[xaerise]

It was owned by a UK company called Firefox. They actually linked to both Mozilla and Get Firefox for many years as a landing page.

When the company shut down, the owner owned it and redirected it to getfirefox.com instead of making a profit from it.

[Traubenfuchs]

That‘s… commendable… or foolish?

I would have rented or sold it to the highest bidder.

[bryanlarsen]

Whoever you sold it to would have to have a valid Firefox trademark in a different field like the original owner did, or Firefox would be to snag it via a trademark lawsuit.

Or you could sell it to a malware site, who would lose it fairly quickly but might be able to make some cash in the meantime. I can't imagine they'd earn much though. The old firefox.com didn't have Google juice until after the transition.

The only value in the firefox.com domain is the ability to shake down Mozilla for a sum less than the cost of filing a trademark lawsuit. Which is significant, but not extremely so.

[mtmail]

https://nissan.com/ even after his death didn't sell out to the car manufacturer (https://www.nissan-global.com/).

[fencepost]

Now just has a memorial page for him. Not sure if it'd qualify as an Internet version of a "spite house" but it doesn't seem that far off.

[cAtte_]

would be pretty difficult to sell out while dead

[rafark]

But Firefox is a for profit company worth millions? Why would you just donate it like that to a corporation? For the longest time I thought Mozilla was a non profit org but it doesn’t seem to be the case and they have millions in the bank? I would sell it for a fair price for both parties.

[jjmarr]

Mozilla Corporation is a for-profit entity wholly owned by the Mozilla Foundation. That's why they can keep lots of cash on hand and reinvest it into the business.

[ToucanLoucan]

It's my experience that people who look for a way to profit off of every situation they encounter are usually both wealthier than me and also generally quite miserable, lonely folks. Also ironically, they usually are only as wealthy as they are due to generosity given to them earlier in life they would never give to others.

Not said with judgement, just observing.

[jacobgkau]

> Not said with judgement, just observing.

Seems more like speculating than observing. Unless you can elaborate on what proof you have that each of the individuals you've "observed" (which doesn't include GP) were lonely and had handouts.

[ajkjk]

In this day and age anyone going against profit motive is commendable. the default is "fuck people over but not care because you're abstracted away from them". It's the tragedy of our times. Big respect for anyone who's willing to fight it.

[imjonse]

many times it is rationalized as "fuck people over because even if I don't, someone else will, so I might as well be the one to profit". An attitude that scales well from individuals to big corporations.

[nicce]

I think you don’t find many billionaires with opposite ideology.

[ajkjk]

That's what makes not doing it moral

[yogorenapan]

And what, have it serve as malware/phishing? Thankfully most people still seem to have morals and not fallen prey to pure capitalism

[Traubenfuchs]

You are thinking all wrong, I wouldn't want to connect some hardcore wirefraud to myself.

I would have found someone on upwork to write me a firefox fork that contains a crypto miner.

The website would have some small print checkbox, making end users actively consent to mining crypto as payment for using the browser for free.

[Daviey]

Pretty good place to download Chrome or IE, depending who bought it.

[nicce]

Looking for Firefox? Sorry, it has been officially discontinued. Here is something better.

[firefax]

>I would have rented or sold it to the highest bidder.

Do you also steal from the library? Mozilla isn't some big bad corporation.

Personally, I'd be a little wary of pissing off the hackers who are fans of that browser using my meatspace name, but hey, you do you. Maybe when you're done you can stroll on down to the local motorcycle bar and kick over some Harleys and see how far that takes you in life.

[Gud]

Relax dude, it’s just a domain name

[Traubenfuchs]

The Firefox gang's about to bust my kneecaps.

[firefax]

Dear lord, I certainly wouldn't want to be some kind of shadowy open source egregore making people unsafe offline... I don't think there's some kind of squad of Stallman level open source types who would Batman you away. That's a ridiculous idea and I'm sorry I made you think that!

The only time anything close to busting kneecaps came during an internshipc I had at Firefox in the bay area years ago after a nearby homeless man declaring that he "loved firefox because firefox "doesn't murder the homelss". (You learn all sorts of things when you speak to the users!)

Me being me, I joking asked "Does Chrome murder the homeless?" (The Chrome team had recently moved into the same office building and begun poaching people while throwing pity parties on Twitter if no one showed up at their office because they made a stupid cake.)

Anyways, long story short there were some very fucked up Chrometerns that summer, and apparently there was a literal rumble when one of them instinctively ran towards Sutter Gutter when someone tried to beat them up for no reason. So it's just after last call, bunch of firefox shirts stumble out and... well I'm pretty sure we're past the statue of limitations, but a chrometern got his ass kicked, badly, and transferred down to Mountain View because they were very suddenly aware that homeless people are... people. They talk. And when you try to beat one of them up and get run off... now you're suddenly aware there's quite a lot of homelessness in San Francisco and maybe you were walking home safely because up until that point, you hadn't been an asshole to people.

Anyways, no, there is no Firefox gang, just a collection of people who happen to use a particular web browser. (And no, I don't work for Firefox)