[remeq]

I don't agree with this point of view. I think that world is slowly evolving towards an age where this point of view is outdated.

There are things for which it makes sense to try and find a different model then traditional profit driven. A web browser is one of those things. It should be a neutral window into a neutral network.

Why doesn't Mozilla try to master donation marketing the way Wikipedia does? I am sure Firefox would have an active and regular donors would the large community of enthusiasts knew that otherwise it would be heading either towards EOL or towards making it commercial

[betterunix2]

Wikipedia does not require anything like the technical staff that Mozilla requires, and even Wikipedia has struggled to get by with only donations. Wikipedia does not run on end-user devices and does not have to deal with all the things that entails. A critical vulnerability in Wikipedia is a problem for Wikipedia; a critical vulnerability in Firefox is a problem for everyone who uses Firefox, and it needs to be fixed by someone who is not going to suddenly be swamped at their day job. Wikipedia can ignore new web standards that are not useful for Wikipedia itself; Firefox has to support most web standards to remain useful as a web browser.

The best case for a community-driven Firefox would be for big companies to provide support, either in the form of money or in the form of labor. That is more or less the model that has propelled the Linux kernel. Unlike the Linux kernel, there are few if any companies out there who can point to Firefox as a strategically important project that they are prepared to pay someone to work on, especially given the existence of good, actively-developed alternatives (including Chromium for those who require open source).

[rrdharan]

> even Wikipedia has struggled to get by with only donations

This is not true, they just write their donation pleas to make it seem true because they raise more money that way.