I think I’m getting it, I’m just trying to say that I think you’re underestimating how hard it is to fund web browser development.

What incentives does the for-profit (that’s owned by the non-profit) have that a non-profit without a for-profit subsidiary wouldn’t have? Both aren’t able to maximise revenue for shareholders, and both will always have the option to pay their leaders extravagantly.

And as a well-paid programmer, I haven’t been known to donate $100 a year to software projects. As a conservative estimate, let’s say Mozilla could run Firefox at one-fifth the current budget, that would still mean we’d need a million people like you that would continue to do so even if, say, the most-often-voted-for feature request is misinterpreted, or changing a “view all tabs” icon suddenly pisses off a significant portion of them enough to stop their donations.

And even if that happened, it’s not clear that that would necessarily lead to gaining market share on default browsers or ones that get heavily promoted through search engine homepages or shadily bundled with installers. Which would still mean more and more websites would start to ignore it, which would mean web compatibility would continue to get worse and worse.

Ah, that’s the secret? Why didn’t anyone tell me this before?! All this slaving away at my day job, when I could just have built a self-sustaining good product - it’s that easy!

2. ???
3. Profit break-even, somehow?

This is very well-informed, nice job on the research.

Google hasn’t been forbidden from paying Mozilla - yet, at least. They’ve only been ruled a monopolist, but what consequences they will face is yet to be determined, and then the appeals process will follow, so it’ll be a couple of years before there’s any potential impact.

Mozilla has also explicitly tried to have other baskets to put eggs in (Relay. VPN, Monitor Plus, Hubs, etc.), it’s just that none of those have been as successful.

I believe MDN and standards partcipation is part of the Corporation. The latter definitely, because implementation experience matters for that. The former also has its own monetisation, and has a lot of content contributed by the Open Web Docs foundation.

It’ll be at the hands of whatever jurisdiction the forker is in. It’s not like you can escape governments.

We’ll see, and I’d be happy if it wins!

And yet all the big apps are still using Electron.

Usually the answer is limited resources with unclear payoff, i.e. even with Electron’s success, it’s not clear that there’s room for an alternative in the market, and it’d be a lot of effort to do.

Ah, so it should just be better! I wonder why nobody thought of that yet :P

(Sorry, I’m in a sarcastic mood, but you get my point.)

No, I’m telling people not to suspect anything, because we don’t know anything.

This is all hypothetical

Yes, that is exactly my point: let’s not get all worked up about something where we have almost zero facts. Although:

open source is beholden to western laws and corporate practices

is definitely the case for the Linux Foundation: it’s beholden to US laws. And wake-up call or not, a foundation would always be incorporated somewhere, and beholden to the laws of that somewhere.

Oh geez, this the third reply by the same account… Again, I’m just saying that we don’t know whether the contributors were assumed guilty, or if they have actual ties to sanctioned companies.

I am literally saying the opposite: I am saying that it’s not clear that this applies to all Russians, or just ones that are sanctioned.

No, I’m saying that if the banned people are only banned because they’re associated with the Russian government (/employed by sanctioned companies), then I’m not going to get outraged over the kernel maintainers. I do not expect them to break the law just to die on this hill.

I would get it if he would have simply stated that the Linux Foundation needs to abide by the sanctions

I mean, that’s basically what he said:

If you haven’t heard of Russian sanctions yet, you should try to read the news some day.

Doesn’t sound like they banned Russians in general, just people employed by sanctioned companies.

Anyone who thinks they know what needs to happen for Firefox to regain market share, needs to consider what would happen if someone forks Firefox and makes that happen.

There’s no way that CSS theming is it. And in general, “not doing something” isn’t going to be it, either.

Honestly I wish that was a principle that the internet embraced more. We’re so trigger-happy to be outraged.