@aral I don’t understand why the need for hyper growth among VC-backed ventures. Nobody seems to be in it for the long run. They just want to make fast money and exit. The business does not really matter - it’s just a means to feed the greed.
Mozilla is a for-profit Silicon Valley tech company that exists through the half a billion dollars or so it gets every year by enabling surveillance capitalists like Google to track people in their browser. This is hardly surprising to anyone who’s been paying attention in the past decade.
@AlejandroP @aral @miklo tbf there's very limited choice; brave is rebranded chrome from a crypto grifter company led by a right-wing homophobic gobshite, vivaldi is not open source, chrome is chrome, and opera is a spam engine.
@mawhrin @AlejandroP @aral @miklo there is Gnome Web (Epiphany) that in the next month should receive an update with extensions and I think it'll be the best choice together with LibreWolf
@Volpit @AlejandroP @aral @miklo yes, but gnome is relatively starved of development resources, and the web browser isn't – and can't be – their priority.
@Volpit I’ll definitely give GNOME Web another try once extensions are added (I simply cannot use a browser without my password manager extension) but I do this every time there is a new release and usually my patience only lasts a handful of minutes. Fingers crossed that will change as we do need alternatives. (And we must fund alternatives from the commons.)
@nathandh If you’re locked into Apple’s platforms already, not a huge amount. That said, it is proprietary so you have to trust Apple, Inc., and whether you can or not might change at any time and vary depending on your geographic location (Apple only believes privacy is a human right for folks living in the West, for example. Not, say, in China.)
@aral @miklo Not quite. The for-profit Mozilla Corporation is a fully owned subsidiary of the non-profit Mozilla Foundation. The corporation does exist to maximise profit for its shareholders, but its only shareholder is a non-profit foundation working for the public good.
It also only has around 1,000 employees (and 10,000+ volunteers), which hardly qualifies as "big tech" today.
It is true most of its revenue comes from Google, but also does a lot to prevent tracking so 🤷♂️
@Ben Francis @Aral Balkan @Thomas Fuchs 🕹️🔭😽 Let's sum it up: "The Mozilla corporation does exist to maximise profit for (... here the long chain of "transformations".....) for the public good"
The public good doesn't need any "maximal profit" to exist, but maximising profit almost always means that some human good is disregarded or exploited on this occasion.
And this whole process of profit-squeezing from startups pumped by VCs is just a typical tool for putting profit before values.
@benfrancis The for-profit Greenzilla Corporation is a fully owned subsidiary of the non-profit Greenzilla Foundation. The corporation does exist to maximise profit for its shareholders, but its only shareholder is a non-profit foundation working for the public good.
It is true most of its revenue comes from ExxonMobil, but also does a lot to prevent climate change so 🤷♂️
@aral @benfrancis @miklo If a tiny amount of the Mozilla-hate had been used to *actually* build alternatives, maybe the situation would be better?
Why didn't you all pick up the work on Servo to contribute or fund it in the last couple of years for instance? Clean state, open license, no corp overlord. Is that not good enough?
But no, instead we get the same complaints that don't move the needle.
I don’t know, Fabrice, after I’d sold the only two homes I had to fund my work over the years which is about to give us the Small Web, I didn’t have much left over to finance that.
What did you do?
Perhaps more importantly, instead of riding in to defend the honour of a Silicon Valley corporation, how about we start discussing how to fund such efforts from our taxes? Maintaining a browser is not something you can do from your garage on the weekends.
@aral @fabrice @miklo Well that's sad. I was quite interested in the Small Technology Foundation until you started crapping on other foundations with similar missions.
If you can't see that Mozilla are the good guys (and believe me I have plenty of reasons to not like them) then I guess I wish you the best of luck trying to change the world on your own.
@benfrancis Yes, it is sad. If you cannot see that a half-billion-dollar Silicon Valley corporation fully funded by surveillance capitalists with a CEO that gets paid millions of dollars is not the same as an independent two-person not-for-profit, the problem’s not with me.
Please feel free to take your interest elsewhere but know that we are also very far from being on our own either.
Perfect is the enemy of good. You start the discussion with the only solution acceptable for you ("fund from taxes"), so you should know what to do right? Instead of wasting your time on Small Web, build a *group* lobbying effort. The @owa did a great job at something similar in a relatively short time frame.
Feels like: ”We've moved away from supporting our core products like firefox, and thunderbird, and mozilla documentation of core net stuff that helped give non-google alternatives to people, because it just doesn't make enough money. Instead we're going to focus on giving our money to other companies that might make money... oh and yeah, maybe like.. be good for the net... something... er where was I? Oh yes. Money. We want it. ”
@anedroid @ArneBab @manoj If you own the copyright, you can license it under whatever you like at any time. You can’t retroactively apply it to existing code released under AGPL, though. And you can’t apply it to code you do not own the copyright for (eg., contributions of others, unless they have specifically granted you the right via contract).
@realbadawo Those few config changes make a world of difference, however, in making the browser private by default.
Let’s put it another way: if Mozilla made the same few config changes to Firefox, it would earn half a billion dollars less every year than it currently does. (And go bankrupt.)
So that’s how much those few config changes are worth.
not quite right, LW only exists because Firefox HAS existed. if they (or someone else... Waterfox for example) continue to maintain their own fork then they can easily exist without Firefox. Otherwise it's like saying Edge only exists because of Chromium... I think Microsoft are perfectly capable of maintaining the source code of a brows....oh no hang on a minute 😂
i remember a blogpost around 2005 in which a google engineer described how to design a crawler and a search index. that was really impressing. main point: you don‘t need bandwidth or high end hardware, you‘ll need a good algorithm. :)
@Åki 🐐 @Thomas Fuchs 🕹️🔭😽 With all the searchable information published every day you need astronomical bandwidth just to keep up and warehouses of CPU to index it. And then it's all useless without a good algorithm to filter through it all.
Aral Balkan
•Aral Balkanudostępnił to.
Manoj
•sorry 🇵🇸☭
•There's nothing more to it. It's just capitalism being capitalism.
Aral Balkan
•Arne Babenhauserheide
•The core question then is: how can we ensure that a good tool isn’t driven to VC-funding? @thomasfuchs
MiKlo:~/citizen4.eu$💙💛
11 ludzi lubi to
Aral Balkan, Salman Qureshi :official_verified: :aot_sc:, Toasterson, Volpit :ac_thought:, Marky Mark, Francesco, Jure Repinc :linux: :kde:, old_tootbrute, kwj@hub.hubzilla.de⚪🔵⚪🟡, eobet i eharv lubię to.
4 użytkowników udostępniło to dalej
Aral Balkan, Toasterson, Benjamin Sonntag-King 🐙 i Corentinudostępnił to.
Aral Balkan
•#mozilla #ventureCapital #vc #BigTech #SiliconValley #surveillanceCapitalism #capitalism
dick_turpin lubi to.
Aral Balkanudostępnił to.
AlejandroP
•I mean a good usable one, I really want to ditch Mozilla completely
João Pedro Almeida
•@aral @miklo @thomasfuchs
Paul Wilde :blobcatnim_new: :dontpanic_nobg: lubi to.
AlejandroP
•Will check it 👍👍
Paul Wilde :blobcatnim_new: :dontpanic_nobg:
•flere-imsaho
•Volpit :ac_thought:
•flere-imsaho
•Aral Balkan
•@mawhrin @AlejandroP @miklo @thomasfuchs
Augusto lubi to.
Nathan Anti Fascist
•flere-imsaho
•Aral Balkan
•@Volpit @mawhrin @AlejandroP @miklo @thomasfuchs
Ben Francis
•It also only has around 1,000 employees (and 10,000+ volunteers), which hardly qualifies as "big tech" today.
It is true most of its revenue comes from Google, but also does a lot to prevent tracking so 🤷♂️
MiKlo:~/citizen4.eu$💙💛
Let's sum it up: "The Mozilla corporation does exist to maximise profit for (... here the long chain of "transformations".....) for the public good"
The public good doesn't need any "maximal profit" to exist, but maximising profit almost always means that some human good is disregarded or exploited on this occasion.
And this whole process of profit-squeezing from startups pumped by VCs is just a typical tool for putting profit before values.
2 ludzi lubi to
Aral Balkan i Luke lubię to.
Aral Balkan
•It is true most of its revenue comes from ExxonMobil, but also does a lot to prevent climate change so 🤷♂️
@miklo @thomasfuchs
MiKlo:~/citizen4.eu$💙💛 lubi to.
Fabrice Desré
•Why didn't you all pick up the work on Servo to contribute or fund it in the last couple of years for instance? Clean state, open license, no corp overlord. Is that not good enough?
But no, instead we get the same complaints that don't move the needle.
Aral Balkan
•What did you do?
Perhaps more importantly, instead of riding in to defend the honour of a Silicon Valley corporation, how about we start discussing how to fund such efforts from our taxes? Maintaining a browser is not something you can do from your garage on the weekends.
@benfrancis @miklo @thomasfuchs
2 ludzi lubi to
xmoo, the nimventurer i Diego Veralli lubię to.
Ben Francis
•If you can't see that Mozilla are the good guys (and believe me I have plenty of reasons to not like them) then I guess I wish you the best of luck trying to change the world on your own.
Aral Balkan
•Please feel free to take your interest elsewhere but know that we are also very far from being on our own either.
Goodbye.
@fabrice @miklo @thomasfuchs
xmoo, the nimventurer lubi to.
Fabrice Desré
•What I did or do now is not important in this discussion (but look at https://capyloon.org in any case).
Perfect is the enemy of good. You start the discussion with the only solution acceptable for you ("fund from taxes"), so you should know what to do right? Instead of wasting your time on Small Web, build a *group* lobbying effort.
The @owa did a great job at something similar in a relatively short time frame.
Capyloon - Reclaim Your Web!
capyloon.orgAral Balkan
•Fuck off, Fabrice.
@benfrancis@mastodon.social @miklo @thomasfuchs @owa
masukomi
•Feels like: ”We've moved away from supporting our core products like firefox, and thunderbird, and mozilla documentation of core net stuff that helped give non-google alternatives to people, because it just doesn't make enough money. Instead we're going to focus on giving our money to other companies that might make money... oh and yeah, maybe like.. be good for the net... something... er where was I? Oh yes. Money. We want it. ”
or am i missing something?
Arne Babenhauserheide
•Aral Balkan
•Aral Balkan
•Let’s put it another way: if Mozilla made the same few config changes to Firefox, it would earn half a billion dollars less every year than it currently does. (And go bankrupt.)
So that’s how much those few config changes are worth.
@AlejandroP @t3mujin @miklo @thomasfuchs
Aral Balkan
•@AlejandroP @t3mujin @miklo @thomasfuchs
Paul Wilde :blobcatnim_new: :dontpanic_nobg:
•Otherwise it's like saying Edge only exists because of Chromium... I think Microsoft are perfectly capable of maintaining the source code of a brows....oh no hang on a minute 😂
Åki
•those where the days
Thomas 🔭🕹️
•Åki
•i remember a blogpost around 2005 in which a google engineer described how to design a crawler and a search index. that was really impressing.
main point: you don‘t need bandwidth or high end hardware, you‘ll need a good algorithm. :)
clacke: inhibited exhausted pixie dream boy 🇸🇪🇭🇰💙💛
•