I doubt that. Mozilla wastes a ton, not only on CEO salaries but tangential projects and other dogoodery.
Maybe I'm reading this wrong, but when I do the math (33M x 5 x 12) I get $1.98B.
Maybe you meant $1/month?
The problem is that micropayments are not interesting for most news outlets: the friction of current solutions is high, the resulting revenue stream, unsteady. Monthly / yearly subscriptions bring a better revenue stream, and cost way less.
If micropayments were indeed zero-friction, and effectively zero-cost, maybe they'd be (reluctantly) integrated.
This is a commitment to support the development, because the development should be oingoing. Not Netflix-style, but Patreon-style.
(Also see how JetBrains handles "subscriptions" to their closed-source software. Once you've paid, the version is forever yours. Updates are bought with some additional sums if desired.)
Maybe we could go back to where people paid once and could pay separately for support?
This simply does not exist for any software that is internet connected.
It's not feasible at all to call a browser "done" and leave it alone, so if you want one that's independent from adtech, a subscription is kind of your only option.
It makes sure that people who continue to use continue to pay. Upfront charges are often either too low with long term users free-riding or too high, in case the project is abandoned. Subscription makes it much more likely to price products correctly.
I could not disagree more. Subscriptions for software are a deeply unfair approach. Great for the companies, of course, but not for users.
A more fair approach is to charge for upgrades and support instead. At least that way, users only pay if/when they choose to obtain additional value.
But the solution to this is to offer both forms, as several companies do.
If users want to stay on an old version, why shouldn't they be allowed to? Sure, there may be additional security considerations or missing functionality, but there's nothing wrong with a user making that choice.
It results in users having a broken experience or sites being very conservative in what features they use.
Perhaps ironically, this was also the genesis of Firefox
That's not entirely accurate (or at least, while accurate, is missing a lot of significant context) Mozilla was creating within Netscape, not in opposition to it, as a steward org for the open-sourcing of Navigator & Communicator. Even when Netscape was acquired by AOL, AOL continued to fund[0] Mozilla for years after the acquisition.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20050324025052/http://www.wired....
https://website-archive.mozilla.org/www.mozilla.org/firefox_...
Mozilla was created in 1998 to open-source Netscape Communicator suite. Mozilla released its own suite, also called "Mozilla" (e.g. "Mozilla 1.0" [0])
Independently of that effort, Dave Hyatt and Blake Ross made an experimenal, cut-down version of just the browser part of the suite, which they called "Phoenix", as in a Phoenix rising from the ashes. That's a fork. That's a fork by any metric.
They later rebranded Phoenix as Firefox, and eventually the Mozilla suite was abandoned. Mozilla changed tack in 2003 and switched to developing Firefox and Thunderbird as independent products [1]
[0] https://www-archive.mozilla.org/releases/mozilla1.0
[1] https://www-archive.mozilla.org/roadmap/roadmap-02-apr-2003
If not this time then the next. Just the fact that the commission was allowed to propose such a blatant privacy invading law is enough for me to know that privacy is not a something that the EU is serious about.
Non-profit is better than gov but private is way worse than even gov.
But to think that the EU would be the guarantor of everyone's privacy on the web, is completely ridiculous.
Also your argument is not valid. When Google detects that you break their rules they ban your account. When the government has this kind power, then they have the power to do worse things to you, like imprisonment, fines, putting you on a blacklist and much more...
Those two things are not comparable.
The EU does better than the US for consumer-related privacy issues. But I don't think the same can be said when the government wants to slap a label of "national security" onto something. That puts us into a whole different world of "anything goes".
Article 45 of eIDAS 2.0 will roll back web security by 12 years - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38181114 - Nov 2023 (77 comments)
Joint statement of scientists and NGOs on the EU’s proposed eIDAS reform - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38126997 - Nov 2023 (63 comments)
Last Chance to fix eIDAS: Secret EU law threatens Internet security - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38109494 - Nov 2023 (299 comments)
EFF about EU: EIDAS 2.0 Sets a Dangerous Precedent for Web Security - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33966364 - Dec 2022 (44 comments)
EU legislation eIDAS article 45.2 may force inclusion of insecure QWAC root CAs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32093891 - July 2022 (36 comments)
Mozilla and the EFF publish letter about the danger of Article 45.2 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30549119 - March 2022 (13 comments)
Mozilla is an open-source project. When an open-source project somehow loses its way, it's often forked by a new team of contributors who have a better idea. This happened several times: Open Office / Libre Office, MySQL / MariaDB, X86 / X11.org, hell, even GCC / egcs in the 1990s.
But this likely cannot happen to Mozilla, which is basically kept afloat by Google handing it some money for keeping it as a default search engine, about $400M a year currently [1]. There is little chance that an alternative "Better Mozilla" organization would collect as much, or at least half as much, to support a fork. It would e.g. take 33M users who agree to pay $5/mo for a Mozilla "support subscription" to collect $400M a year.
Maybe a web browser can be maintained for less than 400M, but likely not much less. The modern web is fiendishly complex, and you need both a desktop version (three platforms) and a mobile version.
[1]: https://www.pcmag.com/news/mozilla-signs-lucrative-3-year-go...