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Mozilla lays off 70

(techcrunch.com)
929 points ameshkov | 2 comments | 15 Jan 20 19:48 UTC | HN request time: 0.403s | source
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musicale ◴[15 Jan 20 22:56 UTC] No.22059746[source]▶
> “You may recall that we expected to be earning revenue in 2019 and 2020 from new subscription products as well as higher revenue from sources outside of search. This did not happen

I don't want subscription garbage, and I don't want Firefox advertising stuff to me.

However, I have no idea how I'd try to fund Mozilla when most of their work is on a product that they give away for free.

I can't imagine that grants from foundations or the government could cover their budget, and I can't really see them being amazingly successful with apps (although I would pay for a bulletproof, high quality ad blocker for iPhone) or hardware (although Purism's phones and laptops seem kind of in Mozilla's ballpark, I doubt they are making much money.) Nobody wants to pay for web services, and it's hard to compete with the many cloud incumbents, so those don't really seem like a good options either. Running a consulting business to fund the browser doesn't seem like a winning idea. Development tools seem to be free from the likes of {Microsoft, Apple, Google} as well, so that doesn't seem like a great business. I can't imagine many people paying for Rust or webasm tools either. Perhaps web game development tools or platforms? Anyway, it's a hard problem.

So HN, does anyone have any actual, serious, good ideas on how Mozilla can make money and keep delivering a good Firefox browser (and Rust, webasm, etc.) for free?

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1. pnako ◴[16 Jan 20 05:01 UTC] No.22061793[source]▶
Why not something like the Linux Foundation?

Stop all the marketing and the nonsense advocacy, focus on developing a browser, get other companies to fund development. It's in the interest of quite a few vendors to have a good, neutral browser.

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2. modo_mario ◴[16 Jan 20 13:30 UTC] No.22064290[source]▶
The linux foundation gets money because quite a lot of products, companies depend on it. Their servers, their iot devices, etc, etc A lot of the code contributions come from the industries that depend on it not just volunteers or people payed with donations by small time linux lovers.

Nobody directly depends on Mozilla and or features in their product and so nobody will give them money because of that. (you can argue rust trough kubernetes and such is an example of the opposite but despite their big influence and contribution it's not really a mozilla product) Electron has chromium at it's core, CEF apps have chromium at their core, all the other popular alternatives have chromium at their core and google has nice control. Despite that this dominance is ultimately bad for everyone. Google gets too much control over internet standards and their implementation. It is trash. and Mozzila depends on them too for their funding.

I'd say we even risk that they wouldn't get hit with monopoly rulings if Mozilla and firefox dies despite their competition being utterly dependant on and at the mercy of the direction of their product.