Comment by logicprog | Hacker News Reader

Comment by logicprog | Hacker News Reader

This is really awesome. I deeply admire what they're doing and hope it works out.

What I'd really love to see with this is some kind of monetization model outside of just relying on sponsors to a non-profit. Although I'm not a huge fan of their specific license, I think maybe the FUTO model might be something to look at: The user is fully free to inspect, modify, and redistribute copies of or modifications of the source code of the application, and the full features of the application are available at all times to all users, but there is a way to "pay for the application if you like it" built into the interface that is easy to access and convenient to use, that gives people some kind of "lifetime license" that just adds a rewarding cosmetic thing to their account or something. Maybe with a one-time notification reminding the user to pay after a certain amount of time using the application that can be permanently dismissed with a button that's part of the notification.

Agree with this. Similar to something like Frame.work, this kind of product will never have universal interest and is unlikely to take more than a couple percent of the market, but that’s Fine. Pick your audience, build them the product they want, and charge them money for it. I’ll happily pay for an open-source standards compliant browser with no conflict about who it’s building for.

Yes, I think that's at least one thing that the FUTO model shows, which is that there is actually a substantial proportion of people willing to pay for goods software that respects them as users. Whether that's enough to break even with development costs is another question though, but I certainly hope that would be the case.

Ladybird is explicitly forgoing any monetization. They will live of donations only. They are happy with a non copyleft license. Some people prefer this. They don't want a tit-for-tat, they just want to give unrestricted.

The real FUTO model is that a billionaire is funding the dev though... They are likely not making bank with the "pay what you want" model.

Elementary OS also has a "pay what you want" option, but I could not find how much this is bringing them compared to their other funding sources.

> The real FUTO model is that a billionaire is funding the dev though... They are likely not making bank with the "pay what you want" model.

That's fair, but Ladybird can emulate that through the sponsors of its non-profit foundation. So it can be partially funded through shareware-like stuff and mostly funded through sponsors keeping it funded. Maybe I'm just crazy here, though. I really don't know what would make a viable funding model.

A funding model that I really think would be great and I wish people would use more is only providing source code and the tools and documentation needed to modify it and build it yourself for free and charging money for access to pre-built or packaged binaries. I judt don't tend to go around suggesting it because I feel like a lot of people would be pretty resentful of this with our current culture around software, even though I think it's probably the best model in our ideal world.

I think that cryptocurrencies get an undeserved level of hate, and that it would be perfect for monetizing a project like a web browser. Yes, there are scam coins, but there are also legitimate use cases for it.

IMO the Basic Attention Token used by Brave is a good way to do it. Users have the option to earn BAT by watching "privacy-friendly" ads, or exchange fiat into BAT and skip seeing ads. They can then use the funds to support websites they visit, or the browser developer. I'm not a Brave user, but this always seemed to me like the best way to transition away from the intrusive and hostile ad-based business models, and into one that eliminates the middle-man and allows users to support content creators directly.

> perfect for monetizing a project like a web browser

They could also try regular old fashioned money for monetization. It has worked for ~3,000 years pretty well and you can buy things like food and shelter with it in pretty much every country on earth.

Assuming you mean the electronic form of fiat, it's not a good fit for microtransactions because of the fee requirements. A digital currency can be used for much smaller and frequent transactions. Not Bitcoin and most major ones, but there are currencies optimized for real-time transactions with minimal fees, so it is possible.

It's a shame that the cryptocurrency stigma doesn't allow legitimate uses of the technology to enable novel business models and user experiences. But keep downvoting me because you disagree. :)

Also rich patrons supporting artists was how many of the greatest artworks of many civilisations were commissioned for thousands of years...

Is writing software closer to growing potatoes or designing the Sagrada de Familia, or writing the Clarinet Concerto?

I'd argue that writing a web browser is a lot closer in scope to writing a symphony than building a house - at least in audience and durability. In a house's life time, maybe 100 people live in it, and perhaps 2000 people visit it, but a browser, or a symphony, will have an audience of millions.

The market is massively smaller. The impact massively larger.

I guess also for context, a lot of the code I write is closer to the "house" or even "potatoes".

A one-off script to extract data for a report - potato.

A brochure website for a company that'll be replaced in 6 years, a small house (or even just an interior of a house, or kitchen revamp...).

I disagree, as being able to earn BAT incentivizes fraud, and fraud protection cannot be done well without a significant loss of privacy.

There's no way to confirm that you've watched an ad, you can write a Python script that pretends to be the Brave browser and sends the right requests to their API, and there's no way to distinguish those two on their side. The easiest (if not the only) way to make this difficult is to require lots of tracking and fingerprinting, which is hard to emulate well with a custom script. This is one major reason why tracking is so crucial for the ad economy to work.

I don't get your point.

There is no way to confirm whether you've watched an ad with existing systems either. Ad impression / click / PPC fraud is rampant, and adtech is in a perpetual battle to detect and prevent it.

A solution like BAT isn't meant to address fraud. It's meant to address user privacy and monetization of web services by serving ads that don't track the user, and by allowing the user to directly support the services they use.

The fact advertisers have inserted themselves as middlemen between consumers and producers for decades now has corrupted all forms of media, not just the internet. The solution by Brave is not perfect, but it's certainly a step in the right direction. Without such solutions user privacy and experience on the internet will inevitably continue to degrade, as publishers optimize creating content specifically designed to please advertisers, and adtech optimizes systems designed to extract as much data from users as possible.

Advertising is an absolute scourge on humanity. As we move towards a transhumanist future, I shudder to imagine the machiavellian ideas adtech has in store for us. They've already experimented with face and eye tracking, and I'm sure they're thinking of ways of injecting ads directly into our brain... We should be open to any alternative solution that steers us away from this future, even if it's not perfect.

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