Imagine how much open source software could be developed for $500 million/year. What the fuck has firefox done?
Try to get MORE money so that they can pay their CEO.
They've paid their CEO.
500 million would pay for almost 5000 full time developers.
Ceo makes how much?
Yeah, but their job is like reeeally hard!! They deserve it. /s
What difference would it make if CEO got a minimum wage if there is no stable income stream for the company regardless?
Because having a CEO earning 100x of an average employee disincentivizes looking for stable, consumer-friendly income streams.
Why would the leadership want that, the only way they can continue paying themselves that much money is by sucking big tech's tit.
By the above link, it looks like only 69x
Slightly more than 1% of their annual revenue.
Oh look we're back to the "open source software can't survive on its own without gobs of money and million-dollar CEOs wah wah wah" again.
Fiy, the Mozilla Foundation is one of the highest rates charities on Charity Navigator.
They don't always make the best choices as far as product direction, but as a charity, they are quite respectable.
You say that as if we're lying. Mozilla's entire revenue is from the search deal. If it goes away, you can kiss the entire company goodbye. Not saying that OSS is inherently unable to survive or anything like that.
Then die. Open source software wasn't created to generate revenue.
Hopefully Mozilla won't die until Ladybird or Servo is ready 😅
I don't think the EU will let it die. Maybe Mozilla dies and Firefox gets reborn as a EU (ZENDIS?) project.
Well goodbye mozilla it wasn't great knowing you. Hopefully you are able to fuck over the devs and golden parachute your c-suite bastards one last time.
Maybe, but what are the odds of a fork taking off? It was started under the codename "Phoenix" and went by "Firebird" for some time before becoming "Firefox".
Maybe it's time for a fork to rise from the ashes and take off...
The fork that takes off will be the one where the Firefox devs move to. Which isn't predictable. We could make our own foundation, without the blackjack and hookers (cause based on how mozilla was doing things it sure seems like all they did), and make it more as a means for the devs to get paid for their work.
Why can't they just use the Wikipedia model? That should bring in enough to cover development and operating costs.
Because a browser is several orders of magnitudee more complex than a website.
Wikimedia is even using php still. Firefox created Rust I believe, in order to advance.
Rust was originally created by a Mozilla dev as a hobby project. Also, the Mozilla rust team was fired in 2020 during a "restructuring".
Ah weird.
Maybe, just as a crazy thought here, jwz was right. Mozilla and Firefox exist for 2 purposes - to build the standard reference browser, free of corporate crud (like, say, Google WebExtensions); and to be an absolute attack dog against ridiculous corporate desires.
Except it isn't. And we know it isn't because the amount you spend on Firefox vs the rest of Mozilla is peanuts
Not even remotely true, this is a myth. Most of what they spend is on development, operations, and legal. They publish their 990 online which gives the breakdown. IIRC the foundation gets like 2%.
Its interesting they don't have all the services Proton does. I'd pay them for a email and VPN combo.
right? thats a golden opportunity right there. they are sure taking their sweet time with their email service.
How much active development does a browser engine need? If Mozilla died would I quickly be finding a larger chunk of websites that aren't supported? Because as it sits, Firefox feels like one of the most corporate pieces of open source software I use daily, and I need to know just how tragic it would be if Mozilla died.
In the old days, a few motivated nerds could write a browser. Now all you can realistically do is take a browser engine and build some user interface around it. That what most "alternative browsers" do - tweaking or repackaging.
These days, a browser is like it's own operating system with sandboxing, various Interfaces to periphery devices, hardware acceleration for GPU and all the bells and whistles taken for granted now.
I'd say that imagining it to be on a scale similar to working on the Linux Kernel is more right than wrong.
So we definitely very much want Firefox to survive, or it will be much worse than the Linux/Mac/Windows trilemma. Microsoft Edge is chromium under the hood too. Any many desktop "apps".
If Mozilla died would I quickly be finding a larger chunk of websites that aren’t supported?
Likely yes, as Google will keep enshittifying the web unless stopped by antitrust or whatever. Which isn't looking so likely.
A ton. Mozilla is already behind on all kinds of miscellaneous less used standards implementations compared to Chrome AFAIK. On top of that there are security fixes needed monthly and realistically you need to be able to push emergency patches within 48 hours or less (really 1/4 or 1/2 that) or people are going to flee because they got cryptolockered because of you.
How quickly would sites be unsupported? Hard to say. Most likely large chunks of the internet would start blocking Mozilla user agents as an out of date security threat for their userbase before it actually ran into actual implementation problems. The problem would be that, websites and services no longer even bothering to try to support Mozilla and making changes that break things, and of course security holes and exploits which would likely eventually lead to no-click complete computer compromises and other very bad things. Once it falls far enough behind on standards a lot of sites will block it for that reason because they don't want bug reports or to spend money chasing down an issue potentially caused by an out of date piece of software.
Google or whoever owns Chrome would keep pushing new web standards at a fast pace to kill and bury any attempts to keep Firefox running. At that point there's nothing really stopping them closed sourcing large parts of Chrome to kill privacy forks and lock down control of the web which most big websites would be fine with as Google's interest is in getting through ads and preventing the end user from control over their own computer in favor of the interests of the website owner.
It would be apocalyptic potentially for what remains of the open web and user freedom.
Send another Luigi Mangione
Their pants are being the sun again
All about open source! Feel free to ask questions, and share news, and interesting stuff!
Community icon from opensource.org, but we are not affiliated with them.