oh mozilla, why don't you just focus on Firefox. That is all we want.
I want them to go cap-in-hand to other countries and say "if you don't fund us then you are letting the US and surveillance capitalism get between your citizens and their government" and "do you really know what Chrome is doing with your data?"
I don't want to pretend they are simply part of a browser marketplace, but rather have them realize they are part of a civil rights effort, with powerful non-market forces they can ally with.
And I want those governments to commit to progressive enhancement guidelines like https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/technology/using-progressi... so new alternatives like Ladybird can start, and further require their agencies to test on a Firefox branch with no AI, no location tracking, full ad-blocking, etc. because while the market is free to ignore certain non-profitable users, a government should not be allowed to ignore some of its citizens.
I don't see a contradiction there.
Investing on AI is not going to make them less financially reliant on Google.
Microsoft stopped building their own browser engine because it didn't suit their business needs and they could still get a controlling share with significantly less effort by recycling webkit/blink for the umpteenth time. That makes total sense for them. Mozilla has, in the past, guided and pushed back on corporate interests.
Today, a large portion of the web now stands, built from the bones of the original khtml project, which was unceremoniously made by a handful of volunteers on the KDE project. Let's not pretend a rendering engine it's an entirely _impossible_ task. It is a LOT of work, and I laud the effortor of the few tireless individuals that make it their work, but in the end it's another piece of software, not unlike an OS. The history goes:
KHTML -> WebKit -> Blink
Meanwhile:
Mosaic -> Netscape -> Gecko
Maybe we find maintaining the second lineage is too great a burden and the web just becomes a defacto standard, guided entirely by 3 corporations. It's not what we want, but I guess at this point it's probably what we deserve.
It looks like they might want to get into hosting/selling services to users on this.
From the FAQ:
> Is there going to be a hosted version if I don't want to deploy it myself? > Yes, we are planning to launch Thunderbolt for regular users but we do not have a release date yet.
The world may need Firefox but it's funny how people complain about Mozilla's dependence on Google while also complaining about every attempt to become more financially independent from Google.
The current state of Mozilla is pretty odd since they rebranded to make it more apparent they're a non-profit, while also attempting to become more profitable pushing out new products and services.
For now, they mainly rely on Google for that money. Google pays them to avoid antitrust cases, to show the courts that they are not a monopoly and that "alternatives" exist. For example, the DOJ once proposed that Google be forced to sell off Chrome.
However, if another entity has control over your budget, they also have control over your product. If Firefox becomes "too good" to be a true competitor in the consumer space, the funding might be reduced or even cut off.
Creating a new source of revenue allows Mozilla to improve Firefox even beyond the point Google feels "comfortable" with.
2. 1 billion dollars is a lot of money. Even the interest off it is huge.
3. 10 years is a very long time in tech.
4. I would greatly prefer the money Mozilla earned due to Firefox being a thing was put into developing Firefox, yes. The current Mozilla organization seems to be a mechanism for providing third homes for the executives, starting projects nobody wanted them to start, sullying the Firefox brand with them, and then abandoning them. There's a VC cancer infesting the supposed "free software community" called Mozilla.
Wait, what? I thought your whole premise from one comment ago was that they "stop doing everything" and exclusively slow burn away their endowment. They're dead by 2029 if they do that.
If they don't do that, then you're just talking about how they currently operate.
Mozilla should stop doing all these side quests -- look at their track record! -- and they should get rid of the fat executive layer. They should transparently report what they're using their money, instead of saying they burn hundreds of millions of dollars in "software development" while firing the Servo developers.
I don't think actual competition benefits Google in a commercial sense. If we considered the situation purely rationally, Google's most logical decision would be to use their budget as leverage, threatening off the books to prevent any strategy that might make Firefox "viable again", under the assumption that Google focused primarily on market share, while Mozilla focused purely on survival.
However, if Firefox drops to ~0% usage, it will definitely stop, as that ruins Google's monopoly defense, which is the motivation for it! Firefox usage is supposedly already as low as 2.33%.
It's great if you can get your endowment so big you never have to worry about revenue but outside of, say, elite universities or middle eastern sovereign wealth funds that rarely happens.