This 'broken' goes all the way back to Marc Andreesen.

He leaves a publicly funded team building a web browser, starts a commercial entity, and for whatever reason they don't feel they can charge for their browser funded by private equity. You could in fact buy it in a box at the local electronics store, but with the pricing I suspect most of that money went to distribution, not NCC. So they try to find other ways to make money, like their web server and overpriced consulting (for their notoriously awful web server).

The entire dotcom era then emulated this pattern. There were certainly other logistical reasons for it (like the state of credit card billing at the time), but I can't help but feel like this was the rock that started the avalanche of adware and commercial cyberstalking.

And so here we are 25 years later, and the last remnant of Netscape is trying to build the free browser and not much to fund it. I'm kinda surprised it lasted this long.

To be fair to them though, and particularly on the topic of this story, if they were going to build a free browser, it always should have been on the community to contribute to the dev tools. It's the part of the browser that we have a vested interest in.

And in fact, it used to be that way. Firefox had no dev tools at the beginning. They copied a very popular add-on, which I now recall made absolutely no sense to me at the time. I felt like their attempt was less effective in several ways, and why are they shouldering out this tool that made them in the first place (as GP asserts, nobody develops first-class support on a browser they can't debug in, or at least not when there is an alternative.)

The tool was firebug. It was a big difference when browsers didn’t offer built in tools.

When Firebug came out it was such a big deal that it was the sole reason our IE-only product (which was not a simple application, it was fully-fledged fleet management, tracking, mapping, and reporting platform, entirely web-based) got cross-browser compatibility (we made it work with Firefox).

Being able to use Firebug was such a huge boon to development back in the day, though it probably looks primitive today.

Firebug is what got me to use Firefox in the beginning. I continued to use Firefox out of habit after firebug went away, though the replacement was inferior (it still is). Now... I might have to switch to Chrome, but I really don’t want to due to privacy issues. I suppose I could use it just for development.

I think Firebug got most of us to use Firefox, and then we got other people to use Firefox, directly or indirectly.

I worked on two teams back to back. Everyone was using Firebug. Management was telling us NOT to support Firefox, but tough shit, you want this work done yesterday and the only way that's going to happen is by engineering on Firefox/Firebug and then going back to black magic for the 10% that didn't work on IE (and soon, Safari).

I think SV's theory is that if you make something that potentially a billion people will use, that's worth doing even if you don't know the business model yet because when the fog of war clears you might be FAAMG

> Mozilla's open source efforts are/were a loss leader for ... nothing. Their work was motivated by altruism, not profit, and that turned out to be, well, not profitable. That's why they're pivoting; altruism alone wasn't enough to pay the bills.

Except it didn't turn out to be "not profitable". Leaving aside the issue of dependence on companies like Google and the frankly ridiculous exec compensation, all publicly available data shows that Mozilla is very financially healthy and has been for a long time.

The claim of financial issues is implied by the corporatespeak press release, but simply not supported by any evidence that I've seen.

Is open source a loss leader for Apple, really? Or is it something they mostly get for free, but have to contribute a little back to shape it how they want?

The point I read from GP, at least, was that open source is cheap for these big corps because they get a ton of benefit for it, but non-profit (either orgs or individuals) are bearing the brunt of the cost.

Apple is the primary contributor and maintainer of WebKit at this point since Google forked Blink off of it.

There are consulting firms like Igalia that work on all three engines, and they're funded mostly from big clients like Bloomberg and banks so developers there can use flexbox and CSS grid everywhere.

Google sometimes works on WebKit as well if they want to try to improve compatibility of websites, but the project is mostly Apple employees now.

> contribute a little back

Clang was certainly an in-house Apple project from the start, and it would be hard to claim that it hasn't been a project that has seen huge uptake outside of Apple.

This is not entirely accurate. LLVM was started by Chris Lattner before he was hired by Apple, which were probably spooked by gcc going GPLv3 by then.

Yes for LLVM, but Clang was made entirely while Chris Lattner was employed by Apple[1]. Before Clang you have to use LLVM GCC frontend (llvm-gcc) to compile C code under LLVM, which was the default in Xcode until 5.x (although Clang was added in Xcode 4.x, I remembered it being quite unstable at the time).

[1]: https://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/cfe-dev/2007-July/000000.ht... (announcement)

LLVM and Clang are both projects started by Chris Lattner, but they are not the same project.

Do you mean that Clang leverages LLVM on the back end?

WebKit, Swift, LLVM, that's it really. Relative to marketcap, Apple open sources the least, probably even less than Oracle, Intel, and friends. Swift and LLVM benefit from being open source--it would actually be unusable if it weren't. None of the things which give them market share like iMessage or their chip designs are remotely open source. It doesn't compare at all to Google's open source which includes Chromium, the entire Android operating system, Bazel, protocol buffers, Go--too many to list.

+ CUPS. Also should mention that LLVM is huge thing.

Totally agree that Apple not tend to open sourcing software unless needed.

KHTML has an LGPL license. WebCore forked from that, so its source code must be released with a compatible license.

> altruism alone wasn't enough to pay the bills.

That certainly depends on how big the bills are.