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Comment by renewiltord | Hacker News Reader

Everyone starts out pure but then the lucre calls.

> Waterfox’s approach of allowing text ads on the default search partner page is our own decision for sustainability

"Sustainability" indeed.

You either die an open source project, or live long enough to see yourself become ad-driven in the name of sustainability.

Firefox has already done so to google, and when a fork is big enough, they certainly will hear the siren's call.

You’re right 100% The guy literally sold his browser to an online advertising company and then bought it back. Why do you think startpage is the default? Look up the online advertising company that owns it and then look up who he sold the browser to before taking it back.

Did you read the same article as me? The word is singularly used in the context of how do you earn money as a project, i.e. sustain the effort. It's a bit of a leap to imply this is impure unless they made some contract stating the opposite or are doing something dark.

I mean first thing I do in any browser is change the search engine so it's not like it affects me in any way. I don't expect opensource projects to never make deals that give them some money, I just want them to be fully transparent when they do. Waterfox is transparent and clearly states who and how they sell their user data to.

You can however of course swap out the default Search Engine with Google or whatever privacy focused replacement (e.g. DuckDuckGo, Kagi, etc).

Have you ever sent a donation to Alex?

Why would I donate to someone who is willing to sell my attention?

Did you do it before they did so?

Looks like I judged them well in not doing so. I would have been such a sucker. After all, donating to corporations is for bootlickers.

https://www.waterfox.com/blog/waterfox-has-joined-system1/

So they’re just shilling their own search product on their own browser. No different from Google and Chrome. Except with some corporate bootlicking from running dog lackeys.

He literally sold it to an online advertising company lol.

EDIT: haha, the best defence of this guy you guys can muster is "If you don't pay me, I'll sell your data to online advertising companies" and that this is some kind of good thing.

Maybe if you donated some money he wouldn't have had to.

I'm impressed by how thoroughly you ignored the question of whether your own inaction was partly responsible for the outcome that occurred later, and which you dislike.

It has persuaded me that your own inaction was totally unrelated to this outcome.

Right. So you don't ever donate to anything, right? Just in case. The future. You know?

It's somewhat funny that this guy asks for 850$/hour for consulting (in his hn profile description), never donates to anything, and writes multiple comments complaining like this.

Donated to Bram Moolenaar or rather to the things he asked me to donate to instead. Didn’t sell vim to an ad company and then send his friends here to HN to act all holier than thou about selling to an ad company. At least Firefox didn’t get sold to The Trade Desk. Vim, brought to you by Doubleclick. Yeah never had that happen.

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