because any successful mechanism will need to be actually useful to advertisers
No.
It’s, by the way, one thing every child should be taught to say, and traditionally an important part of one’s upbringing, and one strongly eroded in the last 20 years.
Simultaneously to that various people with strength are putting before us sets of false choices all leading to the same result, and we pick “the lesser evil” only to avoid saying “no”.
We don’t owe advertisers shit. They can go fuck themselves with a dry aspen stick. We don’t owe Facebook shit. They can go swim in sewers. We don’t owe Mozilla shit. They can go milk bulls.
Just no and nothing in exchange for something we don’t owe them.
Yeah totally agree. The central premise of Mozilla’s argument is wrong: that we need to care about what advertisers want.
No compromise is needed as advertisers problems are not users problems. Mozilla has massively dropped the ball on this.
What’s the alternative to give free sites revenue from the users who won’t donate, which is nearly all of them? Google Ads doesn’t seem to be adding an ad-free subscription anytime soon
I feel the whole “I want to earn money by having an internet page/channel/video/…” is one of the problems here.
I prefer the old way, show some, sell some. Information wants to be free too, now it’s monetised in absurdum. Look for how grep works? Get a 7.000 word AI written html page that rambles about linux and the shells history. And that’s if you can get your hands on a something else than a 11 minutes long youtube fucking video…
People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.
You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.
Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.
– Banksy
That’s right…use librewolf or mullvad browser or arkenfox…
If FF acts like this and the rest follow, well let’s pitch and get another one going.
Either way, if people want Foss software, we will need to pay for it.
That’s true, of course, but there’s a difference between paying and being exploited.
If they want this product to be profitable, then cheating by giving users something that steals their information is not the way.
Crowdfunding is good, donates are good, paid software is good even. Or paid services for free and FOSS software.
One of the reasons paying for software is not very popular is because it was historically kinda hard to just pay on a website. But now people do that all the time.
Why? It’s a gift. One can clean it of unwanted features and use it.
Or if it’s not a gift, they should make it clear.
Cheating is bad. Being gifted a thing and then told some bullshit how you now need to give your blood to Devil to show your gratitude, you should just say “fuck off” and get on with your life.