[rocmcd]

Mozilla really is in a bad spot if advertising, AI, and fundraising are the only innovative ideas their leadership could come up with. I will begrudgingly still use Firefox as my daily driver, but the mismanagement being shown is really appalling and I worry about the future of a free and open Internet.

Suffice to say that we all deserve better.

[exceptione]

The internet and browsers are a public good, no society functions without. As the US has transitioned into a kleptocracy, it would be even more logical for the EU to financially support teams developing important open source projects. Same thing for Linux and Libre Office perhaps.

[bad_user]

The idea of EU funding Mozilla is naive, and if this is the best people can come up with, I'm not blaming Mozilla going for ads.

For one, Mozilla is still a US entity. As an EU citizen, I'd rather have my taxes go towards funding EU entities, especially in this climate. And I'd rather have that EU entity fork Chromium, starting to contribute to its development, as that would be a wiser bet.

And also, governments funding projects such as Firefox is a bad idea because the citizens of those governments come first. As one example, many online BBC shows are geo-blocked in my country. The EU is meant to serve its citizens, not the world, and you don't want the open Internet to depend on whom people vote for in the following election cycle.

The only way to fund a project that has global reach is via a sustainable business model, not taxes.

[exceptione]

I do not mean to sponsor an external entity.

You have to analyze a project, and that might mean you need to fork it. It all depends on how much you need to steer and help. If a community is happy to welcome some formal stewardship, then that might work too. There is a company that contributes a lot to Libre Office. The same with Blender, where there can be cooperative development.

A hard fork is always possible, and nothing bad if the vision and needs differ from teams. Some might fork the EU stuff in turn. The free software model is designed to support that.

[JimDabell]

Mozilla got billions from Google and squandered it. If the EU were to fund a browser, I would prefer it to be Ladybird rather than throwing even more money into Mozilla’s bottomless pit.

[pjmlp]

Agreed, even if I am quite vocal about the state of Linux Desktop, as ex-believer, european distributions of FOSS OSes are the only viable way from US tech stacks.

Yes, I am quite aware of the contributions they also make to those platforms, but at lease those can be forked from, that ain't happening with what Google/Apple/Microsoft are selling as mainstream OSes.