A browser that's not pushed by an advertising company is really important. If we lose Firefox, we lose badly, and these diversions are putting that key bulwark at risk.
Agreed. I'm encouraged at the thought of Google being forced to divest from Chrome by US antitrust action [1] [2].
[1] https://www.marketplace.org/2020/10/13/what-would-google-be-...
[2] https://www.politico.com/news/2020/10/10/feds-may-target-goo...
How would Chrome as a standalone business generate revenue?
My question here was how would would we benefit from the breakup? And how would some products which are dependent on he search revenue survive? At least they sell GSuite so it's an actual competitor to Office.Chrome is just to get more people using a browser that makes more web experiences better so they'll use more Google products.
These things discourage customers from mixing products from different companies, thus reducing competition.
Another way to look at it is that there are two ways for a large company to get its software to work well with others: Either it participates in open standards, or it creates its own ecosystem to lock its customers into. The former is better for customers, but companies obviously choose the latter. So we need to take that option away from them.
I don't know if this applies to Google Docs and search. It might have been a bad example.
If a product can't survive on its own, it should die – that is how a market economy works.
"Activism stuff" is precisely what the Mozilla _Foundation_ is for.
As it stands, the primary activity of the Foundation is to take money and goodwill earned by Firefox and divert it to unrelated activism.
Because I bet many donate because they want to support Firefox.
The New York Times ad was paid for through donations to present an alternative to the closed ecosystem dominated by one browser that didn't follow open standards.
https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/11/14/fast-for-good-launc...
Early versions of Firefox featured links to various news organizations and stories pulled from their feeds, until certain jurisdictions threatened to block the browser entirely.
At some point their missions may have diverged, but the marketing of both were closely intertwined. MoFo accepted donations and other sources of funds which it used, in part, to fund development of a browser by MoCo. Other projects came later, but the community's understanding of their respective roles remained the same.
As a long-term observer I followed this closely when the Foundation and Commercial split was announced, and remember reassurance s about the core mission being loudly proclaimed.
Here it is from the former CLW herself:
https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2007/08/09/firefox-is-a-public...
While true, those donations were largely from sources connected to Netscape. If they had built a normal corporation, it'd be startup capital.
>MoFo accepted donations and other sources of funds which it used, in part, to fund development of a browser by MoCo
Mozilla Corporation saw $60 million in revenue in the first year, at no point were the donations a significant source of income.
>remember reassurance s about the core mission being loudly proclaimed.
Here's the actual "core mission" they launched at the time, note the pledge containing
>Use the Mozilla assets (intellectual property such as copyrights and trademarks, infrastructure, funds, and reputation) to keep the Internet an open platform;
“Firefox is maintained by the Mozilla Corporation, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation” https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/faq/