At this point I'm almost convinced the last 5 users defending Firefox and Mozilla just refuse to acknowledge reality. I don't have the mental gymnastics required to make excuses for a company that routinely begs for money, spends it on throwaway studies or features nobody asks for and then removes "we will never sell your data" from their privacy policy citing different interpretations of "sell" in different jurisdictions. At some point just admit they are a crappy company that has nothing to do with past Mozilla.
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@phnt too many people for too long were convinced that open source means "Free as in Socialism" and refused accept they need to pay for the software or even do the math for how much money it requires to run a project like Firefox/Thunderbird.
Now we all suffer the consequences of their quest to have enough money to pay their developers and their executives. The Google search deal was probably the beginning of the end for them and we just didn't realize it.
It started in 2004 and now the company is so mired in real and technical debt there's no way to dig them out. They've never found a sustainable model to keep the lights on.
We should see if we can get their entire executive board to be replaced with an LLM agent though. That might help.
Now we all suffer the consequences of their quest to have enough money to pay their developers and their executives. The Google search deal was probably the beginning of the end for them and we just didn't realize it.
It started in 2004 and now the company is so mired in real and technical debt there's no way to dig them out. They've never found a sustainable model to keep the lights on.
We should see if we can get their entire executive board to be replaced with an LLM agent though. That might help.
@feld I don't think "were" is the correct tense. It's still the majority that thinks it is free as in socialiasm. A project asks for donations to cover hosting or afford more time spent on development, and what do the individual users do? Ignore it, shun the project or create excuses to not donate anything (including their time). See these all other corporations using it, they don't donate either, why should I as a single user.
Society has moved on from the mentality that paying for quality software supports the developer, to everything must be free, because everything else is free. Blissfully ignoring that free outside of oss means ads and selling their data. The company can "afford" "selling" something for free, a small yet heavily used project cannot.
As for Mozilla going down the toilet, Google search deal was the start, firing of Brendan Eich and replacing him with a CEO that kept increasing her salary was the catalyst and the change from Photon design to Proton was the point of no return for me.
Society has moved on from the mentality that paying for quality software supports the developer, to everything must be free, because everything else is free. Blissfully ignoring that free outside of oss means ads and selling their data. The company can "afford" "selling" something for free, a small yet heavily used project cannot.
As for Mozilla going down the toilet, Google search deal was the start, firing of Brendan Eich and replacing him with a CEO that kept increasing her salary was the catalyst and the change from Photon design to Proton was the point of no return for me.
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