That may be true, but few people ask the follow up question “why do people expect things to be free?”
The answer is usually because companies like Google had pulled a bait-and-switch of sorts where they offered a service for free long before they made a commercial business of people’s profiles. They set this expectation of free themselves.
And you can’t really blame a consumer for wanting to bag a bargain.
Free was a requirement to have any sort of audience. It's still a burden in a lot ways. I suppose there's some version of the future where Amazon builds a microtransaction platform that allows direct end-user billing of the Lambda-time it took to serve your web request. That would be interesting.
- Email wasn’t free (particularly in the pre-web days)
- you had to pay for internet usage per phone call (and it used to be expensive before ISPs went mainstream!)
- hosting wasn’t free (Geocities changed this but there were heavy limitations that even in the 90s surfers felt: storage space, ad banners injected into your site, no friendly domain name, etc)
Most of the free stuff was pretty naff. But people didn’t mind because they used that free stuff for doing generally naff things with. There was a certain beauty to it, like walking through a car boot / yard sale you find the occasional gems but nobody had any illusions of greatness.
What happened after was professional businesses making professional services free. That was the game changer. And it put a lot of non-free services out of business.
People see the digital as ethereal - and it lacks a fixed(ish) production cost per unit, unlike a physical product.
I don't know what a fair price is for access to any form of digital content, other than less than the price of a AAA game (Orange Box excluded).
More recently and it is actually perfectly legal to copy music off the radio and programs off the TV. It’s even legal for people to share their VHS recording with friends and family and keep those recordings around indefinitely. A great many of purple took advantage of that — those who could afford to buy singles or films would do so while others were happy to wait until it was aired and then copy it one a blank cassette.
Trademarks were also less aggressively pursued. That might have been because before the internet was as commoditised it was apparent when Bobby Joe used Disney’s IP for their kids birthday. But now it’s so much easier for companies to identify and clamp down on what they perceive as theft of their intellectual property.
Whether you agree with current copyright laws or not, there has still been a long history of precedence of greater consumer rights and minor transgressions being ignored...then that all changed when content went digital. However people’s attitudes didn’t change with the switch to digital content. At least not initially. Napster was born from the generation of people who grew up recording music from the radio but who no longer listened to the radio. At the time of Napster, downloading was still pretty slow (or, more precisely, peers uploading the MP3s you wanted were slow) and most MP3s were sub CD quality anyway. So if you could afford to buy CDs then you probably would have done.
The real change was when downloading became more convenient than legally buying. That’s really when piracy took off into the mainstream. But when that happened that was because consumers were desperate for a more modern business model while content owners kept dragging their heels by squeezing their antiquated business model and threatening anyone who didn’t comply.
Let’s also not forget that, for a long time, legally owned content was worse than the same content pirated. eg CD root kits, the unskipable “you wouldn’t steal a handbag” adverts that ironically only appeared on legally purchased DVDs, DVD region locking, etc. If you owned a pirated CD or DVD then your user experience was often better than those who paid for their legal copy.
So I find it really hard to be sympathetic to content holders because they’ve lobbied to extend copyright, reduce consumer rights on digital content, and have held back the entertainment industries for years with anti-consumer practices while the world evolved around them. And I find it hypocritical that they then moan about how everyone else is playing foul and they’re just the victims in all this. It smacks of playground bullies moaning when kids refuse to give them lunch money.
But this is all a very different topic to the one of online services, which was the topic originally being discussed.
I take it by saying 'Firefox's Backend' you're talking about Gecko, and with Chromium, Blink (fork of Webkit).
They’re just browser engines. What's the difference in terms of privacy? Nothing. They just render web pages.
No way they’d have two engines switchable, would make it a headache for developers and testers.
Naturally there's a cost to all things: developers need to eat; they need a work/life balance.
Unless there's financial backing for a concept or project it will have a hard time getting off the ground.
And unless there's some corporate interest in what's being worked on it simply won't be written.
The best hope is open-source outreach not as benevolence, but as part of a large company's recruitment policy.
One thing I'd like to see is Microsoft licensing Firefox's backend, and allowing the user to chose which engine to use.
Chromium might have some major advantages, but user privacy (and ultimately experience) will never be a part of it - we need to stop relying on corporations that have intentions that are ultimately adversarial to the end user.
Will that ever happen? Fuck no - Microsoft already bundles adware into their $300 operating system.