<story><title>Earth to Mozilla: Come back home</title><url>http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/doc/2014/04/12/earth-to-mozilla-come-back-to-us/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>kevingadd</author><text>As much as I identify with the motivations behind this post, it&amp;#x27;s utterly out of touch. The author complains about the realities of ad-supported business when the truth is that the for-pay browser market died out over a decade ago because it simply was not a sustainable way to operate a business. Even if Microsoft hadn&amp;#x27;t begun giving IE away for free, someone else would have eventually - they&amp;#x27;d swoop in with their VC money, demolish the browser market entirely with a pricing race-to-the-bottom, and then explode like all startups do and leave us screwed. At least when Microsoft did this, they kept shipping their browser afterwards (other than that IE development pause... sigh.)&lt;p&gt;Ideas like intentionally fragmenting the userbase (with some absurd idea like &amp;#x27;PrivateFox&amp;#x27;) merely contribute to the issues he highlights; if revenue to fund development is scarce, why would you actively undermine your revenue base &lt;i&gt;and&lt;/i&gt; waste resources on the product that is destroying your revenue? It&amp;#x27;s absurd, no sane organizational leader - moral imperative or not - would ever do this. Mozilla cannot do this.&lt;p&gt;Hypothetical revenue sources like crowdfunding and intentcasting are great, but it would be utterly irrational for Mozilla to switch wholesale to some new unproven revenue model. Even if it works for a while, eventually they run the risk of scorching the earth (like how Zynga and co completely obliterated viral pathways on Facebook, effectively destroying their revenue streams).&lt;p&gt;If you want Mozilla to adopt a new business model, you&amp;#x27;ll need to find a new business model that will actually work at their scale, then prove it works. They can&amp;#x27;t afford to undermine their extremely important efforts (on Firefox, etc.) just to satisfy your curiosity and desires for an ideal world.</text></comment>
<story><title>Earth to Mozilla: Come back home</title><url>http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/doc/2014/04/12/earth-to-mozilla-come-back-to-us/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>kijin</author><text>It is indeed disturbing that Mozilla&amp;#x27;s finances depend so much on advertising. No matter how well-intentioned the folks at Mozilla Foundation&amp;#x2F;Corporation might be, it&amp;#x27;s difficult for human beings to avoid getting side-tracked when their wallet are running thin and there&amp;#x27;s easy money up for grabs out there.&lt;p&gt;But I don&amp;#x27;t think the author&amp;#x27;s suggestions are compatible what what we (or at least, I) want Firefox to be, either.&lt;p&gt;1. Spinning off a variant named PrivateFox just sends the message that the regular Firefox will no longer respect your privacy. It will also make regular, free, not-private Firefox users second-class citizens of the Internet. People deserve to have their privacy protected, regardless of whether they can pay or not. In fact, people who can&amp;#x27;t pay (minors, the poor, citizens of oppressive third-world regimes, etc.) are often in need of the most protection. Moreover, even if you can afford PrivateFox, the payment creates a paper trail that might negate the benefit of using PrivateFox.&lt;p&gt;2. Crowdsourcing sounds cool, but only if everyone benefits. There&amp;#x27;s no point in creating &amp;quot;The World’s First Fully Private Browser&amp;quot; and keeping it proprietary. If there exists technology to improve everyone&amp;#x27;s privacy, it should be included in every copy of Firefox by default.&lt;p&gt;3. Intentcasting is an interesting concept, but in the context of a web browser it sounds like just another &amp;quot;Ubuntu sends my searches to Amazon&amp;quot; debacle waiting to happen. If I want good privacy, I probably don&amp;#x27;t want to tell faceless multinational corporations what I want to buy, either.&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, the only alternative that I can think of is a variant of Wikimedia Foundation&amp;#x27;s annual donation drive. As a long-time Firefox fan, I would certainly donate as much as I can. (Is there someone at Mozilla who can give creepy stares in a banner ad as well as Jimmy Wales does?) But again there&amp;#x27;s a problem: Mozilla&amp;#x27;s budget is several times the size of Wikimedia&amp;#x27;s (300MM vs. 80MM), and I&amp;#x27;m not sure that the moral value of Firefox, although significant, exceeds that of Wikipedia. Mozilla needs to be seriously trimmed down if they&amp;#x27;re ever going to be supported by donations.</text></comment>