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I sincerely hope that is what's going to happen and Mozilla gets severely fucked over for how they have been running their shit. Break their business and rethink from scratch how we run and finance the development of one of the most important pieces of software around. Hint: You're not going to be competitive with big tech by copying their practices, marketing "AI" bullshit and pocket and all that crap. You can't compete with google there, they can always outspend you.
As a Linux user, such a break would also be very timely, now that we have survived the painful surgeries of systemd and wayland. Those problems are mostly fixed, so we need another dysfunctional troublemaker - Firefox it is!
But seriously: The official story is always that google gives Mozilla the money to be the default search engine. But really, they don't need to care. Google needs Firefox so they can pretend they don't have a browser monopoly. For similar reasons, google used to employed 10000s of people who were doing very much non-essential stuff that is entirely irrelevant for their business. They could have fired them all long ago, and massively increased their profitability. But those would have looked obscene and raises regulators' attention. So just hiring a bunch of expensive engineers who build google chat 23.0 and whatever makes them appear more like a "normal" company.
We completely agree, Mozilla should not be run like it is i.e. a Tech Startup and should allow donations to Firefox directly.
It should become a worker owned co-op as that would make a lot of things better in the long run.
It's been clear for a while now, their current way of operating just isn't going to work and hasn't been, especially since they're adding rubbish no-one wants or needs e.g. the private adverts thing.
Break their business and rethink from scratch how we run and finance the development of one of the most important pieces of software around.
Or just run them into bankruptcy and dissolve the enterprise.
Hint: You’re not going to be competitive with big tech by copying their practices, marketing “AI” bullshit and pocket and all that crap. You can’t compete with google there, they can always outspend you.
That's sort of the root problem of a monopoly. There's nothing you can practically do to break their hold. They have to fuck up so hard that they lose a significant chunk of their patrons. And in a Walled Garden of an online ecosystem, that's very hard to do.
In a better world, the sanction on Google as "monopoly" would incur an antitrust ruling that breaks them up into multiple smaller firms. This is also what should have happened to Microsoft back in the 90s. Instead, what we're seeing is a wrist-slap that mostly hurts Google's partners, rather than their shareholders.
Google needs Firefox so they can pretend they don’t have a browser monopoly.
Edge provides them enough cover for that. And Mozilla's refusal to adopt the ManifestV3 threatens Google's advertising revenues with a browser that continues to support ad blockers.
So now its time for Mozilla to die.