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Comment by acoard | Hacker News Reader

> Isn’t receiving hundreds of millions a year a sustainable business?

Right, but the argument goes that the only reason Google pays Mozilla so much is to prop up the competition. Google may have calculated that it would be preferable to pay the hundreds of millions, rather than have Firefox die just leaving Chrome/Safari.

Thus, it's not really a sustainable business, but rather being the lucky benefactor of some scheme. Their value is only in being 'the other guy', not in actually creating a valuable product for consumers. I wouldn't call that a sustainable business.

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How are you supposed to build a "sustainable business" if you're expected to offer your product for free because your competitors are pouring money from other businesses in to it to offer it for free?

Google Chrome is not a "sustainable business" either; it just gets funded by Google's other business activities (mainly Google ads). Arguably, Safari is the only one that people (indirectly) pay for when they purchase an Apple device.

> Their value is only in being 'the other guy', not in actually creating a valuable product for consumers.

I use Firefox purely because I feel it works better than Chrome.

> Their value is only in being 'the other guy', not in actually creating a valuable product for consumers

Mozilla's value to Google might be only being "the other guy", but Mozilla is valuable to me (a consumer) because they are producing a Firefox, which is a product I consider valuable.

Obviously I would prefer that Mozilla can find a self-sustainable business model to support Firefox development. But if I had to choose between "Mozilla doesn't exist" and "Mozilla exists only because it gets money from Google", then I choose the latter.

But the fact that Mozilla continue to require Google's money to survive means that not enough people would make the same choice.

Perhaps, but also consider that they are only in this position because Google uses their search monopoly to fund development of a free alternative... much like Microsoft used their desktop OS monopoly to do the same in the 90s.

While I don't think user payments would be enough to fund development, I don't think "they need Google's money" is evidence for it. It's not like paying for Firefox is currently an option.

Firefox is developed by the Mozilla Corporation. The closest thing to paying for Firefox is probably donating to the Mozilla Foundation, but that money is used for education and advocacy.

> It's not like paying for Firefox is currently an option.

That's a choice made by the Mozilla Corporation, not a technical impossibility.

The majority of the software industry is just lucky benefactors who “got there first”.

Google isn’t a sustainable business without paying enormous sums to remain in business, without a whole lot of political concessions that have been made to hype USian markets.

What is and isn’t a sustainable business is relative to how frequently you have been told what is and isn’t sustainable business.

> The majority of the software industry is just lucky benefactors who “got there first”.

This is not true. There are so many examples of 2nd mover who became the dominant force, such as Zoom, Photoshop, MS Office, IntelliJ.

To attribute a success product purely to luck is also intellectually lazy. There are often so many factors, in many cases conflicting, that change of course of a product. It is impossible to say luck is the main factor, although it is usually a factor.

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