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> Out of curiosity, what services and products are you paying for? To be fair you're asking the wrong person. I pay for a ton of products. I pay for IntelliJ w

> Out of curiosity, what services and products are you paying for? To be fair you're asking the wrong person. I pay for a ton of products. I pay for IntelliJ which I think is $150 per year. HubSpot which will probably get $1k from me... I pay for Gmail... I think it's $4 per user per month? TeamCity, CircleCI ... NYTimes (yeah, I actually pay). ... but I do think you're right here. I'm actually legitimately curious to understand this issue. I want to focus my product, Polar, on being a premium document management platform for people VERY serious about research: https://getpolarized.io https://getpolarized.io ... I want to understand more about this mindset though. I think you can make a go at things if you have a VERY premium product focused on a tight niche (at least initially). > both by license and by how it is developed. I'd like to argue that this is false. The argument behind Open Source is that it's developed by the community and that by being open there is some sort of community development behind it. However, that's not what we see from Open Source outside of enterpise. 99% of Mozilla's development comes from paid Mozilla engineers. > I'd rather use Mozilla's Firefox, instead of products with obscure VC-backed business models I mean this is sort of a logical fallacy. Just because something is based on a company doesn't mean they are trying to do something inherently wrong.

sfink 7y ago
> 99% of Mozilla's development comes from paid Mozilla engineers. While this is by and large true, Mozilla does still have a pretty solid base of volunteer contributors. It's nowhere close to what it used to be back in the day when more than half the development was done by volunteers. But there are still serious contributions coming from volunteers every day, and as a long-time employee, it still has a major impact on the feel of Mozilla development work. You won't be ignored or shut down because you're not being paid, if you have an idea for a different way of doing things that works better, it'll be accepted and supported even if it incurs ongoing maintenance, etc. (Well, assuming people decide it's worth the ongoing overhead, of course; I'm just saying that it's common in other supposedly open development organizations to only accept isolated improvements that make core developers' lives easier.) I do miss the days when external contributors were a much bigger part. It's tough when people need to eat, and the system complexity has risen, making it harder to get started in many areas. Contributors welcome!

sfink 7y ago

> 99% of Mozilla's development comes from paid Mozilla engineers. While this is by and large true, Mozilla does still have a pretty solid base of volunteer contributors. It's nowhere close to what it used to be back in the day when more than half the development was done by volunteers. But there are still serious contributions coming from volunteers every day, and as a long-time employee, it still has a major impact on the feel of Mozilla development work. You won't be ignored or shut down because you're not being paid, if you have an idea for a different way of doing things that works better, it'll be accepted and supported even if it incurs ongoing maintenance, etc. (Well, assuming people decide it's worth the ongoing overhead, of course; I'm just saying that it's common in other supposedly open development organizations to only accept isolated improvements that make core developers' lives easier.) I do miss the days when external contributors were a much bigger part. It's tough when people need to eat, and the system complexity has risen, making it harder to get started in many areas. Contributors welcome!