Mozilla grants Ente- a private Google Photos alternative- $100k | Hacker News Reader

Mozilla grants Ente- a private Google Photos alternative- $100k

ente.io

Wish we can donate to the development of Firefox and not projects like this.

And yes I did but stopped last year when it became clear they are spending money on projects I don't care about https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/what-we-fund/

Why? Competition and alternatives are good for everyone.

they aren't spending their money on competing

Firefox existing, is competition against a world of Chromium.

How is Mozilla funding a private Google Photos alternative “competition against a world of Chromium”?

Maybe you didn’t follow the thread close enough — the complaint isn’t that funding Firefox is counterproductive, but that shoveling dollars to a non-Firefox product does nothing to help Firefox compete against Chrome/Chromium, which is kinda hard to argue against, no?

Focus. People donate for the browser but the funds are used for other purposes meaning the browser doesn’t get the attention it should. If you think it’s not a distraction to even distribute funds it is because you have to at least spend time and energy picking between options

> People donate for the browser

Then they're doing it wrong, because exactly zero donations to the Mozilla Foundation go to Firefox, that's a Mozilla Corporation project. To support the browser, purchase their side services instead.

Got a source for that?

Take it from this engineer employed at the Foundation for ten years.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39346814

The Foundation website also states it, but they try to weasel word their way around it: Firefox is not listed as one of their programs but as being maintained by the Corporation, which shares its revenue back to the Foundation (not the other way around).

> Then they're doing it wrong

Which was GP's point, people (rightfully imo) assume that donating to Mozilla helps the browser.

Mozilla is being misleading and is the one who should be criticized, not the person who's donating to them and didn't read the fineprints regarding where the money is going.

I don't know how it relates to anything else happening in the world but it seems like a good idea. People use Google photos, people look for alternatives.

The true alternative to Photos is Immich: https://github.com/immich-app/immich. Anything that someone else hosts is not in any way "private".

You can self host ente if you want I'm pretty sure

https://help.ente.io/self-hosting/

You can, and you can use the Ente-published mobile apps with your self-hosted instance. The setup process is a bit rough, but it absolutely works.

They also have quite the disclaimer :/

- The project is under very active development.

- Expect bugs and breaking changes.

- Do not use the app as the only way to store your photos and videos.

- Always follow 3-2-1 backup plan for your precious photos and videos!

edit: Though those last two are applicable to any data hosting solution.

I've been using Immich for over a year. "Maintenance" boils down to weekly docker compose pull and a restart. There's semantic search, deduplication, mapping, face recognition etc etc. I do not miss Google Photos at all, and can recommend Immich without any reservations to anyone with even basic understanding of docker compose.

I self-host Immich and its definitely my favorite web photo system. One thing with Ente that aligns more with Mozilla's approach to data however is end-to-end encryption, which Ente has, but Immich doesn't. So I can see why Mozilla funded this option instead.

I personally wish that self-hosting was a more reliable and simplified process for the average person such that simpler and more powerful software like Immich was the best choice for all.

Self hosted Immich doesn't need end-to-end encryption, and the lack of it enables a number of very useful server-side features. If your end-to-end encryption has not undergone a security audit, it's as good as if there was no encryption at all.

Ente's use of cryptography[1] has been externally audited[2].

[1]: https://ente.io/architecture

[2]: https://ente.io/blog/cryptography-audit

Yes, that was kind of my point. Self-hosted negates the need, but most can't self host.... so that leaves end-to-end encryption the best intermediate step.

Nice sentiment but 100k isnt much.

I wonder how many people actually use Ente. Looks very niche and non-mainstream to me.

Is there any published guide to self host? There's no mention of it anywhere except an offhanded comment in the Readme.

https://help.ente.io/self-hosting

Isn't Mozilla cash strapped?

It's only $100k.

Send me yours and I'll find a way to dispose of it.

+1 for anything that helps the creators of Ente Auth succeed!

> Send me yours and I'll find a way to dispose of it.

I'd send you 100k if I had an income of $593M. If we scale to my actual income, however, it's probably a few pennies. Do you still want it?

100k here, 100k there and pretty soon you are talking about real money.

I don't think they would have raised CEO pay last year if things were really bad financially. Right?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38795308

https://stateof.mozilla.org

The documents you linked to show that 2022 they have a billion and something in net assets 513 million in cash (up from 378 in 2021). Cash flow from operating activities was 147 million in 2022 and 197 million in 2021.

So according to the documents you linked, Mozilla is doing extremely well financially.

Also according to your documents, they spend the vast majority of their money on developing Firefox.

If they continue to grow alternative revenue streams as they have in the last couple of years, they will be in a position to develop Firefox without Google funding in the intermediate future.

I am pretty happy with self-hosted https://photoprism.app

Will they be incentivized to develop features that people don't want now?

From a quick look, only the client is open source. The server software is still privative. Why did Mozilla fund this? There is no shortage of libre software of self-hosted image servers in need of funding.

Ente is fully open source[1][2].

[1]: https://github.com/ente-io/ente

[2]: https://ente.io/blog/open-sourcing-our-server

I stand corrected.

ENTE failed on iOS with my initial password verification

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