Comment by nine_k | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nine_k | Hacker News Reader

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I can imagine that the CEO, or maybe a few other top officers, may say: "This is me who is bringing in all the search deals, which means all the money. Come on and try to oust me."

Mozilla is an open-source project. When an open-source project somehow loses its way, it's often forked by a new team of contributors who have a better idea. This happened several times: Open Office / Libre Office, MySQL / MariaDB, X86 / X11.org, hell, even GCC / egcs in the 1990s.

But this likely cannot happen to Mozilla, which is basically kept afloat by Google handing it some money for keeping it as a default search engine, about $400M a year currently [1]. There is little chance that an alternative "Better Mozilla" organization would collect as much, or at least half as much, to support a fork. It would e.g. take 33M users who agree to pay $5/mo for a Mozilla "support subscription" to collect $400M a year.

Maybe a web browser can be maintained for less than 400M, but likely not much less. The modern web is fiendishly complex, and you need both a desktop version (three platforms) and a mobile version.

[1]: https://www.pcmag.com/news/mozilla-signs-lucrative-3-year-go...

It would e.g. take 33M users who agree to pay $5/mo for a Mozilla "support subscription" to collect $400M a year.

Maybe I'm reading this wrong, but when I do the math (33M x 5 x 12) I get $1.98B.

Maybe you meant $1/month?

If you pay yearly, you usually get a discount so you cant multiply by 12.

Yep, you're right. At 5$/month they'd need 6.66M subscribed users. Still a lot, but more acheivable.

Most people don't want to pay for anything. Look at all of the workarounds for news sites. I try to pay or donate for most of what I use but there seem to be a lot of people who want to get everything for free.

I totally won't mind paying for the occasional article I open, if micropayments were a thing! Pay a quarter, read something worthy.

The problem is that micropayments are not interesting for most news outlets: the friction of current solutions is high, the resulting revenue stream, unsteady. Monthly / yearly subscriptions bring a better revenue stream, and cost way less.

If micropayments were indeed zero-friction, and effectively zero-cost, maybe they'd be (reluctantly) integrated.

My experience w/ most news outlets is that they have a random article I'm linked to. That's not worth a subscription in my mind. A news service you have an ongoing relationship with is.

I'm deeply disturbed of this normalization of software as a subscription service. I want the return of good old days when people could pay once for their software and use it in perpetuity.

subscription is a significantly fairer revenue model for software which undergoes regular upgrades and has support, which is most software nowadays.

It makes sure that people who continue to use continue to pay. Upfront charges are often either too low with long term users free-riding or too high, in case the project is abandoned. Subscription makes it much more likely to price products correctly.

> subscription is a significantly fairer revenue model for software which undergoes regular upgrades and has support

I could not disagree more. Subscriptions for software are a deeply unfair approach. Great for the companies, of course, but not for users.

A more fair approach is to charge for upgrades and support instead. At least that way, users only pay if/when they choose to obtain additional value.

Leaving nonpaying users on old versions on browsers with security issues and who will no longer support the latest web standards will be bad for the web.

How would it be bad for the web?

If users want to stay on an old version, why shouldn't they be allowed to? Sure, there may be additional security considerations or missing functionality, but there's nothing wrong with a user making that choice.

>How would it be bad for the web?

It results in users having a broken experience or sites being very conservative in what features they use.

This model gets implemented, and then the comments section is littered with "I prefer when I didn't need to pay for software upgrades and backward compatibility!"

Yeah, people can get irrational about such things (like ignoring that they're only paying when they choose to rather than paying every month automatically).

But the solution to this is to offer both forms, as several companies do.

I hate the "subscriptionification" of everything as much as anybody, but there is a cost to ongoing updates to software. Especially on something like a browser, where both standards and exceptional behavior contrary to the standards change rapidly.

Maybe we could go back to where people paid once and could pay separately for support?

I remember the forced obsolescence. There were a few good software packages but many would frequently force you to upgrade from version 12.31 to 13.0 which isn't backward compatible i.e., "This software doesn't run on Windows XP"

At least with Microsoft, they are fanatics about backwards compatibility. It is pretty rare for something designed for an OS prior to Windows XP to not run on current Windows OS versions.

This is not a subscription to use the browser. You can always build it from source and use for free, as designed.

This is a commitment to support the development, because the development should be oingoing. Not Netflix-style, but Patreon-style.

(Also see how JetBrains handles "subscriptions" to their closed-source software. Once you've paid, the version is forever yours. Updates are bought with some additional sums if desired.)

I mean yes, but I read that more as "patronizing." I.e. how many patrons (of some sort) Mozilla would need.

> I want the return of good old days when people could pay once for their software and use it in perpetuity.

This simply does not exist for any software that is internet connected.

All my software is that. My monthly subscription is 0$.

Of all the types of software where you should be ok paying a subscription, browsers are the ones where should be most ok with it. Browsers, more than anything else, need constant updates because they're by far the biggest and juiciest attack surface for hackers, and also web devs will just stop supporting you if you're not on top of the treadmill of browser standard updates.

It's not feasible at all to call a browser "done" and leave it alone, so if you want one that's independent from adtech, a subscription is kind of your only option.

> Maybe a web browser can be maintained for less than 400M, but likely not much less.

I doubt that. Mozilla wastes a ton, not only on CEO salaries but tangential projects and other dogoodery.

The EU could have a privacy-friendly browser if it funded Mozilla or a Mozilla fork.

I, for one, won't trust a government to ensure my privacy.

The EU does better than the US for consumer-related privacy issues. But I don't think the same can be said when the government wants to slap a label of "national security" onto something. That puts us into a whole different world of "anything goes".

That would be a no from me. Considering the recent headlines from the EU wanting to scan every private message on the phones of it's citizens in order to "protect the children".

FIY, that has been rejected: https://fortune.com/europe/2023/10/26/eu-chat-control-csam-e...

For now yes. I'm sure it will be back on the agenda in some form or other before we know it.

For now, but it's not over.

If not this time then the next. Just the fact that the commission was allowed to propose such a blatant privacy invading law is enough for me to know that privacy is not a something that the EU is serious about.

Private corporations do the same without you knowing, without any pretence and without even illusion of accountability.

Non-profit is better than gov but private is way worse than even gov.

I don't think this is what being argued here. We know that privacy is an after thought of most companies even in the EU.

But to think that the EU would be the guarantor of everyone's privacy on the web, is completely ridiculous.

Also your argument is not valid. When Google detects that you break their rules they ban your account. When the government has this kind power, then they have the power to do worse things to you, like imprisonment, fines, putting you on a blacklist and much more...

Those two things are not comparable.

Is this the same EU that is forcing browsers to accept government mandated certificate authorities?

Article 45 of eIDAS 2.0 will roll back web security by 12 years - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38181114 - Nov 2023 (77 comments)

Joint statement of scientists and NGOs on the EU’s proposed eIDAS reform - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38126997 - Nov 2023 (63 comments)

Last Chance to fix eIDAS: Secret EU law threatens Internet security - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38109494 - Nov 2023 (299 comments)

EFF about EU: EIDAS 2.0 Sets a Dangerous Precedent for Web Security - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33966364 - Dec 2022 (44 comments)

EU legislation eIDAS article 45.2 may force inclusion of insecure QWAC root CAs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32093891 - July 2022 (36 comments)

Mozilla and the EFF publish letter about the danger of Article 45.2 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30549119 - March 2022 (13 comments)

> When an open-source project somehow loses its way, it's often forked by a new team of contributors who have a better idea

Perhaps ironically, this was also the genesis of Firefox

> Perhaps ironically, this was also the genesis of Firefox

That's not entirely accurate (or at least, while accurate, is missing a lot of significant context) Mozilla was creating within Netscape, not in opposition to it, as a steward org for the open-sourcing of Navigator & Communicator. Even when Netscape was acquired by AOL, AOL continued to fund[0] Mozilla for years after the acquisition.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20050324025052/http://www.wired....

Firefox, however, was not. It was created because people didn't use most of the tools built into the Mozilla suite, and they were difficult to port (because they had a Motif frontend AND a GTK frontend).

https://website-archive.mozilla.org/www.mozilla.org/firefox_...

But after that, IIRC Mozilla Suite was big, clunky and stagnating. And Phoenix, I mean, Firebird, I mean, Firefox was a lean spin-off.

It was a spin-off within Mozilla though - not a rival fork.

That is the case, but even then Firefox really was a fork, within Mozilla.

Mozilla was created in 1998 to open-source Netscape Communicator suite. Mozilla released its own suite, also called "Mozilla" (e.g. "Mozilla 1.0" [0])

Independently of that effort, Dave Hyatt and Blake Ross made an experimenal, cut-down version of just the browser part of the suite, which they called "Phoenix", as in a Phoenix rising from the ashes. That's a fork. That's a fork by any metric.

They later rebranded Phoenix as Firefox, and eventually the Mozilla suite was abandoned. Mozilla changed tack in 2003 and switched to developing Firefox and Thunderbird as independent products [1]

[0] https://www-archive.mozilla.org/releases/mozilla1.0

[1] https://www-archive.mozilla.org/roadmap/roadmap-02-apr-2003

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