Without that deal, there wouldn’t be a Firefox. If/when it’s gone, there’s no one capable/willing to fund Mozilla to that amount.
Really there’s only 1 other company who can throw that level of money at us and it’s Microsoft. Without Google bidding up the price, doubtful they would pay as much for Bing to be the default search and it’s not like Firefox users would welcome that change.
Free software doesn’t work for long without some sort of corporate sponsorship at some point, and it’s not in anyone’s interest to fund it at this point. (And don’t say “the EU should” most Europeans are not clamoring for their governments to spend money on an American browser company with web compatibility issues that no one tests against)
The problem with Mozzilla is that they don’t just fund development, they have control of it and they receive almost all funding from a direct competitor with a horrible privacy record.
I trust FSF, Debian, Linux Foundation, etc. not to violate my privacy. Clearly the same cannot be said for Mozilla.
And I'm more than willing to believe the legal difficulties of the foundation would be a nightmare, but would an EU sponsored fork of some kind be such a terrible idea? A move of headquarters to a suitable city and so on.
Remove the tracking, maybe even a few mandates to offer it up in certain settings that receive EU funding already.
> Without that deal, there wouldn’t be a Firefox. If/when it’s gone, there’s no one capable/willing to fund Mozilla to that amount.
There's some irony when I read that while my laptop is running Linux Mint, which in my perception is much superior in many ways to the competition.
I agree that Free software needs sponsorship, especially when it is such a fundamental part of interacting with a computer (which a web browser certainly is).
I am not certain that this sponsorship coming from a company that wants to undermine it is a good thing.
All of the funding for Firefox (or nearly all?) comes from Google. There is no way for you as a private person to donate money to firefox development. That of course means that Mozilla needs to keep its large donner happy lest the money go away.
On top of that, the recent google monopoly ruling means that most likely Google cannot continue to donate the massive chunk of change yearly to firefox that they have been. That could mean the death of firefox.
Oh wow, how have I not heard of this? I assume Firefox can still strike some deal for revenue sharing of people who choose to use Google on Firefox, though? Or was the money purely for having Google be the default?
That Mozilla seems to actually give a shit about something for the first time in decades speaks volumes to how anticompetitive that deal was.