@mint if you aren't willing to fund their existence you have no right to complain about how they get their funding and what their product roadmap looks like.
Most outspoken open source proponents these days are just toxic personalities who beg, scream, and demand results and nobody should listen to their opinions on anything. They want to pretend these projects are akin to a government run social program that should serve their needs.
It's like crying about the local food bank closing and how that's going to impact your community. Oh wait you never donated to the food bank before? Huh, shocking.
@lucy tech workers for the most part are not living paycheck to paycheck. They are often really bad at managing their own finances though, as evidenced by their useless expensive action figure collection and countless computers they don't need.
@feld Even ignoring their agenda for a second, it's clear the sole reason Mozilla still exists as an entity is to seep Google's antitrust money. They don't care about community lest they wouldn't have shutdown community forums in favor of invasive telemetry resulting in the browser performing more and more like Chrome with different skin. Perhaps the only party that keeps it in check is Tor team who are cooperating in order to build their browser bundle.
@feld 1. Any resident of a nation with free speech protections has a right to complain about whatever they want. 2. There are no guarantees the funds would go to an actual browser development and not some bullshit like diversity campaigns, 10px margin increases in interface or an useless service that's due to shutdown in a couple months.
@mint so then I guess it's time for people to SFTU and write the code themselves and donate infrastructure hosting too. Because they're not gonna be happy with how things look if Mozilla completely disappears and the entire browser project falls apart.
If people want open source to not just survive but actually thrive I think it would be wise to consider making it a part of any major tech union movement. That would be a good way to extract some capital to funnel back into the core foundation of what these companies stand upon.
@feld For the most part I've wrangled it into doing what I want, yes. I wish I didn't have to, but my expectations of nice things have long withered. >how things look if Mozilla completely disappears and the entire browser project falls apart That would be an improvement. When MySQL got Oracle'd, we got MariaDB, same with Open/LibreOffice. I have no doubts a community fork of Firefox is possible to emerge when shit finally hits the fan.
@mint MariaDB is worse, and now that's dead because Monty sold it again to a venture capitalist lol
I think one of the most difficult parts of a community fork of Firefox will be the build infrastructure and hosting the binaries. Nobody's gonna want to support Firefox-sized downloads that happen millions of times per day. (200M users * ~50MB for a patch)
@jonah@mint you'd think Mozilla would have already explored various methods to shrink their infrastructure footprint as much as possible. Why aren't they doing this already?
This is all hosted on Google Cloud. Is Mozilla paying standard rates for their infra at Google? Doubt it. Google's probably funding this too, which is why Mozilla hasn't cared to change it. They don't need to care. (yet, but maybe soon)
@haui idk, I have doubts. What happened to the torrent revolution we were promised? I remember when it seemed like everything was supposed to move that direction and almost nothing did.
My suspicion is that it became apparent that it fails too often in restricted networks and buggy NATs so it's not really worth doing at scale
@mischievoustomato@feld@mint Earlier today on my TL, I saw someone post a fundraising email they just got from Mozilla, and it was to raise money for more AI integration... which no one wants.
As usual people make this claim with only anecdotal evidence. Some of us understand and even like the technology for what it can do. I have no issues with them doing this as long as they're not spending money on any licensing to ship access to an LLM for free. But let me connect it to my own API or let me use another service I already have access to? Hell yeah just put it in, it doesn't cost anyone anything
@mischievoustomato@feld@mint > There are no guarantees the funds would go to an actual browser development and not some bullshit like diversity campaigns
This.
I have given to free software projects before. But, Mozilla has always been shitting their money into things I don't want.
When people aren't using their funding correctly, all you can do is withhold.
People like the Firefox, they like that it is different than Chrome, they aren't donating because Mozilla seems determined to ruin it, and they are complaining because that is bad for them.