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- cross-posted to:
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Mozilla has a close relationship with Google, as most of Firefox’s revenue comes from the agreement keeping Google as the browser’s default search engine. However, the search giant is now officially a monopoly, and a future court decision could have an unprecedented impact on Mozilla’s ability to keep things “business as usual.”
United States District Judge Amit Mehta found Google guilty of building a monopolistic position in web search. The Mountain View corporation spent billions of dollars becoming the leading search provider for computing platforms and web browsers on PC and mobile devices.
Most of the $21 billion spent went to Apple in exchange for setting Google as the default search engine on iPhone, iPad, and Mac systems. The judge will now need to decide on a penalty for the company’s actions, including the potential of forcing Google to stop payments to its search “partners completely,” which could have dire consequences for smaller companies like Mozilla.
Its most recent financials show Mozilla gets $510 million out of its $593 million in total revenue from its Google partnership. This precarious financial position is a side effect of its deal with Alphabet, which made Google the search engine default for newer Firefox installations.
The open-source web browser has experienced a steady market share decline over the past few years. Meanwhile, Mozilla management was paid millions to develop a new “vision” of a theoretical future with AI chatbots. Mozilla Corporation, the wholly owned subsidiary of Mozilla Foundation managing Firefox development, could find itself in a severe struggle for revenue if Google’s money suddenly dried up.
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So instead of fucking over google with an antitrust ruling like they very much deserve, we’re going to fearmonger about how much it might hurt the ✨ sole saviors of the web ✨ Mozilla, who’s finances are apparently entirely dependent on the company primarily responsible for ruining the web. Looks like a narrative, smells like narrative, to get the public to turn against the antitrust ruling.
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This has been well known for years. Just because it’s news to you doesn’t mean it’s a conspiracy.
While we’re at it, we should add Microsoft to the antitrust case…again.
@MeowZedong @ssm Especially #Microsoft ‘s tendency to sneak into youngsters’ mind as early as possible, including at school: they’re one of the cheapest “education system” (outside of #libre ones obviously).
And the only “education” they contribute to consists of putting young minds into their boxes and create a lifelong dependency on their software suite and cloud… enlarging their future consumer base and scraping kid’s #data 😡
Instead of nurturing youngsters’ critical mind, teach them how to install and use #libre software, and push them to #diversity 😠
“sole saviors of the web”
Lol I mean that’s also a strong narrative you’re pushing
apparently that needed a /s
Haha apparently, my bad
Honestly, I’d like if the browser could become truly independent from google ad money. Then mozilla devs would have to focus on the browser and come up with a donation program like thunderbird for example instead. I’d prefer to pay and know how the money is used. I absolutely hate the google dependence
Nobody donates to these things.
Yeah. 99% of users click nag screens off right away. I do too, unless I use that application/service extensively.
You should read Thunderbird donation statement.
They got 6 million USD of donation back in 2022.
https://blog.thunderbird.net/2023/05/thunderbird-is-thriving-our-2022-financial-report/
There might not be any devs without that sweet google funding.
Wasn’t it open source at one point?
Both Firefox and thunderbird are
Mozilla corp is trash and deserves to fail. The non-profit Mozilla however, can remain and steward Firefox and friends just fine.
I support the things that the Mozilla Foundation puts on its website, even their manifesto. Even, begrudgingly, the insistence that we must balance the needs of human beings against the needs of corporations.
Even if those things contradict what Mozilla Corporation is doing with their browser.
But the Foundation is just a thin wrapper for the Corporation, so I’m not sure how that would work.
balance the needs of human beings against the needs of corporations.
I support this if it is a 1:1 scale.
Corporation can be human, but each corporation only counts as 1.
We can balance 9,000,000,000 people against a few thousand corps no big deal.
TIL. Super disappointing. Thanks for the additional info. I’ve changed my mind. Mozilla can just go poof completely.
Why would the foundation have members? It’s not a coop, after all. It’s not the Linux Foundation model, either, which is “bunch of companies get together and decide on how to spend their money”. It’s much closer to the Bosch or Zeiss model, “We’re doing business but are owned by noone and instead of handing out dividends we throw money at some charitable stuff” – though Mozilla is way more charitable than either of them.
The board is bound to the Foundation’s statutes, and it can’t just change them. They’re required to steer the foundation such that its actions benefit the free and open web, if you think they’re doing something else, sue them. Or get oversight bureaucrats to investigate or however that works in the US.
The board is the Corporation. Why would they be bound to the Mozilla manifesto? They seem to be destroying its spirit right now.
If “just sue them” is the only way to hold Mozilla accountable, how low they have fallen!
And an executive is suing them. For discrimination.
The board is the Corporation.
No.The board is the board, an organ of the corporate body, but not the corporate body itself.
Why would they be bound to the Mozilla manifesto?
Foundations are bound to their bylaws, as set out when they were founded. Why? Because law, that’s why. It’s what foundations are for.
They seem to be destroying its spirit right now.
According to you.
If “just sue them” is the only way to hold Mozilla accountable, how low they have fallen!
You can also complain. Like, with that Brendan Eich situation, the community complained and he left.
And an executive is suing them. For discrimination.
That seems to be standard corporate stuff: The two sides disagree over the reason for a non-promotion. Should Mozilla lose the case you can be quite sure heads will roll because unlike other boards, Mozilla actually has to give a fuck about stakeholder opinion. See, well, Brendan Eich.
OTOH, blanket “they’re doing stuff wrong” “criticism” like yours will be ignored. That’s like filing a bug report saying nothing but “Doesn’t work fix noaw”
You seem to have incredibly low standards for Mozilla.
But for people who are not you, I want you to explain how the Mozilla Foundation manifesto is compatible with the Mozilla FakeSpot privacy policy that promises to sell browsing history, search history, and geolocation directly to advertisers.
Don’t install it, then. There: Voila, manifesto fulfilled because it’s all opt-in. It’s still an extension, they bought it, they didn’t build it into the browser. How did anything change? Before the acquisition, people had to install the thing and agree to privacy terms, after the acquisition, people have to install the thing and agree to privacy terms.Find something relevant to complain about.
Interesting. I asked you how Mozilla FakeSpot’s privacy policy adheres to Mozilla Foundation principles, and your answer is to tell me to avoid it.
Is the privacy policy of Mozilla FakeSpot compatible with the Mozilla Foundation, yes it no?
Paid for by what money?
Open source existed before money. Corporate backers came in because the product was successful, not because they thought it was a sinking ship.
So the proverbial one guy in Nebraska and a few dozen like him can work on Firefox in addition to their day jobs?
so the worldwide open source community can actually take over the project, in the full knowledge that their pull requests will actually be merged.
That can work for small improvements but not for active development at the pace of Chromium and its forks.
I see this a win.
Firefox’s core users don’t really care what google does, Mozilla tries to maintain feature parity with Chrome only to win the non-FF users over.
That is that one guy in Nebraska. Yes.
Every repo has its power members, but you still get great sporadic wildcard contributions from motivated outsiders, and it all adds up.
They could cut their overpaid clown executive team jfc… these parasites are everywhere, leeching.
FF will survive, it is open source lol
jfc do you have any idea how fast the web evolves? Firefox already struggles to keep up with changing web standards and operating system features. It took them until December 2019 to implement one particular feature Chrome had since 2010 with a vendor prefix and since early 2016 as a fully-released feature. It took them until 4 weeks ago to implement an OS feature that existed since 2019 and which Chrome added that same year, and Edge had by 2022 at the latest.
You cut their budget, they’ll necessarily lose developers. Yes, maybe they can minimise how many developers they lose by becoming more lean, but it’s a fantasy to think that becoming “more lean” could actually prevent them from losing paid developers. And any volunteer developers are also necessarily going to be spending less time and effort on their contributions than a full-time paid employee would.
Cut their budget by 86% and they go from “barely keeping up” to “utterly falling behind”.
Can we just redistribute the CEO’s salary
That’ll give you about twenty-five engineers, give or take.
OK cool, let’s conservatively say every C-suite member gets 10 million. I don’t know how many of those there are, but let’s conservatively say 10. That only leaves us with a funding gap of 400 million. Any idea how to close that?
The foundation staff pay is public, and not that high. The corporation pays corporate wages.
Not all software needs to be backed by money. Money helps, of course, and I would support a non-profit financially that is focused purely on browser development. Right now, the only game in town doing that is Ladybird. But honestly, I think building upon a firefox fork makes more sense than starting from scratch.
You’re saying Firefox could exist, and keep up with security updates and website compatibility, without being backed by money? (Or based on a couple of donations?) Any convincing evidence that could make us trust that that’s possible too?
Many such pieces of software exist both backed by non-profit foundations, and not. Before the Linux kernel was running the world, it was primarily maintained by volunteers. Also consider the myriad of Linux distributions that don’t have corp overlords. Or pick a *BSD. Or anything you watch video content with: ffmpeg, vlc, mpv. Or even various programming languages such as ECMA Script, Python, Ruby, C, C++, etc. Hell, even Lemmy fits into this category. There literally is a whole slew of software not directly backed by money and still maintained that literally runs the world.
All your examples are at a way smaller scale, or rely on corporate cooperation (and we already have that in Chromium). With the exception of VLC, which is a treasure, but also has way fewer adversaries/things that will break because they don’t care about VLC.
Perhaps it could be state funded? It worked for PBS for a time and it still mostly works for the BBC. Why not a browser? A truly independent steward for the open web is important and it doesn’t seem like Google is capable of that.
I’d absolutely be in favour of that, preferably funding from several states. But I’d prefer getting that in place before losing the main source of income.
Seems like a good idea except for how often these states already force their own spyware and backdoors onto projects. Ideally, the state would fund it, but given their history, I’d prefer costs were covered by user donations as the interests of the users are the only interests I trust. We are the only group that is truly independent of competing interests.
Crowd funding and donations obviously have their own drawbacks. Maybe we can find a work around to avoid the privacy violations of states in the future, but I don’t have a simple answer for how to accomplish this. The way the FOSS community operates is currently the best alternative I’ve seen, but I’m sure it’s not always lucrative for developers. People need to be compensated for their labor and our current systems tend to put development interests at odds with user interests.
Seriously, the right time to burn the phoenix was ten years ago.
Force Google to separate from Chrome and it’ll be less of an issue.
Isn’t it open source?
Won’t random Devs that care about Firefox just keep working on it?
Yes and no, if Firefox org falls, open source community will continue to develop necessary features like security updates, but features will drag behind. Eventually a new player will emerge and we will bury it out back with Netscape, ie and aol explorer.
Mozilla org isn’t the concern. Mozilla Corp, the for profit company, makes Firefox and has to worry about things like revenue for the most part. Mozilla org used to develop it and could fold it back in if it went really bad, it would definitely hamper development but being the premier browser is more of a Corp goal than an org one. Most likely the corp will just find a different search partner again (Google hasn’t always been default).
Thanks for the clarification, I’m not completely on top of the issues that a lot of this community faces with them. I intended it to mean the collective company as a business entity, which was incorrect.
I’m not to worried about Firefox if Devs take over, it has tons of support behind it to add new features.
lol yes… if we don’t let google to keep its monopoly they will take FF from us
taking down a 90% monopoly will have side effects? impossible.
86% of Mozilla’s revenue came from the agreement keeping Google as Firefox’s default search engine
That explains a lot. I’ve only recently switched back to Firefox after Chrome took the throne years ago. I still use Google’s services for now, so wanted their home page as my new tab page.
The only way I could find to do that was by using an extension, but every so often I get a warning from FF that my new tab page has been changed, and it gets reset. I looked up a way to stop the warnings, and found a Mozilla blog post with comments from staff claiming that it’s a security feature.
Apparently the only reason that you might not want to start with the FF start page is because you’ve been hacked 🙄
I have one of those anti-capitalist takes where if taking down one company takes down another company, then the system is probably broken.
Which we know it is, but not enough know it is.
That isn’t really a anticapitalist take. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that the tech industry isn’t super healthy.
In fact we probably need more competition
We need much more competition on every front. The VPN market is the only place where competition exists, even though it is narrowed with fake competitions.
Things could change if Linux distro becomes the majority system in PC, notebook and mobile markets. The PC market is shifting thanks to Windows 11 system requirements. The mobile market tho.
I doubt the judge will want to kill Chromes only alternative. They aren’t going to make the monopoly stronger
They probably “only” need to break the deal with Apple. I think that’s the big one being a problem.
Mozilla could be overlooked in the grant scheme of things, and Google would want to get as many users as possible.
Goddammit no, I’m not going back to fuckin Chrome
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