“Last month, Mozilla made a quiet change in Firefox that caused some diehard users to revolt…”
The problem is in our current society it’s simply not possible for something to get very popular without being taken over by a corporation or government, who are usually driven by profits because we live in a capitalist world whether you like it or believe it or not.
I don’t want to throw the word enshitiffication around, especially when I’m not sure if I can spell it, but the platforms that people jump ship to when that happens are probably especially vulnerable to people jumping ship again.
I can’t imagine Mozilla effectively marketing Firefox as anything but the bullshit free browser, and when they lose that, people will just move to the next actual bullshit free option.
it’s simply not possible for something to get very popular without being taken over by a corporation
Please don’t excuse unethical and exploitative behavior by pretending that it’s unavoidable.
There are examples of other funding models available; for example, what the Blender Foundation does. It turns out, if a FOSS effort focuses on their community, makes users feel involved and important, asks in good faith for contributions and suggestions, treats people with respect, maintains funding and organizational transparency, and has consistent ethical standards… it can work out very well for them. No selling out required. No data harvesting required. No shady deals with Google required.
For the purposes of my argument I don’t consider blender to be “very popular” in the same way that Chrome or even Firefox is. Blender has less than 2% of the number of users that even Firefox has. I think if Blender were to get Firefox-level popular (for example, over 100 million users), then it too would succumb to greedy corporate interests.
If you know of this funding model working successfully at the scale of 100 million users/customers or more, I would be interested to learn about it though.
Your statement did leave some wiggle room to quibble over what exactly “very popular” means, though I don’t see how popularity is a useful metric when we’re talking about free software which doesn’t rely on user purchases for revenue. Ultimately it comes down to how funding the development of each software is accomplished, and whether that can be done effectively without selling out.
However, if we must compare funding strategies based on popularity, then we can. I’m not sure where you got your usage numbers from, but I’ll use your percentage to normalize for the number of employees paid through the funding strategies of both examples to compare the effectiveness of the approaches:
- Mozilla Corporation and Mozilla Foundation together have roughly 840 employees as of 2020 (the latest numbers available on Wikipedia). I’m not sure how they split up who does what for developing the software, but I seriously doubt the vast majority of those 840 employees are developers.
- Blender Foundation has a team of 31 people (as of 2022). Most of them are developers/engineers/designers directly involved with improving the software.
For purposes of discussion, I’ll assume that you are correct that Blender has 2% of the popularity of Firefox. Normalizing that for comparison, 2% of 840 Mozilla employees is 16.8 employees (round down because you can’t have 0.8 of a person).
In other words, if Firefox were only 2% as popular as it is now (thus making it equally as popular as you say Blender is), Mozilla would be paying 16 developers with it’s funding strategy.
Conversely, Blender is able to pay 31 developers using their funding strategy. This means that, even when accounting for popularity, Blender’s funding strategy is 2x more effective than Mozilla’s at paying developers to work on their software.
Again, I don’t agree that popularity is an important metric to compare here, but even when we do so, it’s clear that it is entirely possible to fund software without resorting to tired old capitalistic funding models that result in the increasingly objectionable violations of user privacy that Mozilla engages in lately. They could choose to do things differently, and we ought not to excuse them for their failure of imagination about how to fund their business more ethically. Especially when perfectly workable alternative funding models are right there in public view for anyone to emulate.
In a capitalist world, it is possible (and prudent) to treat your customers like customers. Your line will still go up, and for longer. Yes, if you treat them like products, your line will go up faster, until it won’t.
E: if they made this ad network an opt-in with a proper explanation, many people would have opted in. Not everyone, but many would have. And their reputation would not have been sullied.
