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Comment by bityard | Hacker News Reader

In the most chaotic alternate reality possible: Mozilla

Interestingly if I recall correctly a lot of the original talent for Chrome/Chromium originally worked at Mozilla and were poached by Google. [1]

[1] https://www.niallkennedy.com/blog/2008/09/google-chrome.html...

This is such a valuable article from 2008. I've archived it here: https://archive.is/hVove

Having it owned by a non-profit foundation would make a huge amount of sense, especially if that foundation was then immediately funded by a variety of companies rather than just one big advertising company.

The obvious test for whether the browser is actually independent: what is the response to "let's add an ad-blocker by default".

> Having it owned by a non-profit foundation would make a huge amount of sense,...

OpenAI joined the chat...

There would be few incentives to try and pull off something like that if nobody had any faith in the product every becoming extremely profitable though.

Isn't openapi pro-profit? Or at least I thought it was.

This is wishful thinking. Non-profits that don’t turn into for-profit turn into a shitshow of incompetence instead.

Not necessarily, see The Linux Foundation Europe competently maintains Servo.

My comment could rub tech people in the wrong way (for a good reason).

I meant incompetence at the company governance level, not technical.

There's massive technical competence in non-profits.

This brilliance is just wasted by leaders who sacrifice business acumen over the mission.

You all need to learn about employer owned companies, in Brasil it's called cooperativas not sure in english, and that would fix that

In that same alternate reality: WPEngine is given control of Automattic/WordPress as a result of the lawsuits.

Firefox is sponsored primary by Google. WPEngine is not. It would be like Automattic giving control to Wordpress foundation.

My intention was to emphasize the irony, not so much the relationship between them. :)

With Mozilla becoming so hostile to their power users in recent years (or any user who just wants to customize the interface or core functionality), I'm not sure it would make much difference.

They'll do what their benefactor (Goog) wants whether they own chrome or not.

That's just a different kind of monopoly.

na... Oracle.

Broadcom.

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