this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2024
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Privacy
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Yeah. Maybe I'm just old (I'm 40).
I would be happy to donate. But, the reality is.. donations don't work in my experience. One of my projects went FrontPage on all the major tech sites (and even was mentioned in Linux format magazine).
I got $300 in donations.
$250 was from a person I knew...
Backend projects often get screwed more, and I guess you probably need to hope you get supported by companies like Redhat ultimately. This may be why in my case. But backend projects always have people dissing them (frontend projects just need to look good and markety)
I think what's more important is that it's open source to be honest. We're actually lucky we still have Mozilla honestly.
In Mozilla browser days (after Netscape), id imagine it would have been a struggle to get a good pay. The people still there I suspect took a massive risk, and could have moved to lots of other companies like Google instead quite easily
I think they deserve to get rewarded..
I feel like Mozilla could have been what NextCloud is today. Totally free, open source, and offering a vast offering of office apps, with paid hosted versions. It could be all neatly integrated into Firefox, and you would pay a premium to use them without self hosting. The only thing they did was create Firefox VPN, and the only reason most people use VPNs is because of scammy marketing.
Yes.. Similarly, there are lots of browsers that failed too.. KHTML for instance is what Chrome and safari was based off..
They have a huge number of projects they tried.. Including their own mobile phone OS which they were actively shipping (it's a pity it didn't survive, would have been nice to have a 3rd OS)
It's really a risk / time payoff here. The reality is, when you see projects like this, there are 20 more which fail.
When you have limited resources, things like Firefox VPN actually make sense, because its low risk (there's a lot of competitors, but its fast to implement).
An office suite takes a huge amount of resources, and is a lot of work.
VPN's do have their uses. But, I agree.. 99% of it is scum marketing
When Mozilla was founded the idea of hosted webapps didn't exist. Quite the frankly web standards didn't yet exist to allow such a thing to exist. Those were the days when you'd use Flash, Shockwave or Silverlight just to view media content on the web.
But I do agree, they could be investing right now into feature rich hosted services, but they've only half-assed any paid services they've tried to integrate and then dropped them because they couldn't get enough users to make it worth continuing the effort (mostly due to the half-assed effort they put in to start with)
Exactly because Mozilla was around to see the Internet grow and mature they should have been fit to create such a suite.