I just saw a post complaining about the Mozilla layoffs.
I wanted to point out that the vast majority of their income (over 85% in 2022) is from having Google as the default search engine - Ironically, the anti monopoly lawsuit against Google will end this.
Expect things to get worse.
Please don’t assume it was just a cruel choice.
Serious question, is there actually a FOSS project out there at the scale of something like Firefox that survives on only donations?
No because people choose diss cause it’s free. I mean they might say other things but then the vast majority do not donate to anything. People are cheap and that’s why we are where we are with all the ads.
Feels kind of weird, if thats the case how did Linux come as far as it is today?
Corporate support of development, and I’m not just talking about Redhat and SUSE. Hell, Microsoft is a major contributor to the kernel.
VLC I would say
VLC also has a company behind it: https://videolabs.io/
Not the same scale but Signal has a rather new approach for a messaging client. Completely free and funded by user donations - at least that’s the direction they’re trying to head as their initial seed funding starts running low. I’ve doubled my donations for Signal because I’d like to help prove that its a working model and I encourage everyone who uses it to donate, even if it’s just once. I’d love to see Firefox head in that direction where funding goes directly to the browser’s development. If I donate to Firefox today it might go to one of their dozen or so other pet projects that are unrelated to the browser. I think their side projects are great and glad they were able to do them while they had the cash, but funding is clearly drying up and they need a whole restructure to keep the browser alive.