[debacle]

This is more about how, for many companies, the OSS doctrine that they espouse doesn't really jive with their need for profitability.

In the long run, they need to make decisions for the company that are not in the best interest of the project, and either the project dies or is forked or abandoned.

Sun did really well by the OSS community for a very long time, but they had nothing to show for it and Oracle has since foisted a lot of their efforts on to the ASF. LibreOffice, hhvm, Mint, just to name a few, have all come about because the companies responsible for the stewardship of a project weren't doing their duty in the eyes of the community. I honestly think we're going to see a Firefox fork in the next 2-3 years.

It's just the nature of OSS and while it means that, long-term, fewer companies will invest in the space, the companies that do invest will do it for the right reasons.

[random28345]

> I honestly think we're going to see a Firefox fork in the next 2-3 years.

Who is going to fork it? The active contributors that are employed by the Mozilla Foundation? Google? Microsoft? Opera? Some currently peripherally involved third party?

And what will the goals of this fork be? To be more focused on something other than producing a standards-compliant, multi-platform, performant browser?

[dragonwriter]

> I honestly think we're going to see a Firefox fork in the next 2-3 years.

There are already semi-forks (downstream distributions that continue to pull from upstream and are mostly synced, but also maintain distinct and divergent feature sets) -- both GNU IceCat is an example (Debian Iceweasel I think is less so, because IIRC it is synced but for branding with upstream.)

[bhouston]

https://www.waterfoxproject.org/ as well -- a 64 bit version.

[kibwen]

And another, Pale Moon: http://www.palemoon.org/