally do not buy that argument, it is like saying that firefox has an integrated emacs in it because "the code is all yours".
Seeing as your original comment said Chrome, that's what I'm contrasting it with.
I'd also happily pay for a browser, but I'm not a big fan of "donate because it's the right thing to do", I prefer "pay because the product is worth it".
As far as I understand, donations to the Mozilla Foundation won't go into development anyway because of the way they're structured.
Don't ask for donations in the browser. Offer a product that people want and sell it to them. My personal approach: focus initially on developers. They're somewhat easy to understand (you have developers on the team), they have more money than the average user, their requirements and desires are clear and a little effort goes a long way, they already pay for tools that do some jobs that could be done in the browser (e.g. Fiddler).
Alternatively: Small company sells software, large company gives away the same kind of software for free. Small company loses, again.
You're not going to fix market forces artificially. We pay what we pay because that's what someone's willing to offer it for. Also, not all value is in dollars.
In the current business model, there’s absolutely no competing with them long term. You’d have to either break them up or create some weird funding schemes driven by govs and users that don’t care (public good or some other utilitarian argument).
You're thinking of predatory pricing, but he market price for a browser has been zero for a long time.
Users chose to ditch Firefox and IE for Chrome because it was the better product. That's competition at work. The point of anti-trust is to protect the consumer, not the weak market participants.
If tomorrow Google decided to do something to Chrome, that isn't in the consumer's interest, immediately the opportunity arises for competitors to outdo them - with their own code even.
> ...or as a lead in to their existing profit-making product.
Isn't that the point of most free products? I doubt there's an anti-trust case to be made there.
Surely Google wouldn't allocate ad-space preferentially to their own products, right?
And surely they wouldn't bug me for five plus years about how the internet is faster with Chrome?
Nah, that would never happen ;)
I don't think your definition of anti-trust is accurate. Protect consumers by creating a competitive market. To promote and protect competition because consumers and the economy as a whole benefits when we have more competition in the market.
This is essentially a religious belief, and using "Chrome is the superior browser" as the foudation to your argument that "Google did nothing wrong" is weak and essentially circular.
These massive, unregulated companies can lose an enormous amount of money on products indefinitely, either choosing to sink cash into them quickly in order to follow (or drive) the market into rapid change that a company that is required to bring in revenue can't keep up with, or in a slower market just park the product at an adequate quality, and wait for the competition to stumble.
After the competition dies, then you can squeeze the customer for all they're worth.
Lets not oversimplify things. "Product competition" and "google doing nothing wrong" do not need to be, and are not, synonymous. These attributes are separated by at least a decade though.
I'm pretty sure enough of us in this thread were using the web when chrome was emerging, it _did_ offer a compelling alternative to the pretty dire alternatives at the time whatever your platform, and all on it's own merrits. For such complex beasts it's hard to quantize into best, and browsers wax an wayne in terms of keeping up with web standards and performance expectations... never the less at the time, chrome was a breath of fresh air in the context of the very stale state of browser development.
At the time it really didn't matter what Google's motives were, browsers sucked and this was good competition... But in the context of a monopoly in browser share (which lets face it chrome has become)... Motive is very important.
I agree with you though, the parent comment is wrong that the competition is still alive, it's merely historic at this point.
The underlying theme is motives vs competition - in the right context (competition), ulterior motives are neutralized due to market forces. However once overcome, those true motives take over.
I never said that "Google did nothing wrong". I'm saying that if Google were to do something wrong that users actually care about, that would open the opportunity for competition to gain traction by offering a better product - based on their own codebase even!
That situation is what limits Google's options and that's what differentiates it from an actual monopoly. If you have a monopoly, your users are forced to use your services, because nobody else is able to compete. Nothing forces me to use Google's browser.
If you're making an anti-trust case, it has to be solid. If you just don't like the situation or making some sort of moral case, that's a different story.
You need to offer some value added services (like privacy, less ads) to be able to charge for the browser.
https://tech.slashdot.org/story/20/08/13/0012243/mozilla-ext...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#Google
Fucking suits.
I don't currently get paid for all the open source work I do nor do I expect to be but if that expectation changed, if everyone expected to be compensated for their what at least starts out as their hobby, I'd guess the amount of people doing it drop drastically.
Of course it sucks if your project gets popular and you feel obligated to keep spending time on it but you can always walk away.
Otherwise my compensation is the feeling I get from helping. This is no different then volunteering. I don't go to the soup kitchen and demand a salary for helping out. I also feel compensated from everyone else's contributions. That companies like Apple (clang, llvm, swift, webkit), Google (android, chrome, angular, dart, flutter), Facebook (react, graphql), Microsoft (.net, vs code), etc...
They are paying me back by offering all of that. I'm sure you can name some rich company not contributing but I guess I really don't care.
I hope you are not implying that that is the main or even only reason to release free software.
> Anyone who [...]
IME people get shouted down for suggesting to "fix" free software by removing freedoms.
And OSS is more attractive to those companies in terms of not being vendor locked-in.
People who are annoyed that age of commercial smalltalks is over, or shilling for oracle, never understand this.
So "free software cheerleaders" are not trying to defend Open Source. If you don't want large corporations, or any corporations, ripping off your work, make it AGPL and sell them licenses.
As it is, most of this type of thing seems to be a complaint that the commons is crowding out the small businessman i.e. "There are too many public parks, and they're keeping people from visiting my nature resort."
ie why are upfront mobile app prices free or peanuts? A big reason is cause they started that way. If mobile app prices started at closer to desktop app prices at the beginning, we’d probably have a much different mobile app marketplace today.
Another example: developer salaries in the US compared to rest of world, where they’re much lower even after normalization. I posit that a key reason was the easy money VC years around 2010, and they just stayed high ever since.
I’m sure there’s a proper economic term for this phenomenon :)
I was an open source apologist some time ago, but since I quit full-time job and started to freelance/working on my own personal projects I began to realize, that I as an independent developer can't actually profit from it. In fact, it takes a lot of my time to contribute to something and I get nothing in return.
From my perspective:
* Behind every popular open source project there is a company (typically big), which pays core team salary to maintain open source project. Community is typically do work for free. The bigger the project, the better for the company public image.
* Open source projects end up to be designed by committee, which inevitably turns projects to bloatware, which are hard to maintain and hard to use.
* Increase in technology turn-over. Projects become hyped and die faster that
* Competition is becoming more difficult. Why to try to make another deployment manager if there's Kubernetes?
* En-masse community memebers get nothing from contrubuting to projects while doing a lot of work for free. One may argue that in return they get polished product, but in reality that's far from true.
That's a concer of mine too and that's why I'm in favor of the BDFL[1] figure.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benevolent_dictator_for_life
> * Competition is becoming more difficult. Why to try to make another deployment manager if there's Kubernetes?
At the same time, you can also study how Kubernetes does the job, and come up with radical superior solutions.
I feel that's a bit of a reach. A small team will magically come up with something better than hundreds/thousands of developers that thought/developed k8s?
It's nice to think anyone can do that, but I believe only another company (and probably not a small one) could try and do that. I doubt bunch of open source contributors could come close to that.
What I'm saying is that the product being open source allows you to study it, let's say you want to do something as fast as Redis, you have all that previous work open. I don't imagine a single person in a room going line by line studying it, what usually happen is that many people study particular aspects and write about it the problems they had, improvements and so on.
> I doubt bunch of open source contributors could come close to that.
Well it depends a "bunch" of open source contributors can organise themselves and grow into organizations, there are many examples.
Although this does open another hole for companies like Amazon/Google to, for example, repackage Redis as their "product" and sell it too.
But as you said, these are different discussions altogether :)
The ugly thing is that they take advantage from the brand too just saying "X brand compatible" they can use the brand reputation and re-package it, I agree on that point being an issue.
You could offer support for the product you are offering or maybe you can just write proprietary software. To think that there is a problem with open source as a concept sound like a pretty alien conclusion to be honest.
Most open source projects don't have corporate backing obviously. The large ones that are heavily in use? Sure, because their developers use it too.
> Open source projects end up to be designed by committee [..]
I can agree on that point, but again, that is a minority of project that have become very successful.
> En-masse community memebers get nothing from contrubuting to project
That is the point of any free contribution. I know that can get exhausting and that there are ungrateful users that can ruin it for you, but I still don't see how open source is the problem and not your disposition to it.
I think the article overall is not convincing. Maybe our expectations are too high, but whose aren't in todays software world. Without open source it just isn't possible to let developers teach themselves as efficient as they can do now. That these costs are externalized by companies and that they might not give back enough is the nature of voluntary work. But it certainly not undercutting some imagined market.
The best option looks like a tight copyleft license combined with a contract for copyright assignment and revenue sharing for contributors and dual licensed for commercial use. The most difficult part of this would be gauging developer worth based on contributions, but that's something that happens in every company anyways.
If you frame it like that, sounds like people are forced to work for free, think about other open source advantages, for example the freedom to customise the software to your needs without questions asked. You can fix a bug that is blocking you for doing something, instead of waiting a big company to prioritise your little problem. And that's just the first that comes to my mind, there are much more.
But I understand that your statment seems to come from a frustating experience, I'm curious about what was that product.
And that's my problem with the moniker 'open source' - it gives people the wrong idea. Free software is all about freedom, and surprisingly that often turns out to be easier to explain than the nebulous appellation 'open'.
Amusingly, each of your five dot points applies entirely to non-free software (behind non-free software there's a commercial entity, their products often end up getting designed by committee and are the worse for it, projects die as soon as they (product or company) cease being commercially viable, competition is discouraging and leads to similar but worse in slightly different ways products, and people contributing via bug reports or plugins or code contributions or blogs on how to use the product are doing it 'for free').
You said behind every popular open source project there's a big company -- what would that be for the Linux kernel, Apache, KDE, Python, VLC, gimp?
Btw, don't tell Hashicorp that it's pointless trying to write a better orchestrator than K8s. : )
Or English lacks a nice sounding word for the meaning we want to convey. Branding is hard.
Open source projects are there as common heritage of mankind that addresses a major need. To me they are similar to roads ans railways. Where is competition to a road? Is there real competition to tcp/ip?
There are well maintained Open Source projects that have effectively a BDFL and don't lose focus. Go language or Lua come to mind.
But people like to complain "Go is Google's language" because it's authors rejected some fringe proposal. Not that I like Go, but there are many ways of doing open source.
If instead Mozilla Corp. had focused on cross-browser freemium/paid features, they could have been self-sustained by now. E.g. I would definitely pay for a Firefox Account that included:
- Password manager with cross-browser cloud sync. They already have Lockwise. Only need to make it cross-browser.
- Firefox send. Great convenience feature. Trivial to integrate to other browsers. Currently "unavailable while we work on product improvements." WTF?
- Cross-browser bookmarks sync with improvements in core functionality. E.g. make tagging easy, support tag-based dynamic folders to the bookmarks bar. I wish they had brought the person behind Buku bookmarks manager aboard instead of buying Pocket.
"In light of recent reports of Firefox Send being used to distribute malware we have decided to temporarily take the service offline to implement new features..." https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/what-happened-firefox-s...
What do you mean by "integrate to other browsers"? Firefox Send is a website.
Agreed. We need a way to directly fund Firefox development, and Mozilla is not currently providing this.
Another reason, is that I am not particularly thrilled about having someone else calling the shots on my work. I do what I do for love, not money or status. Once money comes into the picture, the fun drains out like a popped balloon.
I write my stuff as enterprise-class software. It may be the "tinkering" of an old codger, but it is nothing to sneeze at.
And I set the agenda. If you don't want to use my stuff; fine. No loss to me. It's great stuff, but tastes differ.
If, on the other hand, you pay me to do work for you, then you get to call the shots. That's just the way of the world. It doesn't matter whether or not it's "fun." You are paying me for a service, and it is my fiduciary responsibility to deliver. I spent my entire career delivering software on schedule, and to spec. Like I said, I found it annoying that it wasn't treated so well, after delivery, but it was their property, and I had no say.
I just found out that a company that makes two great, free, open-source utilities I use all the time, has been sold; throwing their future into doubt. That sucks, but it is also not something that I really have a right to whine about.
I am not particularly thrilled with corporations making commercial products on the back of free, open-source projects; even really high-quality ones (I won't list any, because there are religious wars over them).
If it's free, then you get what you pay for.
If anybody is going to pay for a browser it must be better than its competition.
I would pay for better privacy, adblocking, higher speed, better dev tools and what not. But Firefox is not so much better than Chromium in any of these points to warrant payment.
I vastly prefer Firefox and always did for some reason (I keep testing Opera, Vivalidi, Chromium and what not but none of them clicked with me) but I still see you point, it would be hard for many to justify a high price even if they prefer it.
I'd still happily pay for Firefox (not Mozilla) but I'd consider it an insurance more than an investment at the moment.
Individually, all their paid offerings aren't that interesting. Scroll, Pocket, and privacy VPN's are all fine little niche products, but bundled together and called Firefox Pro, it gives you vision of what a premium browser might look like: the browser is free, paid users get a collection of services and support the open web.
- Privacy and security-centic browser-based email (to replace Gmail). - Basic browser-based apps to replace Google docs, sheets, etc. - A legit no logs VPN - A privacy-centric replacement for Google analytics - A privacy focused comms tool - a la Zoom, Whatsapp or Messenger.
In short, an alternative to Apple without the commitment to their hardware.I understand that many of these exist on their own. I'm asking (read: begging) for a unified offering (again a la Apple), one vendor to pay, and so on.
The problem with Firefox and free is that they're trying to compete again an entity (i.e., Google) that has the same type of product as a loss leader. That's a suicide mission on Mozilla's part. Without a blue ocean (e.g., Apple) they will struggle - just like every other company that doesn't seek higher less competitive ground.
If MDN closes, productivity for millions of web developers across the county will plummet. Why is this being left to charity?
If that should happen, I would consider it a gift from heaven ;-)
Also, from the list of jobs laid off there are some jobs that seem superfluous to the main core concept of browser development:
Diversity and Inclusion Lead, Office and Culture Project Manager, Director of Strategic Alliances and Platform Strategy - Mixed Reality, Global Event Maker, Senior University Recruiter, Senior Product Designer + Growth, Staff Business Strategist, Lead UX Designer for Brand, Senior Brand Designer, Head of Design, Senior Executive Assistant, Brand Designer.
I am not even sure what some of those jobs involve! Some even sound like invented jobs to me.
I mean, is a "brand designer" someone who actually draws graphics or is it just someone who thinks what the "brand" should involve? ie. The Web, a browser.
Education welcomed.
It's cute, to be sure, but it felt like kind of a slap in the face when I saw that rebrand logo front and center on the blog post about Mozilla laying off 250 staff.
Where is it? I've seen in other posts that real developers (even "almost all Servo team") were laid off?
Mozilla isn't just about the browser. It's about free and open internet. So of course they should be involved in authentication, search, messaging (mail, chat, and video), and secure dns. But they don't do any of those projects any more so whatever.
Which is contradictory with what they have actually been doing for a decade, which is pushing, pushing and pushing again for Web-everything and everything-Web everywhere.
Even the items you list after, in Mozilla strategy, were meant be implemented inside and around a single piece of tech: a Web browser, over a single protocol (HTTP(S)); also replacing classical libraries with Web-tech (that's now new since the interface of their products has always been based on some form of it, but they kept on pushing the pedal of webisation).
Given that the ad industry is filled by the kind of people who are vocally hostile to privacy (especially when it comes to "targeting ads"), this is a product without a market.
AIUI, web sites that host ads probably want the ads to be shown so they can get their money. And people who buy ad space probably want the ads to be shown so they can market their product or service. And maybe the ads will be shown if users white list ad networks that respect privacy.
Staff recruitment and retention roles.
> Director of Strategic Alliances and Platform Strategy - Mixed Reality
Easily mockable since it has "strategic" in it twice, but ultimately this role should either get money into FF or get FF into more platforms. Focus on mixed reality / AR seems questionable in retrospect.
> Global Event Maker
Did Mozilla have many events? I don't really remember hearing of any.
> Senior University Recruiter
Fairly obvious: recruit graduates from universities.
> Senior Product Designer + Growth
This actually sounds pretty core; someone has to define the product, and I don't think you really want that left to the forums.
> Lead UX Designer for Brand, Senior Brand Designer, Head of Design, Brand Designer
That may be one or two many designers, resulting in unnecessary UI churn.
> Senior Executive Assistant
Everywhere has one of these. PA to the boss. They tend to be surprisingly critical since they know what's going on even if they don't have formal responsibility.
The irony being that they themselves were made redundant.
How will they possibly keep all the other staff now??
> Staff recruitment and retention roles.
More like the exact opposite: annoy your staff with superficial stuff.
> When people say they're "neither for or against, just annoyed" about something, they usually mean that they genuinely don't care about the underlying issue, and the annoyance comes from the idea that they have to care about it. I think this is pretty much just the maligned neutral you're describing.
Add to this that most people don't like being preached at not to be racist etc. when most already aren't.
> handling issues through HR as normal is no longer sufficient
I am almost certain most of these "diversity and inclusion staff" you speak of are part of HR, so yes, it is still normal.
I get it, you don't want to preached to about something you aren't, but isn't that life in general? Being told stuff daily that either doesn't apply to you, you already know, or would never do?
To me, that's not life, that's being micro-managed or treated like a child. I'd never want to work somewhere that treats employees like that.
> isn't that life in general
Sure, it still happens, but if it happens repeatedly in the workplace, I might try to reduce it. I also sincerely doubt that a terrible racist person will stop being one because his company implements mandatory diversity training.
That may not have been the case at Mozilla but it absolutely is at a lot of bigcos and in government.
"Training" from HR means "watch dumb videos in a browser for two hours, then take a quiz you could have passed with a 100% score without watching the videos". If you're really unlucky it's some in-person variant that's the live equivalent of that. If this is not what you mean you're doing when you tell someone you've got "training" this week, you'll need to specify, because that's what all your fellow-suffering workers will assume it is. Many of them probably experience it at least annually, on a schedule, no matter how many times they've done essentially the same crap, and some more often.
I've been fortunate to be with small companies almost my entire career so I've experienced this first-hand exactly once, but my friend circle's not at small companies and not in tech. That's what they talk about when they talk about (complain about, commiserate over) "training". It's super common.
Maybe, but:
> Neither for or against, just an annoyance.
Viewing it as an annoyance is both “against” and very much not an example of not caring.
I'm not saying this is your actual motivation, but it kind of comes across as a clumsy attempt of someone hostile to the idea to try to get people in favor to back off by conjuring an image of the maligned neutral that they think those in favor will be more sympathetic to than actual opponents, but failing to be able to even imagine what neutrality would look like when presenting the argument.
If you're one of the people who don't need to be educated then D&I is an annoyance. If you're one of the ones who do then D&I is an annoyance. And unfortunately many times it's more than just an annoyance, it makes matters worse by polarizing or radicalizing people further.
You don't necessarily need a function like this to fix a behavior. You don't need a Basic Human Decency Lead to achieve this in your company. You instill it with education starting at a young age, and then you filter for this at every step of the way, including via interviews, promotions, etc.
But if it's one of those companies they probably couldn't care less about D&I, whatever they have works just fine for them. They want to look like they care so they proudly announce such functions and measures. All the while the people responsible for being in that situation in the first place still hang around, working just a bit harder to do the same things they always did and make it look legit this time. That's usually the role of D&I, shielding the company from responsibility while not actually changing much, if anything.
And I can see why, when you had Facebook pushing their walled garden with WhatsApp and Internet.org in various spots in Africa and India. Mozilla was all about an open global internet.
The main one was the Mozilla Festival, but I believe it also organized various smaller sibling events, hackathons, etc.
Do you have some examples of this? Also, their mission is beyond the browser:
"Our mission is to ensure the Internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all. An Internet that truly puts people first, where individuals can shape their own experience and are empowered, safe and independent." [0]
I've said it before but I'll say it again since it's relevant:
The cost of building and maintaining a competitive browser is huge and it's hard for Mozilla/Firefox to compete with Google/Chrome. Firefox saw its monthly active users go down by ~6% in the last 12 months [1]. I think Mozilla should consider stopping Firefox development and fork Chromium to focus on accessibility and privacy (both in and out of the browser). It's far from ideal--there'll only be one popular browser engine--but it's a trade off that could help Mozilla put more money and time towards its true mission: "to ensure the Internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all". The cost of building/maintaining Firefox is holding them back from putting more money and effort toward that mission (and I think that's why they're reducing their workforce [2]).
[0] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/mission/
[1] 222M MAU in Aug. 2019 and 209M MAU as of Aug. 2, 2020 https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity
[2] "Today we announced a significant restructuring of Mozilla Corporation. This will strengthen our ability to build and invest in products and services that will give people alternatives to conventional Big Tech. Sadly, the changes also include a significant reduction in our workforce by approximately 250 people." https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2020/08/11/changing-world-chan...
Can I no longer "shape my own experience" if I use an iPhone with Safari?
If I use Mozilla products, do I get given richer webpages where my experience is modifiable by me? If not, how do I "shape" my experience??
The mission statement is vague, which seems to have translated into liberal spending.
Can they run a browser which does not work by embedding safari? Can they run another browser which runs JS in JIT mode?
> Can I no longer "shape my own experience" if I use an iPhone with Safari?
Until relatively recently, the answer was "no". And Mozilla was one of the reasons people knew the alternatives world existed and people kept raising this as an issue with both default iPhone and Android browsers. Neither Safari nor Chrome allowed custom ad and trackers blocking.
Safari on iOS does in fact allow ad blockers and has for five years.
I explicitly mentioned custom ad/tracker blocking because the ad blocking provided by iOS Safari was pretty simplistic. You couldn't block specific cookies, div on a page, or other behaviours as far as I understand.
If I care about my privacy, why would I want a third party app to have complete access to my browsing history? That’s the problem solved by iOS’s framework. The third party ad blocker has no visibility into your browsing history.
Safari is increasingly making it difficult for third party tracking cookies.
And Mozilla was one of the reasons people knew the alternatives world existed
So it look like you thought that Mozilla who no one outside of geek circles no exist, had more to do with people wanting third party browsers as the default than Google.
Let me remind you that 5 years ago FF had ~20% usage on the desktop. It was a commonly known name and even more popular at homes if you remove the enterprise usage.
Desktop, because ff mobile didn't really exist yet, so mobile segment is not really relevant for comparison.
Apple’s method of ad blocking - having a JSON file that gives the browser engine rules is relatively browser intensive - at least in regards to what mobile processors could do during the iOS 8 era. Apple didn’t even support it on 32 bit phones that did run iOS 8.
Apple could have only shipped it two years sooner for iOS. iOS 8 was the second version of iOS that supported 64 bit processor.
No... what? Not sure what you're disagreeing with.
Linux and other GPL software I believe has served as a viable alternative to closed/walled gardens like the Apple ecosystem (and I say that from my Macbook with my iPhone and iPad close at hand). Every time we lament the issues of loss of user power in walled gardens, I think it's substantially true that "it could be even worse" if there were no countervailing forces, like Mozilla.
Mission statements are like a wind in the sails of the corporation. It doesn't replace the role of the rudder (that's the job of the C level leaders), but it does lead you in a particular direction.
Yes, that's the problem. Mozilla was Netscape++ and was pretty darn good at it until their ‘leadership’ lost interest.
It looks like you're misquoting GP. Unless they edited it later and I didn't notice... the commenter said, "_seems_ superflous" not "_are_ superfluous". They said they were willing to be educated on what those roles did.
Don't share if you know (and admit) that you have no idea what you are talking about. If all you want to do is learn, ask. Nobody is interested in ignorant assumptions.
Also you might take offense in my interpretation of what has been written but I did not misquote anything.
Yes, I'm aware of the rhetorical technique of the "question that's actually a veiled insult". E.g. "Why does Facebook/Airbnb/Dropbox have all those thousands of programmers?!? What do they all do?!?" ... are often not really sincere questions but really a humblebrag of commenter saying, "I can code a Facebook clone over the weekend with one hand tied behind my back...yada yada yada"
I hope my example above shows the we both have a shared understanding of unstated but implied messages in what people write. That said, I still think it's a more productive discussion to try to answer the question the way pjc50 did[1] rather than the retaliatory criticism of your reply.
>Nobody is interested in ignorant assumptions.
Well, those "ignorant assumptions" was (for several hours) the top-voted comment in this thread so it seems that many are interested in it. (I'm using "seems" in a sincere way.)
If you think it's unproductive to try to answer the commenter's question because you believe they were only trolling Mozilla, consider reframing it as "educating all the lurkers who upvoted that comment". The silent lurkers may have sincere curiosity about what all those roles actually do even if the commenter you responded to does not.
Back in the site-backed-by-CMS days, I was always on the lookout for something better than Wordpress. Every time I thought I landed on a good alternative, I'd start to hunt down some esoteric needs that just didn't exist, and discussions with the staff who ran said solutions were usually fruitless. Meanwhile, the answer to literally any problem with Wordpress was just sitting there on Stack Overflow.
Today I've moved on to JAMstack, and while everything is massively superior from both a consumer and developer perspective, the headless CMS offerings — which seem like a natural fit for the OSS world — are mostly proprietary and very, very expensive. It feels just like trying Wordpress alternatives, where the support is uncommunicative and the community is nonexistent.
My clients can afford to pay for a good headless CMS, but I'm seriously considering using Wordpress API for "headless" because the paid options are a pain in the ass.
Software cost generally isn't a "dramatic" part of cost, wherever you look. Because of zero marginal cost, the price of widely-used software approaches zero naturally. Only highly specialized software commands high prices, those reflect the cost of developing or replacing it, as well as the value that it is providing.
Let's say you put a minimum wage worker to some task on that laptop. Over the amortization period (3 years) of that laptop, that extra cost of the Windows license amounts to maybe 0.1% of the cost of that worker, assuming they use nothing but that laptop to perform the work.
Now, let's say that the worker needs to learn how to use Linux and it costs you, say, 20 hours in opportunity cost to get them up to speed. Linux is now more expensive than Windows.
So using your analysis of the single worker, which I agree with, it actually makes a very big difference when applied to all workers.
To address your point about the training costs of moving from proprietary to Open Source, again this disappears if the move happens at scale. It disappears because every worker would have learnt Linux at their previous job (or at school / college etc.) and so in fact the cheapest thing becomes to use Linux.
What your argument demonstrates is the network effects of proprietary software, whereby if you're the first to use Open Source software it's a disadvantage, but if everyone used it, it would be an overall advantage to society.
The question then becomes, how do we get from here (often proprietary) to there (mostly Open Source)?
It doesn't, because it's still just 0.1%. That may be billions upon billions of dollars in aggregate, but per unit sold, it's still just 0.1%.
So, if your question is "how much cheaper could goods become by switching all production to free software?", then answer would be 0.1%, if we assume that 0.1% is the average share of software licenses in COGS.
In practice, software licenses averaged over all industries might be 1% or higher. Again, that might be trillions of dollars, but it's still just 1% per unit sold. Also, that money isn't evaporating, it's mostly going into the pockets of people who build that software.
Sure, there's a profit margin in software development, maybe 10% on average. So, if you eliminated that profit, you'd save 10% of 1%. You'd still have to pay for that development, even if it is free software. If you eliminate the profit motive, what governs development? Some form of bureaucracy. We already know bureaucracies are inefficient. So you would probably end up paying more to develop "free" software.
From an efficiency perspective, free software is strictly unnecessary, because the marginal cost of software is zero, the cost of developing it is a constant, and therefore its price naturally converges to zero as its development is amortized.
Let's say OpenSSL was proprietary and cost $1000. That would add $1000 to the cost of developing anything that uses it, until a cheaper competitor comes around. How expensive is it to implement SSL? Not that expensive. How many people use SSL? A lot! Do the math, make the business case, and you would probably find that you can turn a profit selling a competing implementation at only 10$. Why is this not happening? Well, because somebody already made OpenSSL free and it's "good enough".
It is a misunderstanding of market forces to assume the compounding effect of free software licenses would be greater than the compounding effect of cheap software licenses that the market produces all by itself.
Economically, spending personal data makes sense for a lot of people. Unlike money, you generate personal data continuously and effortlessly. You can spend it multiple times, many people spend it with little obvious downside, and the process is completely frictionless. Consider the effort involved with setting up, maintaining and eventually cancelling a subscription to a money-financed service, vs. a data-financed one, which you simply start and stop using at your leisure.
Some people do not like this situation. They object to the entire notion of personal data being used as a currency. They attempt to prevent it via advocacy and legislation. Advocacy does not seem to work, at least on its own. Many people, if you explain the situation to them in terms of privacy, will express a theoretical desire not to trade away their personal data. However, their behaviour is not consistent with this. Faced with a choice between using data-financed and money-financed services, the majority chooses the former.
Legislation attempts to resolve this dilemma, either by outlawing the use of personal data as a currency at all, or more often by making the spending of personal data more a onerous and explicit process, in the hope that a closer equivalence in terms of convenience combined with repeated reminders of people's stated preference to maintain their privacy will alter their behaviour.
Personally, I'm skeptical this type of legislation will succeed. Clicking a few checkboxes and cookie banners is still far more convenient than giving my credit card details to every single website or app I want to use. And most humans act in opposition to their stated ideals and desires in myriad ways, every single day.
In the case of Firefox, if I'm not mistaken they do only consumer focus products, maybe they could release something that companies are willing to pay for.
They could captilize on the good reputation while it lasts, and maybe employees that resonate with Mozilla history will promote their products to their bosses for free.
On the former, it's of course a massive shift off of their current focus and they'd get a lot of kickback from the community, but you could imagine a world where they had a model like 37 Signals/Basecamp/Hey etc. On the latter, I don't know anything about the browser market in proper enterprise and if there are many opportunities for products there - you would presume there could be some value capture though.
Mozilla in my mind is a lab company with one product to monetize it: Firefox. At the end of the day though if you're product can't bring in enough money, you need to cut. Seems to be what's happening.
Though there are big regional differences:
It still has a 13% market share in Germany... 22% if you only look at the desktop. Worldwide, across all platforms, it's 4%.
The observations here:
1. Most casual users don’t actually care which browser they use. (Citation needed, to be sure, but among casual users, I suspect it’s the substantial majority.)
2. Corollary: often I have seen cases where a different browser is installed, and the user just accepts it and keeps going. This has been used most parasitically by Google, bundling their browser with other things (an obnoxious practice in the industry at large that is I think not as common as it used to be, but is still widespread in certain niches). A great many users that have Chrome don’t even know how it ended up on their computer; it just… became their default browser at some point.
3. Google as a whole has been extremely underhanded in its marketing and positioning of Chrome, abusing their position of strength in one industry in order to dominate another. There has been some grumbling about this in legal circles, but not a great deal of action; yet if current trends continue, antitrust lawsuits will assuredly come. He wasn’t calling it “Chrome”, he was calling it “Google”. Google search, Google mail, Google browser, Google horizontals.
Total vendor lock-in.
It was hell.
You have a reason to use Firefox.
We're going down the same path again and it makes me sad.
I know a lot of "normal" people using Firefox with privacy add-ons, mostly because someone knowledgeable told them to. I have often seen these people very receptive when I tell them why I deem Firefox a better Choice then Chrome.
I do however see no way to convince my coworkers to switch. And look at hacker news threads on this topic. It's always some variation of "I don't like google collecting everything I do but Mozilla did this one thing once so I can never ever use Firefox!"
So if we, the people who are supposed to be in the know don't recommend it, why would anyone who is not in the know want to use it?
In the case of FF, maybe, but Chrome had a well-oiled marketing machine behind it.
I was volunteer coaching a HS debate team, none of whom had any interest in "tech", and they all of my students switched to Chrome from FF/IE with zero input from a supposed tastemaker like myself, and Chrome had no extensions/adblock on launch, which kept me from adopting it.
Nobody is saying this.
Some people say they'd pay for Firefox. Some say they'd support it, but nothing outside of the main browser. But are there really enough people to fund something as big as Mozilla?
Sure there might be some excesses (like I keep reading about the CEO's salary every other comment), but it seems few realize that the commercial ventures were created for a reason: to bring money in.
If Mozilla only ever worked on the browser, would they have survived up until now? I reckon no.
I do think they should create some sort of recurring donation system in a Patreon style (even without rewards, maybe with nice lists for the biggest donors) and test the waters. Are there really a lot of people willing to put money where their mouth is? I hope so, but my gut feeling also says no.
I believe so. My favorite example is JetBrains. They're making about half of what Mozilla is Making (if you include the other commercial competitors, it's much probably closer, and they're competing with Microsoft giving a free IDE away), people are happy to pay. JetBrains' products are significantly better than the free alternatives though.
In essence, people overvalue free goods. This means it is very hard for a paid product to compete against free goods, even when the paid product is itself cheap and better quality. This explains a lot about the state of the Internet, where a large number of eyeballs go to free products maintained by a large companies with other revenue streams or to low quality junk. It also makes me, unfortunately, doubtful that any efforts to directly monetize Firefox will be successful.
The EU is spending 1e9€ over a decade to build a neuroinformatics platform.
It seems like having a major browser not beholden to corporate interests on another continent could be at least as beneficial as speculative science projects
(1000 employees at 50k€/yr puts Firefox in a similar price range)
Governments need to communicate with whomever they govern and in their language. It should be a strategic imperative to have a browser that isn't reporting back to Silicon Valley with every click and that can be the defacto in a given locale.
Browsers are expected to be for free. The work done on developing the things has been done. At least up to where they are now. There is no god given right for browser developers to be on a money train. We have standards and governments that give a damn about things like education should be making sure that they have a standards compliant browser for their citizens to use. None of this up to the free market malarkey as it doesn't work with a free product.
Never 'been allowed'? By whom?
This 'cult of the free' is also historically how software development was done long before the web ever existed - the 'cult of not free' arising from the PC era is the one encroaching on open software, and it's attendant software profit incentive is largely what created the need to document for-profit browser incompatibilities which the author is complaining needs commercial support..
As a user/consumer I found that setting a monthly sponsorship budget helps. I spend a part of it monthly when available (ex through Patreon), then sum up what is left by the end of the year and do one time donations (for projects that work that way, ex Wikipedia or Thunderbird).
I'm curious how others sponsor software or projects you care about?
Concerning software, I agree the situation is a bit different as states are hardly strong players there. But I would disagree on the fact that the 'clut of free' is a sin. The whole industry gained a lot in terms of openness, sharing of best-practices and just innovation. Try finding how to build a washing-machine from scratch or just getting the PCB layout of your radio, it's a really painful process.
But I would agree that I'm worried too on the future of software, but I would rather push for more financing of open source (& free) projects - by states or NGOs - rather than pushing the whole industry to go sales first.
I think the ideal solution is hard to find, but I doubt we will come to something stable without a bit of regulation.
Pay with your data and liberties business model seems to be the darling of the masses.
Cult of free is actually just that and Mozilla is also part of it as it is making its revenue from Google.
Do you mean that it's technically feasible to implement them, or that they actually work economically to fund viable, competitive businesses.
Free(as in beer) software has become a bait to direct you to something else. You want to drive a virtual car? Here is your virtual car but why don't you check the bubble popping game first? Here are your bubbles to pop but why don't you try jumping over hops instead? Here are the hops you may want to jump but wouldn't you not like to get angry for this political issue first?
This endless ad-supported stream of offers, I believe, is taking the oxygen of truly high quality works. Why would you buy the 0.99$ app or game when you can use the free version, right?
A quick search suggests that that amount is on average less than half a US cent per play on Spotify, and similar services range from about 1/10 to 2 cents per play. It's not a system that the artists are very happy with.
They made $1.5B of it reportedly. https://www.eteknix.com/candy-crush-series-made-1-5b-2018-vi...
I am not big fan of the series so I would not know what is the current situation(maybe now they also do annoying ads? I wouldn't know), but essentially if you want to play all day long you need to chip in, otherwise you wait for life refills. There are also pay-to-win options(consumable power ups) but you don't have to use it. It is a delight for the people who are into the genre, my mother plays the game since years and she is loving it.
What I liked was that, the deal is sipmle: We will give you a game that you like but if you want to play it a lot or be given an easy time you will have to pay. This is in contrast of all the ad-based software out there where the deal is "We made something that you want however we would like you to consider doing something else by clicking on our ads, we insist".
I myself play a lot of PUBG Mobile and it's also an excellent experience. It's free to play, ads's don't interrupt and I can play as much as I would like but If I like to customise my characters appearance, then I need to pay.
That's a sure fire way to annoy users. Mozilla have tried various ways diversify their funding. Vocal users have reacted strongly against anything they perceive as "ads" in their browser, no matter how benign. And yes "please support us" will be seen as an ad/nag. Just as it was when they promoted Mozilla donations for a time.
Couldn't that apply to web browsers too, though? If a company stands to benefit by some browser feature becoming widely available, perhaps it would make sense for them to do the work on the major browsers and donate the code. From their point of view, this might be better than waiting for the browser vendors (who may view it as a low priority) to do it.
I don't know of this ever happening, but I can't see a reason it never could.
* Hopefully this doesn't need to be said, but Free in this context refers to software freedom, not to price.
People are already able to donate to Mozilla (although not directly to Firefox), if that's what they want to do.
> I collectively paid a lot of money for boxed releases of Red Hat and SuSE back in the day, to support development.
Right, exactly. It's essentially an optional donation, and sadly, few people choose to make optional donations.
> I'm willing to pay for a supported, professional version
Charging for premium support is a different idea.
I'm not opposed to paid Free Software support, in principle I think it's a great idea, but I doubt it would generate much revenue.
The core problem is the product itself. People haven't paid for web browsers in 25 years.
Rather than trying to fit the square peg of "ending free" into the round hole of browser software, a more sustaining change would be for Mozilla to develop a product that people will pay for. One they have not been conditioned over the course of decades to get for free.
In other words, Mozilla needs a product (or service) built not for the masses but a small group of people who:
1. have a problem that needs to be solved; and
2. have money to spend
Whether or not Mozilla has the leadership or even culture to pull this off is another question.
Now it's paywalls, gated communities and Valley technologists crying about moochers from the steering wheels of their Teslas.
They have a spending problem. Spending money not on firefox or thunderbird, but spending way to much for public policy and other things.
Donations are a bad idea. Companies can't make donations (usually). But they can buy software licenses.
They should sell something. Not sure what, though.
What would be great from Mozilla is a subscription model.
Obviously, a corporation (like Google, MS, Apple, etc) can't be trusted because they have too many conflicting interests. The MS monopoly lawsuit was about browsers; how people connect to the internet is a big huge deal and there's a lot of money and power to be gained if you become top-dog in that space.
Just ask Google, whose dominance of the browser space with Chrome has massively shaped the way to web works today, making it much friendlier to invasive DRM, micropayment schemes, invasive advertising, and many other consumer exploiting features.
So you need an independent source for a browser, but browsers are big and very complicated and need strong security and on and on. It's neither easy nor cheap, but why would the average person want to pay for an independent browser when MS, Apple, and Google will all give you a great browser "for free?"
There is no real answer to this under our current economic model. Donations and fund-raising are patches on a broken system, usually requiring additional support from advertisers, corporate donations, influencing foundations, and so on. If the money isn't coming from consumers buying or donating, then it's coming from someone with money and a vested interest that their money is buying influence for.
The Internet was built on public money from university grants and military funding. But the internet was stolen from the public decades ago and sold to big capital. Until we fix that, Mozilla is just another in a long line of past and future downsizings as the corporate world continues to pillage and privatize the Internet.
"If you like this page, why not donate a little bit of money to help me pay my bills and create more free content?"
To live like you teach would make the article a "pay-wall, didn't read" for me, seems we're in a catch 22?
It didn't work.
For other related examples see the numerous social media stars/influencers who have moderate to large followings, but don't necessarily make that much money. The majority don't make enough to give up their day jobs.
Recognition often isn't worth that much. The real test of how much people value something is whether they'll pay for it.
It’s a shame the sponsored spaceflight never worked out; but I guess even though Virgin Galactic still isn’t flying customers, that scheme brought more recognition than Reflector.
Anyway, I wasn't involved at all, so you have to understand that this is my personal viewpoint and not the view of the company but, again, the idea was that the recognition from that contest would translate into additional sales of our tools.
It didn't work.
There are already projects that do this.