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Comment by yuvadam | Hacker News Reader

How does Ladybird avoid Mozilla's fate? How can it be a long term sustainable project?

It depends on what you mean by “Mozilla’s fate”. In general, we are setting a much narrower goal than Mozilla and hope that focusing on only browsers will allow us to keep things simple and more sustainable financially. :)

Mozilla is dependent on advertising money from Google, is that only because they ventured in other directions? I'm not intimate with their finances, but it seems just building a browser is a large enough - expensive - R&D effort.

Are you planning on charging your users?

I think it's the other way around. They determined that to become less reliant on Google for revenue they should explore other directions, and that hasn't been very succesful.

Though I don't fully understand why pulling funding for new browser technology was part of their strategy going forward. Servo was one of the projects that made me excited about using Firefox. I bet that big announcements about moving Firefox to Rust would have consistently bumped usage numbers. As much as people voice their opinions about the RiiR movement in the comments here, it's clear people love those kinds of projects just for the technical novelty. I know I do.

We will never charge our users, or attempt to monetize them in any way. Our nonprofit will run on unrestricted donations only.

I wish you luck, more competition in the browser space is sorely needed. But please, please spend more time thinking about your finances. The surface of planet "Startups That Will Figure Out A Business Model Later" is like 99.9% graveyard. You're going to be asking people to depend on your software for an extremely important part of their lives. If you don't have a path to sustainability, you're going to do a lot of harm when you close up shop.

Between the lack of a business plan and your responses about licensing, I'm afraid I feel you're coming at this from a naive point of view. This is a seriously important line of software you're entering, please do take some time to take it seriously.

Will watch your progress and again, I genuinely love to see your project. Good luck.

A non-profit foundation taking donations is a "business" plan and IMO the only one that has a chance of building a true user agent in the long run. That doesn't mean that it is guaranteed to succeed but I don't think there is a better funding option thatwon't come with conflicting incentives.

No, "people give us money" is not a business plan. When you're starting a business (yes, non-profits are businesses) and employing people, you need to be thinking about marketing, user acquisition & conversion, pricing structures, corporate sponsorships, and so on. I know it's not as much fun as programming, but neither is eating out of your neighbor's trash because you can't pay your bills.

It is a non profit foundation. Not a buisness. And so far they managed quite well to get funds without all the buisness plan things you want them to add.

Mozilla went that route and many are not happy with that.

So I am really happy for Kling and the project, that they managed what many others only dreamed about. Focusing on developement - delivering - building trust - getting funds.

Why do you want to change the plan, when it is working?

You personally I believe without reservation about this, but the thing about creating a legal person is that it’s separate from you. Its control can—and in the long run, will—change hands. So please, please write this down somewhere, ideally somewhere binding on its future (can donations have conditions?).

We've committed to this in our application for tax-exempt status, so it's something the organization will be stuck with. :)

Despite that, I hope you'll consider a "pay what you can" popup when downloading the browser, or a donation button built into the browser settings page along with a one-time reminder, or something like that. I don't think that would be monetizing your users in any negative, extractive sense like ads do, it would still essentially just be a donation, just asked for in a more obvious way and made easy and convenient to do as part of using the app, instead of a vague separate thing that'll take work to find and that won't occur to most people to do. Personally I think charging users for software (as long as it is also FOSS) is totally fine, it's probably the only sustainable model for software that isn't ads or corporate sponsorship, and it actually serves to align the incentives of the software's developers more closely with users, instead of doing anything bad, but I respect that line.

Unless you are planning to live off the interest from your donations, how will this be possible?

With a simple two-part strategy:

1. We keep the team small enough that there's always at least 1.5 years of runway in the bank.

2. We continue fundraising actively.

I'd add that fundraising has worked well for the Wikimedia Foundation. They're taking in around $175M/year via donations. That isn't the nearly $500M/year that Mozilla gets from Google, but it's still a ton of money.

I don't know if people will donate for their browser like they donate for Wikipedia, but if it's able to bring joy to people, it could be pretty sustainable. Even Mozilla takes in $10M/year in contributions.

I'm not sure Mozilla is a good case for a lean software project.

If they didn't give their CEO $7M per year, spent money acquiring businesses like Pocket, gave up their braindead attempts at monetizing user data while simultaneously running bizarre tone-deaf "free internet" studies, and just focused on the browser and improving the development experience (is there a worse open source project than Moz??), they might fare better.

$7m!? Jesus

I've heard Andreas Kling say that they will not accept donations that have strings attached. This means they can never sell search engine placement to Google for instance. This is what ties Mozilla to Google.

That's right. The Ladybird Browser Initiative will only accept unrestricted donations. We're missing out on a fair bit of money this way, but we believe it's the right path for us.

Would you accept "issue" sponsorship to prioritize work you were going to do anyways - for instance, improving performance for a specific usecase etc?

I think he's saying precisely that they won't, and I support this. What is issue sponsorship but a donation with strings attached? It would mean ceding control of the direction of the project's development to the highest bidder.

I believe that's also what the Zig Project is doing. I hope that this sort of thing becomes more common, as browsers and programming languages (and many more things) really are things that we should have as "common goods" that don't have the interest of a corporation before the interest of users.

Don't throw money away into non-browser related projects while constantly pissing off your loyal userbase.

Look, I am as annoyed as you are with the constant barrage of "rewritten in Rust" projects, but if Mozilla did not try various other projects that are not browser, there would be no Rust.

If I recall correctly, Rust was born with building a browser engine in mind, or at least it was one of its earliest motivations. So Rust would have been a thing even if Mozilla had focused on their core product.

>So Rust would have been a thing even if Mozilla had focused on their core product.

Plus, while Firefox is their main product, it's been decades since Mozilla has been solely a browser company. It's like saying Microsoft should stop making Office because it detracts from their OS business. Companies can make more than one product. Some of those products are going to have shorter lifespans or smaller userbases than others and that's OK.

Rust wasn't a Mozilla project per se, it was something a person who happened to be working for Mozilla was messing around with and it got internal traction.

But I'm actually ok with a lot of the non-firefox projects that they have like the VPN.

What I do have an issue with is the foundation, throwing money away at various projects that have very little to do with making firefox better. From "trusworthy AI" research grants to giving 387k to the Mckensie Mack group or 375k to the New Venture Fund (I get Mozilla are lefties but what does this have to do with Firefox?) plus some other organizations that I can't even tell if they aren't just money laundering fronts as they don't appear to actually do anything.

That and the C-Suite being complete parasites. The CEO of Mozilla corp makes almost as much in a year as the Mozilla foundation makes from donations.

Remove the parasites and the senseless spending of the foundation and you could develop Firefox with the ~20% of revenue that doesn't come from Google.

Huh I didn't know that Mozilla Ventures exist.

Well, okay

Also the Mozilla originated Fluent project for localization is another example of a stand out approach. It would be interesting to see how localization fits with the Ladybird browser project as a whole. Making use of a custom implementation of Fluent might actually be a good way of moving forward.

Do people actually use Fluent? When I showed it to some professional translators, the reaction was along the lines of: “Hmm, interesting, but does it fit into my existing [roughly speaking XLIFF] tooling? No? Then no.” More generally, a technical translator’s flow is turning a table of strings into a table of strings with minimal distractions and the occasonal look at the reference; I’m not sure Fluent—however nice it looks—facilitates that.

Mostly not, but the formats and limited available tooling is designed to dovetail with existing offerings. Adoption is extremely low despite fairly easy implementation of most features.

Really? So if the software I want localized uses Fluent, do I have ways to work with translators who use Trados or Transit or Déjà Vu or memoQ or whatnot? My initial impression was that Fluent’s data model is way, way too fancy for any of these (or for interoperability via XLIFF or TMX, imperfect as it is), but I’d be happy to learn I was wrong.

Instead of rebuild 'everything' in Rust, we just can use AI to optimize C/C++.

We don't need another programming language.

Wow you actually managed to make me hate the inane "why not rewrite it in rust" commenters a tiny bit less.

I thought it was funny.

(I hope it was a joke)

Its easy to avoid the fate of Mozilla, don't get involved and distracted by lots of side projects.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Past-projects

It does seem the apple doesn't fall far from the money tree.

Ask for money from the start?

And don't ignore or intentionally alienate the users who might be inclined to donate.

Mozilla's fate? You mean building a browser that works?

Indeed, I doubt very much that Ladybird will get there.

I use Firefox every day, but they have lost so much market share that they have become pretty insignificant. They seem to have an oversized and poor management with fat paychecks.

Don't know about oversized, it felt partly more that eg. Baker was mostly interested in Mozilla as a platform for activism, not in making a good tool for users. The new interim CEO seems to have breathed life into actual browser development.

The new interim CEO has been there for such a short time that she can't possibly have breathed life in anything (she managed to get sued by the former CPO for health based discrimination though, so there's that).

You can get sued by anyone for anything, but my read was that Mozilla's board intentionally wanted to avoid promoting from within because they fired Baker in order to try to change things. The first thing he was asked to do was lay off a bunch of people from the product team, and the complaint also says that Baker was removed suddenly (despite her characterizing it as voluntary) [0]. The board that just fired her can hardly be expected to follow her recommendation for who should be CEO next, and it seems that they weren't happy with the way his org was structured either.

We'll see what happens as the lawsuit unfolds, but I'd be pretty surprised if there is proof that the discrimination was health-based and not due to the fact that he was the CPO who worked with Baker during whatever it was that made them decide to fire her.

[0] From the complaint:

> The board decision to removle Ms Baker was so abrupt that they did not conduct a search for a successor, resulting in the naming of one of their own board members, Ms Chambers, as interim CEO.

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