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by pwdisswordfish5 2003 days ago
> in 2015 Mozilla negotiated a deal with Yahoo netting them an additional $100+ million

... after spending years saying that the relationship with Google regarding search royalties was a serendipitous one that involved getting paid for a decision that was the right thing for users whether money was changing hands or not, and that the default search engine spot wasn't actually for sell.

That lie is not unlike their carefully crafted PR statements that were intended to mislead people about the financial arrangement regarding the Pocket partnership. Those efforts turned out to be so successful that they hoodwinked many of Mozilla Corporation's own employees—who interpreted the statements to mean that there was no financial incentive, just as it was intended to be interpreted by the general public. Then those employees began showing up on places like HN and started saying explicitly that there was no money changing hands, even though that's not what the PR statements ever said and reality actually differed.
1 comments
boomboomsubban 2003 days ago
>after spending years saying that the relationship with Google regarding search royalties was a serendipitous one that involved getting paid for a decision that was the right thing for users whether money was changing hands or not, and that the default search engine spot wasn't actually for sell.

What? The default search engine is unambiguously for sale, that's what Google (and other companies depending on your country) are buying. And it was the right decision to sell it to the highest bidder to fund development, when Yahoo bid more than Google they sold it to Yahoo.

I genuinely have no idea what point you are trying to make.

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pwdisswordfish5 2003 days ago
> I genuinely have no idea what point you are trying to make.

The point, as already stated, is that people who were official mouthpieces for Mozilla said for years that the default search engine simply wasn't up for sale to just whomever would pay for it. That it pointed to Google because Google's search engine was the best search engine for Firefox's users. Just like Google was the default search engine before Mozilla ever signed a deal. Just like Wikipedia was added to the searchbar without anyone paying to make it happen. That any royalties were icing on the cake. (See "serendipitous" in the previous comment). What's hard to understand about this or the earlier comment?

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boomboomsubban 2003 days ago
>is that people who were official mouthpieces for Mozilla said for years that the default search engine simply wasn't up for sale to just whomever would pay for it.

This is untrue. They openly stated they sold it to Google in 2008, and in 2011 a bidding war between Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo saw the price triple from 100 million to 300 million.[1]

Maybe at some point following a contract they had a generic "Google was the best choice" PR statement, but they've never hid that it was up for sale to whoever wanted it or that it made up most of their budget.

And even if they did say the royalties were icing on the cake, what would be wrong with then changing their policy to generate as much money for development as possible?

http://allthingsd.com/20111222/google-will-pay-mozilla-almos...

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