Criticizing is easy, I'd like all critics to suggest alternatives to how FF development should be funded. I don't like this at all but I also cannot come up with any realistic alternatives.
For one, it would probably help a lot if Mozilla didn't try to be everything at once. They have a specific product niche, but both Firefox and Thunderbird (both of which should be their core development efforts), just don't seem to be what they're focusing on, instead seeming to thinking they have to be the EFF... before MBA rot seems to have kicked in and now Mozilla is a non-profit that owns an internet ad company (whilst deprioritizing and scaling back a bunch of the advocacy efforts that could upset advertisers. It's kinda funny that they're torpedoing their EFF-esque advocacy to invest into a business sector whose core existence runs contrary to their purpose.)
And that's before we dive into just how much they pay their executives and how much they could probably cut into the executive salaries to fund Firefox and Thunderbird before resorting to sponsorship deals.
The Mozilla Foundation isn't the most disconnected free software org where I have the suspicion that a lot of money is being spent on unnecessary side projects or funneled into rainy day funds while begging on the streets like they're poor (they're guilty of the former, they spend too much for the latter), but make no mistake - every major cut in their own browser market share was of their own making. And it's always tied to harebrained schemes to try and inject sponsored shit into Firefox. (Their original major dent that wasn't just gradual decline/rebalance due to Chrome entering the Browser market originated from Mozilla installing a tie-in extension with the show "Mr Robot".)
A lot of statements you throw out here are demonstrably false. It appears that you haven't tried in the least to actually become informed on this topic, and just spout the same tired talking points.
I am critical of some things that Mozilla does, but shouting blatant falsehoods and repeating "exec salary" ad nauseam is not helpful.
I just posted this the other day:
Firefox is massively profitable, (with a rising share of income not coming from Google). Change in net assets before taxes in 2022 was +168 M$, it was +220 M$ in 2021. This is on expenses of 425 M$ in 2022.
Software development was 220 out of the total expenses. General and administrative coming in second at 108 M$.
I don't know exactly what comparable software companies invest, but assuming that the 220 is entirely SWE salaries this seems appropriate overhead to my mind.
Marketing and Branding is next with 58M$ other program services come in at 34 M$.
So yes, Mozilla could drop all income generating activities other than Google without having to cut anything in development. That means staying dependent on selling the search bar to the largest and most invasive advertisment company there has ever been forever.
Instead, they are running a strategy that seems to aim to get independent of Google money as quickly as possible: Build up a war chest, increase other revenue streams. Other revenues are up to 75M$ in 2022 from 56M$ in 2021.
So looking at the actual figures, rather than making stuff up out of nowhere, it does not seem to me that you can accuse them for a lack of strategic focus. Nor have you articulated the actual trade-off they are facing: Rely on Google money or get better at monetizing Firefox in other ways.
Instead you straw-man their activism and make completely unfounded and implausible statements: "every major cut in their own browser market share was of their own making." I am sure that Google using their Web properties and massive ad campaigns to push Chrome and Microsoft using Windows to push Edge had no impact whatsoever.
> So looking at the actual figures, rather than making stuff up out of nowhere, it does not seem to me that you can accuse them for a lack of strategic focus.
$220 millions are the aggregated expenses of ALL software 'development' efforts of Mozilla Corporation like VPN, Relay, Pocket, mozilla.social, etc. And there are a lot of interesting expenses which are billed as development (like MCKENSIE MACK GROUP payments). How much of that went to Firefox nobody knows.
Net assets are growing but user base is shrinking (and of course it was Google and MS who alienated their users in 2016-2018 by introducing a lot of breaking changes and made FF not usable /s). That's why CEO deserves a big fat bonus and raise.
You can't accuse them for a lack of strategic focus, indeed. But what is their strategic focus? Is it filling their pockets with money and living a lavish lifestyle?
What they could do better is move Firefox development into a separate fund and manage it from there. Just like they did with Thunderbird.
They could let users give them money for the browser. The two obvious ways are to make a "Firefox Pro" that is completely identical but with a different logo or something just to let people pay for it, or make a "Firefox Pro" that, y'know, doesn't have ads. The second one doesn't exactly sit well with me but either is better than the current approach.
I see far too many people essentially saying, "If it wasn't funded unethically, it couldn't exist!" Or "my business needs to do [unethical thing] or I can't compete!"
Okay, then it shouldn't exist. That's not an excuse.
The irony is that if Mozilla had just taken the search deal money over the past decade and a half and quietly kept it away in a rainy day fund instead of wasting it all on ideas that mostly didn't go anywhere or reinvented the wheel from existing projects, they probably would be just fine for the rest of their lifetimes.
The only reason they're looking for unethical funding is because a. Mozilla has grown so bloated beyond it's original purpose that they have ludicrous operating demands and b. because they have a bunch of MBA types in charge who can only think up the most unethical schemes you can think of to make money.
iOS only is for sure a limitation but I've been using it for a while and it's great! Chrome and FF add-ons on iOS including full uBlock Origin.
This is exactly the browser HN has been asking for: no ads, not funded by ads, fully funded by users directly paying them. Fully bootstrapped business with the only funding round they've ever taken coming entirely from their user-base.
Cloud computing is ridiculously expensive. The other day I wanted to increase Mongo Atlas iops by 1000 on a 3 node cluster and it costs $3000 a year. How does that make any sense?
For a VC-backed company, this will never ever generate enough revenue growth. So, the real answer is: "If all goes well, we will keep raising VC money and get acquired and shutdown / butchered in 5-10 years".
Like Bluesky, this monetization plan they present is just something to calm down the haters and sceptics. But if you think for two seconds, it does not make sense.
It might happen the way you describe, or, if they get more popular, then may try to think harder and offer more paid options. Now they're in a growth stage - they need to convince the largest possible number of developers they should switch from VS Code, and that is already a difficult task.
I know, this is the standard VC playbook: First growth at all costs to get everyone into the ecosystem, then pull up the net and monetize. The latter phase is usually when all the subscriptions, value-add nag screens, data sharing agreements and other enshittification goodies pop up.
And how would it work otherwise? You can't perpetually offer a product for free (in all senses of the word) AND satisfy exponential ROI expectations at the same time.
If this is what's going on here, I'm worried what the "monetization" phase will entail.
The other option I see is being owned by a behemoth like Microsoft, in VSCode case, who can pay millions per month in engineering salaries and PaaS, while keeping it free.
They are so big they can monetize it using Copilot or not even monetize it properly, just to get good faith from Developers, Developers, Developers.
No, the other option is something like Sublime Text that has a small team working on it and is paid for by a very fair one-off payment by the customer.
Well as an end user this is pretty much OK right, so long as you are aware of the deal? VC funded companies have subsidized and then abandoned a lot of useful OSS code over the years.
Whenever you encounter a VC backed open source project you know the rug pull will come eventually. It doesn't make the code they have written any less useful. If the tool is good enough then it will be forked and live on.
No, it's not ok. It fucks the whole market by subsidizing the growth with VC money. Either a big company will buy them, consolidating their power, or they will IPO and the VCs will cash out and let the public bear the cost. It fucks the customers who are not as well-informed about this as you are. In summary, it fucking sucks.
This seems pretty optimistic to me. I can't imagine any company I've worked for paying for those things. Especially because they're only going to be useful if everyone uses Zed which is unlikely.
Indeed seems very uncommon where I am, even the IntelliJ’s are more often pirated than paid for.
From my perspective it is very weird to expect to beat MS (who produces two great IDE’s, not one) on their own game with this approach to dev.
I’m not saying it’s impossible to have the most important features replicated, but, c’mon, this is software, it breaks as it builds and some things are not possible
Overnight even if you have the worlds top top top talent around.
But, you also have to be better than what’s freely available by enough to get someone to pay for it. Having a good product isn’t good enough, you have to be significantly better.
Dev tooling is a notoriously difficult space to make money. Free tools tend to win because if a tool costs money, a developer is just as likely to write their own version. (For better or worse)
Zed's vision is that the editor is free and you're paying basically for Teams-lite.
If you're a big company, you're already using a service like Teams, Slack, Zoom, etc.
If you're a small company, then there's free alternatives like Discord.
And say you want to talk to someone other than a programmer, then you'd need something else anyway. Because a project manager wouldn't need an IDE installed.
That’s the thing. Whatever editor I finally migrate from neovim to I’ll likely donate to.
I get so much insane value from open source and companies building for the platforms that I use that I’m happy to pay for them especially for small shops of really passionate hackers like the folks behind Zed.
I don't have much hope in anything replacing it for me. Zed does a lot right but feels very very far away and with a weird focus (from my perspective).
>How some people prefer manual is probably one of the mysteries I'll take to grave with myself.
When I find myself thinking like that I try to come up with generous analogies to try and position myself in a similar mindset. With manual transmission the advantage seems to be fine grained control over the engine at the cost of more complexity and additional work. This fine grained control may be imperceptible or totally unnecessary for some people. However, I run Linux for similar reasons and enjoy tinkering with it. I also tend to prefer tools that target power users at the cost of complexity. So, even if I'm not a gearhead myself, I can easily understand the preference for manual transmission by others.
We do know that the open web consitutes the bulk of the trainig data, although we don't get to know the specific webpages that got used. Plus some more selected sources, like books, of which again we only know that those are books but not which books were used. So it's just a matter of probability that there was a good amount of SEO spam as well.
There is a lot fire directed at Mozilla on HN. I'm not saying I support or can make sense of all of their decisions but I'd love for someone in the criticizers camp to explain what steps they would take to make Mozilla and the continued development of Firefox a financially sustainable and independent endeavour.
> but I'd love for someone in the criticizers camp to explain what steps they would take to make Mozilla and the continued development of Firefox a financially sustainable and independent endeavour.
Let me give them money. Either straight-up take donations to fund firefox development, or sell a "Firefox Pro" that doesn't have these stupid anti-features. But don't refuse to take money from users and complain that because you don't take money from users you're "forced" to screw them over.
I have some ideas of varying quality. Others have been mentioned in the thread.
Really, though, it’s not like me or any of the commenters are being paid millions a year to fix these problems. If I were being paid $6,903,089 I feel like I might be well-equipped to fix them.
They've been pulling in half a billion dollars per year for 15 years. They should have budgeted to invest part of that money to build a development trust fund.
Could it be them disregarding users preferences over and over again or claiming to stand for privacy while siphoning your data at every opportunity. Sure will be hard finding an example of that behavior.
It's been a few years since I last watched his stuff. He always had that crazy genius vibe, similar to Terry Davis but but not as unhinged and much more friendly and wholesome. I'm fascinated how these individuals that are clearly immensely gifted with rational thought are also religious fanatics. How do they rationalize it? I can understand believing in a supreme being but it also being the one described in bible seems difficult to rationalize.
If you're a schizo, it's probably pretty easy to rationalize: you've heard your god talk to you and tell you these things. It's easy to go "You're obviously crazy, this can't have happened!" from the outside looking in, but it's far harder to reject your own experiences out of hand as obviously false.
Doubly so because the types of experiences you get tend to be very hard to disprove. It's usually not something like "There's a yellow demonic entity running around deep in the valley by the mountain" where it's something that can be checked and explained, like actually just a moose who got tangled up in a yellow wintercoat or something, and is running around irritated trying to get it off. Rather it tends to be more "God is speaking to me through my mind, and only does so to special people" or "These people are trying to make me be as miserable as I was before I found God by making me reject him, they must be servants of Satan".
Really, if anything, I would say gifted people are probably way more likely to become religious fanatics if they have these experience. We do not have a good explanation for these things (you're sick in the head, something something dopamine does not work too well for otherwise perfectly functional and rational people), and the explanations that we do have must more or less be taken on faith. You need to trust that the person explaining these things to you is both more capable of judging the situation than you are, and has your best interests in mind. For most gifted people, the chance of both of these being true in any particular situation is abyssmally small.
This applies even more so in mental healthcare, where we're practically at the same stage of technological advancement as we were when trepanation and bloodletting were state of the art in physical medicine. We have a long way to go before we can truly make the "You're crazy!" explanation stick for those who are used to living in a world that is inevitably wrong about most things, whether subtly or overtly. Really, if you're used to being the smartest guy in the room, what choice do you have? What choice do you have but to trust yourself? Yes, you might be delusional and wrong, but you know the world at large is delusional and wrong on countless subjects as well. Why trust them more than you trust yourself, when just about every single experience you've had in life has fed into your belief that you are fundamentally better at judging reality than most people are?
The term you are after, used to describe authors noted for their use of language is prose stylist. Given your examples I think you'll adore Moby-Dick; what Melville pulls off there is astonishing.
It's certainly worth it, especially if you have some appreciation for the craft of writing, a love for words and the English language and the patience to take things slow and put the effort to really understand what you're reading. After the clouds clear and you can see what he is doing a monument reveals itself and there is this feeling of astonishment that a human was able to create such a thing.
The second half of the book (chapters 10 to 18 although page-wise it's more like two thirds) is especially satisfying. Each chapter is written in a vastly different style: imitation of music, a romantic novel, a play, the historical development of style in the English language, how a bad writer writes, a technical text, and a couple of others.
It's challenging and might not be satisfying if you're looking for plot (there is none). I suggest to read a chapter and then the accompanying text in https://www.ulyssesguide.com
