this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2024
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The best ones are thoughts that many people can relate to and they find something funny or interesting in regular stuff.
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You may want to educate yourself before spreading unnecessary FUD. Firefox is free and open source, and always has been. There's no danger in Firefox becoming a paid browser because even if they tried, it would just be forked and maintained by another community or group.
Mozilla does have a for-profit arm called the Mozilla Corporation, and they manage the money received from Google and others. But that doesn't mean Firefox is going to become paid even if Google gets broken up by the antitrust efforts of the US government.
Maintaining a web browser in the 2020s is an expensive thing to do. You need full time employees who specialise in all the systems that make up a browser, and can't leave security-critical parts like ensuring the integrity of the JavaScript sandbox to volunteer hobbyists. It's far from the only thing Mozilla spend money on, so if they need to mage cost savings, it won't necessarily stop them being able to maintain Firefox, but another organisation picking it up if they do stop isn't likely.
I appreciate what you're saying, and you're not wrong about the level of effort. But I take exception to the implication that, somehow, paid developers are better developers than OSS or hobbyist ones.
Getting paid for something doesn't make you good, or diligent. It doesn't even make you competent.
But it does mean you can spend forty hours a week or thereabouts putting effort into a particular goal and maintaining the knowledge, skills and experience to keep doing it to a high standard without having to sink time and effort into something else in order to get paid enough to live on.