[mozempthrowaway]

Without that deal, there wouldn’t be a Firefox. If/when it’s gone, there’s no one capable/willing to fund Mozilla to that amount.

Really there’s only 1 other company who can throw that level of money at us and it’s Microsoft. Without Google bidding up the price, doubtful they would pay as much for Bing to be the default search and it’s not like Firefox users would welcome that change.

Free software doesn’t work for long without some sort of corporate sponsorship at some point, and it’s not in anyone’s interest to fund it at this point. (And don’t say “the EU should” most Europeans are not clamoring for their governments to spend money on an American browser company with web compatibility issues that no one tests against)

[jlarocco]

The problem with Mozzilla is that they don’t just fund development, they have control of it and they receive almost all funding from a direct competitor with a horrible privacy record.

I trust FSF, Debian, Linux Foundation, etc. not to violate my privacy. Clearly the same cannot be said for Mozilla.

[Rattay]

'clamoring' No, they're most certainly not.

And I'm more than willing to believe the legal difficulties of the foundation would be a nightmare, but would an EU sponsored fork of some kind be such a terrible idea? A move of headquarters to a suitable city and so on.

Remove the tracking, maybe even a few mandates to offer it up in certain settings that receive EU funding already.

An interesting idea even if sadly unlikely.

[WD-42]

When you say “fund us” do you mean Mozilla or Firefox development? Because it seems like these haven’t been equivalent for a while now.

[surgical_fire]

> Without that deal, there wouldn’t be a Firefox. If/when it’s gone, there’s no one capable/willing to fund Mozilla to that amount.

There's some irony when I read that while my laptop is running Linux Mint, which in my perception is much superior in many ways to the competition.

I agree that Free software needs sponsorship, especially when it is such a fundamental part of interacting with a computer (which a web browser certainly is).

I am not certain that this sponsorship coming from a company that wants to undermine it is a good thing.

[Volundr]

> There's some irony when I read that while my laptop is running Linux Mint, which in my perception is much superior in many ways to the competition.

I think building a browser is quite a bit more complicated than building a Linux distro. More akin to building an OS to compete with the big 3.

[godzillabrennus]

There is a good book on how non profits are terribly handicapped by the current system: https://www.amazon.com/Uncharitable-Restraints-Nonprofits-Un...

[dylan604]

> Really there’s only 1 other company who can throw that level of money at us and it’s Microsoft.

Doesn't Apple have that kind of money in a big vault that Tim Apple gets to do his Scrooge McDuck impersonation into?