Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by glenstein 453 days ago
Do I understand correctly that you believe Mozilla doesn't currently have the resources necessary to do that from their $500MM in annual revenue? It sounds like you are talking about an ombudsman or something, which highlights my point here, which is that these are philosophical criticisms disguised as commentary on raising revenue.

Also the mission you are describing sounds like something that you might expect from a Chromium browser that has to regularly revert Google-driven changes. At Mozilla, they already own the browser and they could account for this in their ground-level philosophy.
1 comments
devit 451 days ago
They could, but they don't want to do that because they get paid by Google to not do it or because those actions get them money in some other way (from advertisers or whatever), or because they think only power users like some features.
link
glenstein 451 days ago
Firefox publishes their 990 form which discloses all their sources of revenue and Google does not pay Firefox for any of the things you described. Also, it feels kind of nonsensical to suggest that it would have a development strategy of building out their ad tech and simultaneously reverting it, and I don't see how explanations about them wanting or not wanting to do it make that proposed approach for any more sense.
link
devit 451 days ago
They pay them for making Google the default search engine, and it is hypothesized that the payment may also influence them to not provide ad-blocking by default and possibly other things that are not beneficial for Google's business.
link
glenstein 451 days ago
>and it is hypothesized

By whom and on what basis? Those are non-optional questions that should have strong answers as preconditions to you posting about it, if the objective is to offer something more than simple bullshitting (in the Harvey Frankfurt sense of indifference to truth).

This also doesn't answer like 90% of my concerns from my previous comments. Who has ever intentionally had a software development approach of having one team develop features and another person revert those features, working in tandem? And why would they need donations that are 0.20% of what they already get in revenue to finance it? I feel like you're just improv riffing here.

link
devit 450 days ago
The donations would go directly to the individual doing this with no relationship with Mozilla (e.g. with Patreon or similar), not to Mozilla itself.
link