I don't think Mozilla's income is a problem. They are making money. The problem is how they spend that money. My impression is that they lost the original spirit. Mozilla lacked a BDFL that would embody that spirit.
What's going on at Mozilla is probably what's going to happen for Linux once Linus is out.
Both these pieces of open source software are way too big to be replicated now by a dude or a bunch of dudes and also way too big to be maintained by people on their free time. They require resources and organization which itself corrupt the original spirit.
Or maybe that whole firefox debacle made me a little gloomy today...
Agreed, income isn't a problem. It's vision. But I don't want to support Mozilla in a financial way if their vision doesn't match my own. This may sound presumptuous but we really need an open web and Mozilla is one of the last defenders (and failing). I don't want my monetary donations to go to side projects, I want a great open source browser as the focus.
Maybe, just maybe, once Mozilla fails people and organizations will finally understand what terrible mistake they made by giving total control over the web to Google. Maybe this could be the beginning of a new project, managed by an institution with clear aims and no Mozilla-Foundation-style bullshit.
Remember the early days of Firefox? It crashed often, it was slow, but we had great expectations ad supported it. It wasn't easy to use it at all. At some point it made a breakthrough and installing Firefox was the first thing to do on a fresh install of any machine. People don't remember or know these times and take the web browser for granted. But now that Google has long left their original "Don't be evil" mantra and all tech is focused around the web, having an open, neutral browser is more important than ever. I wish people - including the ones at Mozilla - appreciated this fact more.
It crashed often, it was slow - but still faster and far more usable than the horror of IE6. As we're headed for a web that's built for Google (...Chrome), challenging the status quo may be far harder.
As long as the most Mozilla's money comes from Google (86% of revenue! [1]) income is a problem. Why is Mozilla and Firefox portrayed as the last bastion of free web technology if they depend on wealth of their biggest and evil-est competitor?
> My impression is that they lost the original spirit. Mozilla lacked a BDFL that would embody that spirit.
Since we are sharing our impressions, mine is that the Mozilla Foundation's current CEO doesn't believe in Firefox. Instead, I think, they are leveraging Firefox' popularity to try and position the Mozilla Foundation as a defender of internet freedom, at which point they won't need Firefox anymore.
What happens to Firefox once they achieve that? No idea. The cynic in me believes they will keep doing whatever Chrome is doing until the project is virtually dead, but I honestly hope I'm wrong.
> I don't think Mozilla's income is a problem. They are making money. The problem is ...
... from whom they get the money. Its primarily Google who keeps Firefox alive to prevent lawsuits against their market dominance due to missing alternatives.
A clear indication that they are in that area a de-facto a monopoly.
> What's going on at Mozilla is probably what's going to happen for Linux once Linus is out.
> Both these pieces of open source software are way too big to be replicated now by a dude or a bunch of dudes and also way too big to be maintained by people on their free time. They require resources and organization which itself corrupt the original spirit.
I doubt that one. There are a lot of big companies who employ the core developers as well as the Linux Foundation which employs Greg K-H [1]. Unlike Firefox where there isn't much corporate interest behind it, there is an absurd amount of corporate interest behind Linux so in the worst case the Kernel will become a corporate committee joint effort, but definitely it won't go down the hell that Firefox currently is.
Having lots of corporations involved in something doesn't protect the direction it goes in. Corporate interests could easily, for example, try to start adding in closed source blobs or providing support for people doing so. In fact, when Linus is gone, they probably will.
Software projects do seem to benefit from having firm voices empowered to say "no". Committees are incapable of doing that. Sooner or later they end up stuffed with friendly people who compromise their way to yes. That isn't an unacceptable outcome, but it'll be a different and probably worse project when that happens.
I suppose there are counterexamples - like Debian. But they have some very interesting social traditions and they don't let just anyone in to the club.
Commitees will be formed, instead of linux for the people, there will be corporate committees, then of course the diversity and quota ones, and in the end, "the one that pleases the sponsors"... The end results? Instead of Linus showing the middle finger to Nvidia (again), they will issue a statement, that "without contributers nvidia, we're unable to... yada yada", and binary blobs (or worse) will become part of the kernel.
None of the core lieutenants would be doing that work if their interests wasn't aligned with Linus'.
The culture around kernel development is strong, at the risk of scaring away newcomers. But a tight knit community also means it probably wouldn't change much even without Linus.
What's going on at Mozilla is probably what's going to happen for Linux once Linus is out.
Both these pieces of open source software are way too big to be replicated now by a dude or a bunch of dudes and also way too big to be maintained by people on their free time. They require resources and organization which itself corrupt the original spirit.
Or maybe that whole firefox debacle made me a little gloomy today...