Let me pay for Firefox

The post seems to present a false dichotomy:

    FOSS leads to enshittification, advertising, and bad practices.

    Paid software ensures quality assurance.

I believe counter-examples exist for both models. Many FOSS projects have avoided becoming tools for user exploitation, while numerous paid software products have deteriorated due to corporate greed.

The poster worked at Mozilla Corporation, so I think they’re saying that unless you pay for Firefox, it’s getting funded in other ways that aren’t in its users’ best interest, like MoCo selling user data, which they’ve admitted to.

But, when MoCo sold out its users, they lost the ability to ask me to pay, because what would stop them from both taking my money and selling user data?

I’ll gladly donate and have donated to an organizations whose products I use where those organizations would rather fail and be dismantled than sell their users’ data. I’ll even pay companies that don’t lie about it. But, Mozilla said they’d never sell out, and then they did.