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Comment by devmor | Hacker News Reader

I don’t understand why Mozilla keeps doing these odd projects. They maintain the only real alternative browser stack to Chrome and rather than keep it up to date and triage bugs, so many resources keep flowing into random AI hype crapware that no one asked for.

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They need new revenue sources. Their current Google deal was declared illegal by an antitrust ruling.

If that is truly the impetus behind this ridiculous crap, I hope they purge whoever is behind these ideas quickly before they waste any more money.

Honestly, good luck with that. Mozilla spent past 15 years or so creating and killing new projects over and over. Right now I'd be hard-pressed to try anything they create because they would inevitably shut it down next year.

This may be a silly question, but why does an open source project need revenue? Or employees? Couldn't Mozilla's few core projects run on volunteers?

Because there aren't enough volunteers willing to put enough time in.

You may be right, but I'm not sure we actually have strong evidence for that. Mozilla has run like a bigtech firm for so long that it's not really clear whether the open-source portion thereof could survive without.

$500 million in annual revenue and $6 million CEO compensation packages are well in excess of what other similar-scope projects get by on. Mozilla accounts for somewhere between 30-50% of all funding in open-source - if you sum up the Linux foundation, the Wikimedia foundation, the Apache foundation, KDE e.V, the Gnome foundation... it's still less than Mozilla

Well they need a new strategy for finding that. Continually creating half-baked side projects then dropping them after a few years clearly, and unsurprisingly, isn't working.

Which alternative strategy do you propose?

They're grasping for relevance

They already have relevance, they maintain the only browser stack that is not controlled by a data harvesting firm.

Not controlled directly by a data harvesting firm, Google still is their biggest funders so, you know… po-tay-to, po-tah-to.

That’s even before we factor in their LLM usage. LLMs are data harvesters by nature.

Yes everyone knows that, yet they remain as irrelevant as ever.

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