The hits just keep on coming. Mozilla not only changed its Privacy Notice and introduced a Terms of Use for Firefox for the first time with some pretty onerous terms, they also removed a rather specific question and answer pair from their page with frequently asked questions about Firefox, as discovered by David Gerard. The following question and answer were removed:
Does Firefox sell your personal data?
Nope. Never have, never will. And we protect you from many of the advertisers who do. Firefox products are designed to protect your privacy. That’s a promise.
↫ David Gerard detailing what has been removed
This promise is now gone from the website, a removal which tells you all you need to know about what Mozilla has in mind. Combine it with the much broadened data collection and buying and claiming to be an online advertising company, and what I have been predicting and warning everyone about has come to pass: Firefox has become a mere tool to collect user data, user data to be sold by Mozilla for the purposes of advertising.
For years I’ve been warning about this inevitable outcome, and for just as many years people told me I was overreacting, that it wouldn’t happen, that I was crazy. The problem is especially dire for the desktop Linux world, who soon might not have a browser they can safely include in their ISOs and base installations. A desktop Linux installation with Chromium where you have to manually drag and drop extensions to install them, and set up a Google API key just to get browser sync, isn’t exactly a great experience.
At this point I have no idea where to go. Chrome and its various skins are a no-go, obviously, and relatively soft forks like LibreWolf are still dependent on Firefox and Mozilla. Alternatives like Falkon also use the Chromium engine deep down, and have their own set of issues and lack of manpower to deal with. Apple users are somewhat lucky to have the WebKit-based Safari to work with, but I’d rather publish my personal data in The New York Times than trust Apple and Tim Cook.
We’re right back where we started. Lovely.
Using Librewolf here since 6 months. Quite happy, I do trust them to do the right thing. Firefox minus the shite.
The only feature that’s still depending on Mozilla though is Firefox Sync.
While I do believe this data is not readable by Mozilla (am I correct?), I want to remove this dependency. Is it still possible to self-host Sync and has anyone done this successfully?
You can definitely self-host Mozilla Sync, either via the mozilla-services Github repo (1) or via Yunohost (2). I’ve been using it in Yunohost with no issues.
(1) https://github.com/mozilla-services/syncstorage-rs
(2) https://apps.yunohost.org/app/syncserver-rs
Thank you very much! You opened a treasure trove with Yunohost: seems to be a goldmine!
You’re welcome! I use Yunohost at work to host several of our services, including Mattermost to replace Slack. It’s Debian based so very stable and performant.
Your take on https://www.cloudron.io/ ?
@Kochise:
I’ve never tried it, but it seems to be fairly limited compared to Yunohost. Their free tier only allows two apps and their “Pro” tier doesn’t include any kind of support. Yunohost is a nonprofit and places no limitations on their amazing, completely free service, and their documentation and support forum are top notch.
Does anyone have any experience with xBrowserSync?
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/xbs/
I’m a bit leery as reviews of the Firefox Add-On mention data loss.
Looking at some of the GitHub issues, It seems like it once was a great service and would still be if it were still maintained.
https://github.com/xbrowsersync/app/issues
Does anyone still use it? Is it reliable at all, or are the scary reviews accurate?
I just realized I also have to stop using Thunderbird (desktop and mobile) now. It falls under the same loss of trust as Firefox, as this retraction is from Mozilla itself.
This fucking sucks. Why can’t we have nice things?
Because as soon as something gets nice it either gets monetized or it monetizes you.
I lament the death of the desktop email client. I know people use webmail a lot, but for work I use 4/5 differen gmails and exchange accounts. Managing that in tabs is a lesson in madness.
I’ve recently been using the “new” Outlook and it’s simply Aweful for productivity.
Without TB, my only Linux desktop alternative is basically gone.
P. S. Others do exist but are various levels of shady and/or are more catered for personal than anything professional (eg compatible with enterprise security)
Yep, I use Thunderbird at the day job because I have five addresses across both companies just for myself, and I need all the features Thunderbird brings to make it a direct replacement for full Outlook. For personal use it’s not as dire, I can get by with webmail; I use Fastmail and their interface is almost as good as a desktop client.
Way back in the day I used Claws Mail on Linux, maybe I’ll explore that for desktop Linux/BSD use. It’s at work where I’m now in a Catch-22; I can no longer use Thunderbird due to trust issues with Mozilla, but there isn’t (to my knowledge) a viable alternative for Windows. I’m tempted to try Evolution via WSL2 but I need it to be dependable and not a hack.
On Linux, give KMail a whirl. I absolutely love it. And it is actively developed.
But: I am a highly technical user, capable of interacting with Akonadi directly, which I haven’t had to for a few years now.
Claws Mail has also a Windows port.
Another alternative for Windows is TheBat! but is not open source and you have to pay for a licence.
I miss Eudora. :/ (there is an open source implementation called Hermes but is still in alpha)
Adurbe,
+1, same.
Is Betterbird an alternative for you or anyone else reading this?
https://www.betterbird.eu/index.html
From their FAQ:
“What is Betterbird?
Betterbird is a soft fork of Mozilla Thunderbird. Soft fork means that it is closely following the Thunderbird Extended Support Releases (ESR) therefore avoiding the mistakes of other forks which quickly lost track of upstream Thunderbird, thus opening users up to security vulnerabilities. ”
https://www.betterbird.eu/faq/index.html
I am currently testing it as a drop-in replacement for my lone work Gmail account, but don’t have much to say so far beyond: 1. It looks almost identical to Thunderbird. 2. It seems I can read messages in my Inbox and 3. I can open a draft to edit it. That’s all I’ve tried so far. (:
Why? Thunderbird is Mozilla Independent sińce many years
MZLA is a wholly owned subsidiary of Mozilla. They are not fully independent.
Cowards everywhere these days. Disgusting.
There is some hope maybe with Ladybird browser in future.
What comes to syncing stuff, its easy to self host with Vaultwarden for passwords and Floccus for bookmarks, works with Firefox and any Chromium based
Who in their right mind would be using an un-altered, un-forked, binary Firefox download from Mozilla anytime in the past several years? You’ve got to at least be using an Arkenfox user.js or one of the privatized forks like Mullvad or you are just sending all kinds of data by default to Mozilla through their telemetry and to Google through their search and “safe browsing”.
Nothing new here, move along.
It would be only fair to include the part that was added to the FAQ too:
> It seems like every company on the web is buying and selling my data. You’re probably no different.
Mozilla doesn’t sell data about you (in the way that most people think about “selling data“), and we don’t buy data about you. Since we strive for transparency, and the LEGAL definition of “sale of data“ is extremely broad in some places, we’ve had to step back from making the definitive statements you know and love. We still put a lot of work into making sure that the data that we share with our partners (which we need to do to make Firefox commercially viable) is stripped of any identifying information, or shared only in the aggregate, or is put through our privacy preserving technologies (like OHTTP).
—
It sometimes seems like OSnews drew the circle around Mozilla a couple of years ago, and since then it’s jumping with sick happiness every time Mozilla does something that isn’t great. I still think you’re overreacting and that it didn’t happen.
Anthill4991,
I concede that I don’t have the answer to help free software to survive, but we still need to awknowledge just how cancerous the nature of invasive advertising and tracking is. It’s NOT a matter of a company respecting what they do with our data, they shouldn’t collect or have user data in the first place! I’m sick of our devices doing this. We bought a new samsung TV and it popped up an unsolicited alert on top of an local HDMI source not asking but telling us that we agree to let them monitor us. There was no opt out, just an “ok” button. It’s absolutely sickening to see this enshitification everywhere and the coercive terms that accompany it. Incidentally there are blocklists for the technically inclined to protect themselves but it’s such BS that we need to fight our own devices from doing this at all.
https://github.com/Alice6006/adguard_blocklists/blob/main/Samsung-TV_Blocklist.txt
I for one don’t think mozilla are any worse than anyone else, but it’s still disappointing that they aren’t better than this. After all mozilla’s original mission was ostensibly to be a champion for our rights to balance the table against corporate overreach. Now the harsh reality is that mozilla are also succumbing to the same practices due to their own financial pressure/greed. 🙁
It bears repeating, “smart” TVs are cheaper than “dumb” screens because there is an expected return on data sold over the lifetime of the device. My answer is never let it connect to network. Some disassembly may be required to ensure wifi can’t connect. Requires research on brand/model to make sure that you don’t screwed by first-time setup requiring network connect, or required periodic check-in, or ….
Enturbulated,
I think it’s more because dumb TVs are so niche. There were zero for sale in our local stores.
Personally I’d rather have the tracking be outlawed and the market compete on those terms. But I know it isn’t realistic at least not in the US. Tracking is becoming the status quo for everything that has a CPU. It will soon be totally unavoidable: TVs/phones/cars/watches/security cameras and so on…. 🙁
> I concede that I don’t have the answer to help free software to survive,
According to their financial reports, mozilla has over a *billion* dollar in investments.
With so many major free and libre projects operating very successfully on, comparatively, shoestring budgets (libreoffice, kde, etc), the answer, at least in the case of firefox, is staring you right in the face.
Mote,
This is what I found…
https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2024/mozilla-fdn-2023-fs-final-short-1209.pdf
They also have liabilities on the order of $496M, which is inline with their google revenue, but with google revenue ending, they’re looking at $158M in revenue for a net loss of $-339M per year. Even with their savings they stand to run out of money within a few years.
The two highest expense items are:
Software development $261M
General and administrative $124M
None of us will have much sympathy for “administrative”. Fair enough then, lets chop out 100% of their expense line items except for the “software development”. That still leaves a $-103M deficit. Ok, lets have Mozilla cut benefits and have more layoffs to balance the budget without google revenue. Will that affect mozilla’s ability to retain talent and work on software? I’d say yes it will have a negative impact, but if that needs to happen then so be it.
What is the prognoses for Mozilla after all of this? Will more people suddenly start appreciating FF more after this? Probably not. Also, their revenue still includes subscription and advertising inside FF, which users here notoriously hate, so that’s another $65M that needs to be nixed with more accompanied layoffs to please users. Ok so let’s do that too.
The vast majority of Mozilla’s remaining income is interest/dividends from investments, but that only produces revenue so long as they haven’t dipped too far into the principal, which is going to be extremely hard to do without whittling down the majority of mozilla very quickly. Maybe this is what people want to see. Well, lets get the popcorn ready. But let me ask do you believe that such a significantly weakened mozilla is going to be up to competing against google chrome and being an effective counter balance? IMHO I very much doubt it. I genuinely don’t know if there’s anything they can do to turn the tide. Google’s monopoly is too strong….how ironic that an antitrust judge is the reason mozilla lost funding and that the chrome monopoly stands to get even stronger if mozilla fails.
Is Mozilla currently able to compete against Google Chrome?
If it is, why is its market share falling year over year?
If it isn’t, let it be even less competitive. I don’t mind. Nor would the remaining 3 percent of the market, I presume.
cevvalkoala,
Nearly all people stick with the bundled browser and nearly all of mozilla’s competitors benefit from bundling on mainstream platforms. Google literally grew their share by paying OEMs and software developers to bundle chrome. Now it’s bundled with android, chromebooks, etc. Unlike the MS antitrust case, no court has taken on google’s chrome monopoly. While mozilla can develop a competent browser I don’t see a way for mozilla to compete against the google monopoly on merit, unfortunately.
As part of that market, I can say that I absolutely would mind the loss of FF and I think most other FF users would too. I believe that monoculture is a disaster waiting to happen. They may not realize it, but even chrome users benefit from competition to fight against the worst outcomes like google’s web drm.
Alfman,
I didn’t mean “let Firefox die”. I meant, let it lean up really, let it drop that 16-weeks release bullshit, let it introduce new features with a bit of delay. This isn’t 1996 anymore, and the users do not need the newest and the shiniest and the most gimmicky browser. Would you notice if your browser stopped updating? Would it feel old in a year? I don’t suppose.
So, I don’t mind Firefox firing its niche teams, along with its management. I could wait a couple of years before the next acronym googlers introduced, to actually arrive in my computer.
cevvalkoala,
Mozilla’s assets should last longer than that but it’s a question of long term sustainability. Theoretically they could cut down to the bare minimum number of employees, discontinue legal services, etc and just keep the employees that keep code minimally maintained and servers running. Obviously this would minimize costs, but the question is whether it would negatively affect the browser experience, innovation, support, and balance of power on the web more broadly. You seem to be saying “no”, but I’m not so sure – a significantly weakened mozilla could be a gift to google.
In any case I have little power to change these events so in several years we’ll get to see what ultimately happens.
Has anyone had a recent look at Palemoon – was forked from firefox some time ago and seems to work, albiet a bit slowly on some sites. Tom have you done a teardown on Palemoon ? It works on Windows, Linux and Mac OS.
I use Pale Moon as my primary browser. It’s been continuously developed and improved since it forked off from Firefox 52 about 6 years ago. It receives security updates about once every two months, and has received continuous feature updates to keep up with evolving web standards. Seems to work fine on nearly all sites for me.
andyprough,
I’m not sure how much these browser forks are dependent on upstream updates. Obviously they add/remove features, but how independent are they actually in terms of maintaining the whole shebang? I suspect a lot of browsers forks (be it FF or chromium) are still dependent on upstream patches, but I don’t really know. It would be very interesting if someone would compile a spreadsheet and run them all through a gamut of tests and privacy/security audits.
I mainly use FF too, but unfortunately there are some websites that fail and sometimes these are important enough that I need to switch browsers – usually chrome based. I’m curious if forks like palemoon would ever have better compatibility than FF; in theory they shouldn’t but without testing it I don’t really know.
Pale Moon was hard forked from Firefox 52 and has been independently developed separate from Firefox for at least six years. There’s no possible way to mix modern Firefox code with Pale Moon code, as Firefox became a chromium compatible ‘electrolysis’ multi-process browser after Firefox 52.
andyprough,
I have tried palemoon and it felt like a time capsule – firefox as it was years ago. Obviously this makes sense and I personally like some things better than modern FF. I haven’t been a fan of some of mozilla’s newer interfaces/policies. That’s all well and good for pale moon, but I get the impression that without the benefit of mozilla’s work pale moon could end up behind with upkeep and maybe even vulnerabilities.
I genuinely don’t mean to “cry wolf” over it, but given that browsers truly are the first line of defense against internet threats it’s a reasonable question to ask how secure it actually is. Many people talk about it, but they don’t seem to actually know and I don’t think it’s ever been audited. Historically pale moon has patched vulnerabilities after firefox patched them first.
https://www.reddit.com/r/palemoon/comments/evywwj/how_secure_is_pm_really/
https://www.reddit.com/r/palemoon/comments/75wsf8/pale_moon_security/
Obviously my opinions are in no way authoritative, but my gut feeling is that such a small team will struggle to keep up without help. Security aside, I looked up if palemoon users had compatibility trouble, and indeed they did. This doesn’t surprise me, but I was amused by this project to address palemoon compatibility issues…
https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?t=31978
This got a chuckle out of me. I guess there’s no issue that can’t be fixed if we’re going to allow palemoon to call upon chromium to do the dirty work, haha.
I’m not putting down pale moon users, but in terms of my confidence in the independence of the web should mozilla fail….let me just say that I am very concerned.
>”if a website doesn’t render correctly in Pale Moon, Browservice is ideal for working around that.”
Browservice is literally made to work in a tab in ALL browsers, and it’s almost exclusively used as a remote proxy to view sites while using ancient OS’s that are completely unable to run a modern browser (think watching youtube videos in a browser on Windows 95 on a 30 year old computer). I’ve tried Browservice with several modern browsers myself, but if you have modern hardware and a modern OS, Browservice isn’t really useful.
andyprough,
I agree, I just found it funny. Some are advocating for palemoon as an alternative to chrome & FF, but here someone is suggesting Browservice as a workaround using chromium to render pages on behalf of pale moon. Do you not see the irony? Anyway I’m sure people have different reasons for using it and I have no problem with that. If your happy with palemoon, then I’m happy for you. However in the context of our discussion about the health and viability of alternatives, I do worry about things like mono-cultures and independence and I don’t feel the existence of palemoon really alleviates my own concerns.
I use Pale Moon on a few VMs with small ram allocations. It works. But its addon range is antique, and is ever shrinking. As much as I love having a single process for my browser when I look at the task manager, I can’t see it working as a primary browser.
Pale Moon seems to be getting more addons month after month as more new developers are attracted to the platform, and the ‘ancient’ addons mostly all still work. You might need to add JustOff’s Classic Addons extension to get access to some of the older ones. Depends on what you are wanting – for me I’ve got a lot of current privacy and security add-on options that make Pale Moon as good if not better than modern Firefox’s offerings.
re TVs – yeah I have had to resort to buying second hand TVs to get ‘dumb’ TVs and also ones with lower power use.
ddtech(AU),
That might be what we should have done. Alas, these will get rarer over time.
TV suggestion for all: a fellow Arsian recommended me during a discussion about TVs a Gigabyte Aorus FO48U. The firmware is both quirky and buggy but not a big deal for a technical person. I am pleased.
On top of that, you get a KVM and it keeps a MacBook charged via USB-C when watching movies 😉
I’ve started using ProtonMail and their related products. It would be nice if they came out with a Proton Browser that was based on Firefox ESR and replaced all of the Mozilla online functionality (sync, passwords, bookmarks, etc) with their own. I use Proton because I don’t want to self host and they have a good track record and a good organization structure. Plus their servers are located in better jurisdictions for data privacy than other clouds (Switzerland, Germany, and Norway).
If we want privacy, then we have to pay for it. Mozilla has proven that you can’t have a product that respects privacy and be dependent upon advertising for revenue.
In the long run, I hope that the Servo project becomes usable as the basis for web browsers and embedded uses (CEF). We need a viable open source alternative to Chromium and all of its uses.
I’d pay considerable money for a good web browser that’s just a web browser. The likes of Google consider a user by their lifetime worth; something in the order of $270USD per user if they get them young enough (or was that Meta?). Anyway, I’d pay twice that for a good browser & I’m sure there would be other privacy focused individuals that would do the same. But the sad reality is that the vast majority of the population see browsers such as Firefox and those based on Chrome as free, so they’re simply not going to pay for a commercial browser, making the concept non-viable.
I’m not sure what the alternative is at the moment. I’ve just spent a bit of time re-familiarising myself with links (with X & framebuffer UI for inline images) and elinks (with JavaScript support) with the hope one or both could fill the majority of my needs. Sadly, that idea fell down the minute I was presented with a captcha logging in to osnews. Another browser I’m quite fond of on older hardware is NetSurf. Much works, much does not, but perhaps it offers a good base to develop, given a large enough developer base? As for the Firefox clones based on older releases such as Palemoon, I read a point of view this morning that I’d not considered before. That is, none of those forks are doing any large scale development. They’re keeping legacy, insecure APIs that Mozilla dropped long ago because it wasn’t possible to secure them. These are browsers based on legacy code with small developer bases and IMO, simply aren’t viable replacements. In short, right now I think we’re screwed… Every viable browser is simply a marketing extension by those that want to dominate the web, with advertising revenue as the core of their business.
As for email clients, there’s KMail for KDE (quite a capable MUA), Evolution, or if you spend a bit of time on it, mutt or neomutt. I’m using the latter with multiple IMAP accounts, but I opt to use tools like mbsync & protonmail to keep local copies of my mailboxes. This way, if my provider disappears, at least I have an archive of all my email in open formats that can be understood by pretty much any other MUA.
dexterous,
I was stuck at a command line needing to install nvidia drivers and thought I’d be clever and download them using elinks. Alas, while portions of the website were navigable, I could not get past the javascript form download barriers and had to download using another computer. Would have been nice had it worked 🙂
I agree they’re not doing the large scale development. Anyway it’s not really that the APIs are insecure, but that you have to trust the extensions that you are running. It would be like saying that linux is insecure because it can run malicious code. If we follow this logic to it’s natural conclusion we end up owners not having a right to sideload anything on the basis that it might be malicious. Incidentally both apple and mozilla have taken side loading rights away from owners in the name of security, but at the cost of owner freedoms (linux distros bundle the enterprise version of FF, which doesn’t have these forced restrictions).
Yeah, I’ve already shared my opinion about this in other posts :-/
The elephant in the room that almost nobody wants to see: paying for software. We want for free a product that is the sum of millions of work hours of high skilled workers. From this contradiction soon we get in the path of “evil corporations” and the like.
(Yes, corporations are frequently evil; but this does not imply that our problems always are its fault.)
Any thoughts on IceCat vs LibreWolf? IceCat has the advantage of being in the Fedora repo and is back by the GNU project.
I’m hoping that either Mozilla wakes up to the fact that its throwing away it the main feature people use and recommend it for. Or we get an Go-oo type situation. Failing those Servo reaches the point where it becomes easy for small projects to build good browsers.
> At this point I have no idea where to go. Chrome and its various skins are a no-go, obviously, and relatively soft forks like LibreWolf are still dependent on Firefox and Mozilla. Alternatives like Falkon also use the Chromium engine deep down, and have their own set of issues and lack of manpower to deal with.
Since mozilla laid of the servo browser engine team, it must be something worthwhile. If we want a true alternative by the time the other ones become unbearable, the time to invest is now.
Hyperbole much?!
Clearly, you might not be able to trust Mozilla and Chrome, but no reason for someone else not to launch a browser based on either Blink or WebKit engine (which are actively developed and have masses of money behind them) and produce a browser that is privacy protecting / respecting.
However, I think Gecko as an engine is a dead end without proper support (unless Microsoft decides to pick it up).
Were have the choices were have, not the ones were wish to have. But I think a third browser engine is dead.
Mozilla seems to have gone back on this: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/update-on-terms-of-use/
Hot take: Mozilla isn’t an open-source project anymore, it has devolved into an NGO that cares more about maintaining whatever sinecures exist inside the organization than efficiently managing project funds. They assumed the sponsorship deal with Google would run forever and never thought of creating a cash pile and an endowment fund in case the sponsorship deal expired.
Now Google will be forced to drop the sponsorship deal with Mozilla sometime this year (as a result of the ant-trust investigation Google is under), and Mozilla is obviously in a state of panic.
kurkosdr,
I agree they didn’t expect the deal to end and your other points. These monetization attempts are a reflection of their new reality. But they do have a large cash pile as others have pointed out, it’s just that without the inflow of new money they would drain it quickly at their current scale. They would need to decimate mozilla’s staff levels on the double if they want to make their savings last. Given the collapse of revenue, maybe it has to happen, but imagine a CEO doing that. I don’t think it would play out well and there might even be an emergency session to remove the CEO. They would forever be know as the CEO who killed mozilla/FF regardless of circumstance. I suspect CEOs would rather resign and they would have to vote in a new CEO to take a sledge hammer to mozilla. It seems unlikely to me that they would vote for this outcome. They’re more likely to vote for someone who promises more regardless of their (in)ability to make it happen.
Mozilla was a non profit who created a for-profit (the Mozilla Corporation) which started to burn money on dumb stuff like Firefox OS, buying other companies like Pocket, creating subsidiaries in countries like China or Taiwan which supposedly just dedicate to advertising and so on. I think what they missed is making a web browser is basically unprofitable, even Microsoft is a free rider now in that respect, So making it for-profit is not going to work. They tried to become Opera, and instead they should have invested their money establishing a structure like the Linux, Apache, Document foundation, etc. Try to find third parties dependent or in need of something like Firefox (Canonical, Red Hat and so on) and just provide the environment needed for these companies to provide the developers and colaborate on the project. Make it easy for new collaborators to join, and so on. That is how something like a Kernel development survives being developed in the open when obviously is an unprofitable product (you cannot create the Linux Kernel like an open source product as a company and pretend to make money selling it or bundling it with ads or whatever).
balmer,
I think Firefox OS would have been a noble goal….had they succeeded. I would have found it preferable to distribute software via the web than the proprietary walled gardens. The later having caused many problems for alternative mobile operating systems over the years. Mozilla didn’t know it was going to fail but maybe it was dumb to believe that they could actually compete against apple and google’s core products.
They are aware of how difficult it is to get people to pay up. It’s not for the lack of trying, they have been trying to diversify with paid products but on the whole mozilla’s user base haven’t shown much interest. They just want the free browser, which is hard to monetize without advertisers. Everyone’s critical of mozilla for that, but what should they do when everything else failed? I for one don’t know.
Usually linux is bundled with hardware like routers, hones, tablets, cable boxes, streaming devices, smart tvs, IOT, etc. These companies deploy linux on billions of products every year. They make money through unit sales/rentals and advertising. I don’t really know how much money the linux foundation makes from, say, my router or cable box. Is it zero? A buck? I really don’t know, it would be interesting to find out though.
I’ve heard others suggest mozilla should target the embedded market. Maybe they should, although it’s still not clear to me that the money would automatically start flowing in. Would they be selling something on top of the FOSS?
> Usually linux is bundled with hardware like routers, hones, tablets, cable boxes, streaming devices, smart tvs, IOT, etc.
To clarify this point, in case it was not understood, what I mean is that this is a product that seems cannot be sold by itself to final clients, specially if open source, so make the companies that want to integrate it in their products / depend on it, etc be your clients instead. The product that you sell them is the ability to do 1/100 of the development in exchange of the full product and having a say on the direction of development. I think there are many examples. The money comes from the companies themselves. They donate to the project because they have an economic incentive on the project to survive. It’s not that the Linux Foundation has any copyright to get a percentage on the sell of a router, just their sponsors pay a fee to keep the project alive.
balmer,
Thanks for the clarification. I don’t specifically disagree with anything you are saying, but it’s just not obvious to me who’s willing to pay to subsidize mozilla/FF instead of say using chromium for free. Maybe I’m just being too pessimistic.
Yes, I agree the threat of loosing something can be a motivator. This reminds me of the financial trouble over at OpenBSD. Their team contributed so much to the industry and yet nobody was paying for it. Fortunately companies stepped in to donate enough to keep them alive. I think what ends up happening is that a few cash cows subsidize hoards of freeloaders. I guess this can be sustainable as long as the companies agree to keep paying.
I’d still love to see specific numbers. I work with many companies who are dependent on linux and yet they don’t pay for it. It makes me really curious about how much, if any of the money I pay for linux based products & services actually goes to pay for the open source developers & projects they’re built on. For example I know how much I pay for a router or phone, but did any of that help fund open source kernel development? Now I’m very curious.
Hmm, I’d switch to LibreWolf, but I’m not sure… Web browsers and operating systems are just too security sensitive to install whatever software made by 4 randos on the internet (no offense intended). I myself use GrapheneOS and Aurora OS (universal blue), so my bar is not that high on that respect. Problem with a very very small and unknown community is who says the dude with the keys to the kingdom is not going to do something fishy tomorrow?
I had a bad experience with Mull browser and Fennec F-droid, both maintained by a one-man army. At some point I was running unadvertedly like 4 versions behind, and now I’m just using Firefox on Android (and also Linux), so in the end you end up having to choose between privacy and security nowadays with web browsers. It’s true that at least on Android I could be using the excellent Vanadium fork from the folks at Graphene, but I really want addons.