16 ms·

The cult of the free must die

• kstenerud 6y ago
  > Small company gives away software for free. Large companies give away the same software for free, and to them the cost is essentially peanuts, and they own the platforms the sofware runs on. Therefore small company will lose, decreasing diversity in the browser market. Simple as that. Alternatively: Small company sells software, large company gives away the same kind of software for free. Small company loses, again. You're not going to fix market forces artificially. We pay what we pay because that's what someone's willing to offer it for. Also, not all value is in dollars.
  • 3jckd 6y ago
    This is the key point here. Google (Chrome), Apple (Safari) and MIcrosoft (Edge) funnel money from other ventures to their browser dev teams. For Apple and Microsoft it’s just a staple tool that each operating system needs but for Google it’s a platform that guides users towards their other services and ties them in, YouTube, Gmail, Drive, to name but a few. In the current business model, there’s absolutely no competing with them long term. You’d have to either break them up or create some weird funding schemes driven by govs and users that don’t care (public good or some other utilitarian argument).
    • dwd 6y ago
      This where anti-trust kicks in, that you don't allow companies to leverage a monopoly/duopoly position in one market to destroy competition in another. Particularly if they give products away for free to destroy the existing competition or as a lead in to their existing profit-making product.
      • pintxo 6y ago
        Problematic might be the delay in the process. Anti-trust cases can take decades until a final verdict is given.
      • gridlockd 6y ago
        > Particularly if they give products away for free to destroy the existing competition... You're thinking of predatory pricing, but he market price for a browser has been zero for a long time. Users chose to ditch Firefox and IE for Chrome because it was the better product. That's competition at work. The point of anti-trust is to protect the consumer, not the weak market participants. If tomorrow Google decided to do something to Chrome, that isn't in the consumer's interest, immediately the opportunity arises for competitors to outdo them - with their own code even. > ...or as a lead in to their existing profit-making product. Isn't that the point of most free products? I doubt there's an anti-trust case to be made there.
        • disgruntledphd2 6y ago
          Oh really? Where's the price for advertising on the Google.com homepage? Surely Google wouldn't allocate ad-space preferentially to their own products, right? And surely they wouldn't bug me for five plus years about how the internet is faster with Chrome? Nah, that would never happen ;)
        • nemacol 6y ago
          >The point of anti-trust is to protect the consumer, not the weak market participants I don't think your definition of anti-trust is accurate. Protect consumers by creating a competitive market. To promote and protect competition because consumers and the economy as a whole benefits when we have more competition in the market.
        • pessimizer 6y ago
          > Users chose to ditch Firefox and IE for Chrome because it was the better product. This is essentially a religious belief, and using "Chrome is the superior browser" as the foudation to your argument that "Google did nothing wrong" is weak and essentially circular. These massive, unregulated companies can lose an enormous amount of money on products indefinitely, either choosing to sink cash into them quickly in order to follow (or drive) the market into rapid change that a company that is required to bring in revenue can't keep up with, or in a slower market just park the product at an adequate quality, and wait for the competition to stumble. After the competition dies, then you can squeeze the customer for all they're worth.
      • extropy 6y ago
        The tricky bit here is that for most users the browser is "free" so there is no market to destroy. You need to offer some value added services (like privacy, less ads) to be able to charge for the browser.
    • dageshi 6y ago
      I think if you look at Chrome from Google's pov originally, the last thing they wanted was someone putting out a browser where the default search engine of whatever you typed into the address bar couldn't be changed to google. A competitor could attack google by owning the browser, perhaps what they thought microsoft would do.
      • daemin 6y ago
        They also didn't want a small company making a browser which some other company could pay to become the default search engine.
    • Miraste 6y ago
      It's also worth noting that even though Microsoft didn't need Edge to succeed to nearly the degree Firefox has to in order to continue development, the competition from Chrome was so intense they gave up anyway. Fields where even subsidized megacorp projects can't stay above water are very tough places for mid-size nonprofits.
  • paul_f 6y ago
    Mozilla brought in $450M last year because Google wanted to be the search engine on its free software. You can give software away and make money in other ways. Plenty of software companies do it and it's a perfectly valid business model. Small company does not "lose", and $450M is not small
    • waihtis 6y ago
      I understood that this deal is now expiring?
      • staticassertion 6y ago
        It's a contract for a few years. They'll probably re-up it, the question is for how much money.
        • newspheasant 6y ago
          According to this report, they already re-upped it https://tech.slashdot.org/story/20/08/13/0012243/mozilla-extends-its-google-search-deal?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed https://tech.slashdot.org/story/20/08/13/0012243/mozilla-ext...
          • Ygg2 6y ago
            Then why in the name of space balls did they fire like 25% of their dev team?
            • username90 6y ago
              Because they they already re-upped it, why spend more money when you already got the rewards? That is what happens when a company doesn't care about the product.
            • sukilot 6y ago
              Because income is lower than expenses.
  • waihtis 6y ago
    Its almost as if one free thing in one category doesnt observe the same laws as another free thing in another category.
  • throwaway936482 6y ago
    Or more accurately - developers create software for free and license it as Open Source because of social pressure within the development community. Large corporations say thank you very much and use it to make vast quantities of money without contributing back financially to the people who actually do the work. Anyone who points out that this is grossly counter productive if you want to build a sustainable ecosystem that doesn't depend on the unpaid labour of volunteers gets shouted down by free software cheerleaders who condescendingly stress that they mean "free as in speech rather than free as in beer," despite all Open Source licenses literally demanding that Open Source software can be distributed for free (as in beer).
    • greggman3 6y ago
      It certainly sounds logical but we see no evidence of this. Software creation is the highest it's ever been and accelerating. Salaries are going up. Open Source is arguably one of the reasons we're where we're at. I'd argue anything that puts up a barrier or changes the incentives to open source might be the thing that killed the goose that laid the golden egg. I don't currently get paid for all the open source work I do nor do I expect to be but if that expectation changed, if everyone expected to be compensated for their what at least starts out as their hobby, I'd guess the amount of people doing it drop drastically. Of course it sucks if your project gets popular and you feel obligated to keep spending time on it but you can always walk away. Otherwise my compensation is the feeling I get from helping. This is no different then volunteering. I don't go to the soup kitchen and demand a salary for helping out. I also feel compensated from everyone else's contributions. That companies like Apple (clang, llvm, swift, webkit), Google (android, chrome, angular, dart, flutter), Facebook (react, graphql), Microsoft (.net, vs code), etc... They are paying me back by offering all of that. I'm sure you can name some rich company not contributing but I guess I really don't care.
    • account42 6y ago
      > and license it as Open Source because of social pressure within the development community I hope you are not implying that that is the main or even only reason to release free software. > Anyone who [...] IME people get shouted down for suggesting to "fix" free software by removing freedoms.
  • granshaw 6y ago
    IMO there is one more factor in play: pricing inertia once “market prices” are set ie why are upfront mobile app prices free or peanuts? A big reason is cause they started that way. If mobile app prices started at closer to desktop app prices at the beginning, we’d probably have a much different mobile app marketplace today. Another example: developer salaries in the US compared to rest of world, where they’re much lower even after normalization. I posit that a key reason was the easy money VC years around 2010, and they just stayed high ever since. I’m sure there’s a proper economic term for this phenomenon :)
    • xtracto 6y ago
      Netscape tried it. GetRight tried it; darn, even winzip tried it but people just wont pay for it. On the other hand, once you start adding copy protection mechanisms that work, we all start whining.
      • granshaw 6y ago
        Corollary law: once a good enough product is released in a consumer categoryfor free, nobody will ever want to pay for anything in that category again, even if they could easily afford it :)
      • lotsofpulp 6y ago
        Hence the success of SaaS and monthly fees.
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• leroman 6y ago
  It's not "free" if you gain recognition
  • bartread 6y ago
    Years ago I worked for a company called Redgate. We bought a widely used free tool called .NET Reflector from its original author. The idea was that the recognition we received from owning and continuing to provide .NET Reflector for free would translate into additional sales of our other tools. It didn't work. For other related examples see the numerous social media stars/influencers who have moderate to large followings, but don't necessarily make that much money. The majority don't make enough to give up their day jobs. Recognition often isn't worth that much. The real test of how much people value something is whether they'll pay for it.
    • ben_w 6y ago
      A good example of how little recognition is worth, thought I’m slightly surprised I never heard about that purchase given I did hear about your flying sharks. It’s a shame the sponsored spaceflight never worked out; but I guess even though Virgin Galactic still isn’t flying customers, that scheme brought more recognition than Reflector.
      • bartread 6y ago
        Indeed: it's frustrating that we were legally obligated to offer a cash alternative. It would have been cool to send someone into space regardless of any other benefits, real or imagined. Anyway, I wasn't involved at all, so you have to understand that this is my personal viewpoint and not the view of the company but, again, the idea was that the recognition from that contest would translate into additional sales of our tools. It didn't work.
    • goto11 6y ago
      I remember that! I think it actually hurt the brand of Redgate. I just remember .NET Reflector being a free shareware tool which everybody used, and suddenly Redgate bought it and made it cost money.
• xnx 6y ago
  I use Firefox because it does things that Chrome won't like extensions on mobile and better (and riskier) extension capabilities overall. So many of their projects stink of indulgence and adventurism rather than anything that differentiates them from other browsers.
• marmaduke 6y ago
  Why don’t others consider Firefox as worth funding? The EU is spending 1e9€ over a decade to build a neuroinformatics platform. It seems like having a major browser not beholden to corporate interests on another continent could be at least as beneficial as speculative science projects (1000 employees at 50k€/yr puts Firefox in a similar price range)
  • Theodores 6y ago
    Exactly. Governments need to communicate with whomever they govern and in their language. It should be a strategic imperative to have a browser that isn't reporting back to Silicon Valley with every click and that can be the defacto in a given locale. Browsers are expected to be for free. The work done on developing the things has been done. At least up to where they are now. There is no god given right for browser developers to be on a money train. We have standards and governments that give a damn about things like education should be making sure that they have a standards compliant browser for their citizens to use. None of this up to the free market malarkey as it doesn't work with a free product.
  • eitland 6y ago
    Problem is there is no realistic way to fund Firefox development that I know of - there's only ways to fund Mozilla - and that was not my intention originally and less and less now.
• luckylion 6y ago
  Is there such a cult? I keep reading arguments like "nobody would pay for Google search, therefore they must track everyone and push ads", but I'd happily pay for search if it aligned their interests with mine ("high quality search results"). I'd also happily pay for a browser, but I'm not a big fan of "donate because it's the right thing to do", I prefer "pay because the product is worth it". As far as I understand, donations to the Mozilla Foundation won't go into development anyway because of the way they're structured. Don't ask for donations in the browser. Offer a product that people want and sell it to them. My personal approach: focus initially on developers. They're somewhat easy to understand (you have developers on the team), they have more money than the average user, their requirements and desires are clear and a little effort goes a long way, they already pay for tools that do some jobs that could be done in the browser (e.g. Fiddler).
• the-dude 6y ago
  > Small company gives away software for free. They have had years of ~$500M of revenue. I don't consider this small.
  • takluyver 6y ago
    Small relative to their main competitors.
    • the-dude 6y ago
      Is MS spending half a billion on their browser du jour? Apple?
      • zrm 6y ago
        But Mozilla isn't either. That's the trouble. They make plenty of money from Firefox but then don't spend it on Firefox, so Firefox market share declines, so they make less money from Firefox. Maybe they should try turning that wheel the opposite way.
        • takluyver 6y ago
          From where I sit, it looks like there has been a lot of technical effort going into Firefox in the last few years - like 'Electrolyis' and 'Quantum'. 'Quantum' in particular has been translating the more experimental work (Rust & Servo) into improvements in Firefox. So it seems more like they've been losing marketshare despite investing in Firefox. Google has much more money to spend on development, and can potentially also make popular sites like Youtube or GMail work best in Chrome. I use Firefox and I hope it will get more popular again. But I'm baffled how many people seem to think that if only Mozilla tried properly, the users would come flocking back. All the evidence suggests that most users go to Chrome no matter what they do.
      • ChrisSD 6y ago
        MS switched to a Chromium base because they couldn't keep pace with Google's ever shifting web tech. Apple goes at its own pace, sometimes not implementing Google's standards at all. Mozilla wants to have a say in how Google makes web standards. To do that effectively they need to keep up with Chrome. Admittedly even then Chrome's massive market share makes arguing against Google difficult. Apple sometimes joins the conversation but only when it directly affects something they're currently interested in.
• rvz 6y ago
  Having all of your products that are absolutely free for everyone just promotes a culture of "gimmie dat opun sauce warez 4 free" cult and relying on donations for supporting 1,000 employees, doesn't make any sense for sustainability for them. So what's the next step for Mozilla's mission for protecting your privacy? Re-new that contract with your #1 anti-privacy competitor [0] and continue selling free things. [0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/barrycollins/2020/08/13/mozilla-extends-critical-firefox-search-deal-with-google/#7dc07d8b6ea2 https://www.forbes.com/sites/barrycollins/2020/08/13/mozilla...
  • zozbot234 6y ago
    Open source is not "warez", and "supporting 1,000 employees" to work on an open source project makes zero sense. The best model for developer monetary support comes from individual crowdfunding campaigns by prominent devs, as is common, e.g. in the Rust community.
    • dmitriid 6y ago
      It's the worst model, and is not in any way, shape or form sustainable. This works for a very small number of prominent devs. For everybody else it means poverty: https://staltz.com/software-below-the-poverty-line.html https://staltz.com/software-below-the-poverty-line.html
    • the_pwner224 6y ago
      The most important software is the least visible. See OpenSSL. If you have individual developers doing crowdfunding, the most visible ones - the ones making GUI applications everyone uses - win, and all the critical infrastructure gets neglected because it is boring and 99% of people never think about it.
  • martin_a 6y ago
    Maybe ask yourself first, if you need 1000 employees and a CEO with a salary of 2.5 million/year to build a browser. That's the way to think about this. Oh, and I would happily pay/donate to Mozilla for Firefox and Thunderbird, but not for all the other "adventures" they went after. VPN service... As if there were not enough of those already...
• zozbot234 6y ago
  > So allow me to make a modest proposal: build in a donations function in Firefox itself — for instance by adding a simple “Please support us” message to the update page you get to see whenever you update the browser, and by adding a Donations item to the main menu. Agreed. We need a way to directly fund Firefox development, and Mozilla is not currently providing this.
  • eitland 6y ago
    They need to be clear however that the money goes to the browser.
• corty 6y ago
  The author suggests getting donations to (partially) finance Firefox. That would never work without changing the culture of Mozilla Corporation in a huge way: Currently, they take every chance to annoy their users, break their workflows, add new unnecessary but costly mistakes. They frivolously spend on side-projects nobody needs. People would be very quick to cease donating if they are being annoyed in such a way. The only reason people currently put up with Mozilla's behaviour is because they didn't pay for the product. Having people pay, even voluntarily, and having even a small reliance on those payments would just kill Mozilla more quickly without a visible leadership change first.
  • MaxBarraclough 6y ago
    It would be possible for Mozilla to accept donations with strings attached that specify what the funds are to be spent on. Currently, they probably don't accept such donations (as far as I can tell), but that's on Mozilla. We discussed this yesterday at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24129794 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24129794
    • simonh 6y ago
      Money is the ultimate fungible asset, any restricted funds going to development frees up money that would have gone to development otherwise to go to something else instead. The only way this works is if the restricted fund donations exceed what the dev investment would have been otherwise, then it starts making a difference.
      • sukilot 6y ago
        "This idea works better the more people do it" it the most milquetoast criticism ever.
        • simonh 6y ago
          It doesn’t work at all until a lot of people do it. Below a certain, fairly high threshold all the contributions achieve essentially nothing.
• sknat 6y ago
  I think this comes down to the old socialism vs capitalism debate. Industries gain a lot at relying on 'free products' that are most of the time financed by states (think roads, infrastructure, etc...), but you can find counter examples where privately owned & sold products work better. Concerning software, I agree the situation is a bit different as states are hardly strong players there. But I would disagree on the fact that the 'clut of free' is a sin. The whole industry gained a lot in terms of openness, sharing of best-practices and just innovation. Try finding how to build a washing-machine from scratch or just getting the PCB layout of your radio, it's a really painful process. But I would agree that I'm worried too on the future of software, but I would rather push for more financing of open source (& free) projects - by states or NGOs - rather than pushing the whole industry to go sales first.
  • zozbot234 6y ago
    Why "states or NGO's" rather than nimble, grassroots campaigns via crowdfunding? The latter seems to be working quite well for a bunch of projects, while "institutional", politicized funding is a lot harder to come by and brings its own unwanted distortions.
    • sknat 6y ago
      You're right I think crowdfunding campaigns can be a really useful tool for such financing. Altought, I think recently, crowdfunding have a bit diverted from their original purpose to become marketing tools for some companies. I think the ideal solution is hard to find, but I doubt we will come to something stable without a bit of regulation.
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• LordHeini 6y ago
  Who is going to pay for Firefox if they fired the people pushing the tech forward (i.e. the servo team)? If anybody is going to pay for a browser it must be better than its competition. I would pay for better privacy, adblocking, higher speed, better dev tools and what not. But Firefox is not so much better than Chromium in any of these points to warrant payment.
  • eitland 6y ago
    > But Firefox is not so much better than Chromium in any of these points to warrant payment. I vastly prefer Firefox and always did for some reason (I keep testing Opera, Vivalidi, Chromium and what not but none of them clicked with me) but I still see you point, it would be hard for many to justify a high price even if they prefer it. I'd still happily pay for Firefox (not Mozilla) but I'd consider it an insurance more than an investment at the moment.
  • vinw 6y ago
    They let the Servo team go?! Does that mean Gecko isn't going to see any significant new development?
    • kolaente 6y ago
      Its not very clear at this point[0]. [0] https://github.com/servo/servo/discussions/27575 https://github.com/servo/servo/discussions/27575
  • coffeefirst 6y ago
    The more I think about it, the more this seems like a giant branding error. Individually, all their paid offerings aren't that interesting. Scroll, Pocket, and privacy VPN's are all fine little niche products, but bundled together and called Firefox Pro, it gives you vision of what a premium browser might look like: the browser is free, paid users get a collection of services and support the open web.
• ricardobeat 6y ago
  No amount of requesting donations will ever support an organization the size of Mozilla. It's annual budget is half a billion dollars. I also consider reverting to "nagware" a huge step back. Either you sell a product, monetize part of it, or offer it for free - giving it away "for free" while sneaking in a shower of requests for money is the worst possible outcome.
  • gspr 6y ago
    Imagine the amazing stuff they'd do if that half billion was focused squarely at improving and maintaining the Firefox browser.
    • gridlockd 6y ago
      What's there really to improve? I don't think the experience with Firefox is fundamentally different, nor could it be made fundamentally better. It's a browser. People don't care about browsers, they care about websites. Even if Firefox were to implement some fancy feature, websites aren't going to adopt it until Chrome has it too. Sure, you could argue that Firefox doesn't track you like Chrome does. That's basically their whole marketing message. People who care about this already use Firefox, the rest just doesn't care.
      • eitland 6y ago
        > What's there really to improve? I don't think the experience with Firefox is fundamentally different, nor could it be made fundamentally better. Ask any power user that used Firefox 5 years ago: - fix the extension API - re-enable styling - hire someone to look after the ux-team :-D (yes, I'm also one of those who dislike the moving awesomebar ;-)
      • dependenttypes 6y ago
        > you could argue that Firefox doesn't track you like Chrome does Yeah, it tracks you more: https://twitter.com/jonathansampson/status/1165858896176660480 https://twitter.com/jonathansampson/status/11658588961766604...
• TheUndead96 6y ago
  I personally would like to distinguish between donations to the Firefox product and Mozilla as a company. I donated every month for a year, but eventually didn't feel that my contributions were making it to the actual devs making a difference. Or even balancing the books. I cannot explain why, but something feels off about Mozilla. I'm not being conspiratorial, but is Mozilla really one of the "good guys"?
  • TheUndead96 6y ago
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OarBwHc2JzY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OarBwHc2JzY I feel like Mozilla does not understand the "old-internet" which it prostitutes to sell itself to users. Lawyers, Amazon extensions, this is how we are fighting Fake News!
• mhd 6y ago
  I remember when free access to the web and its technologies was something good. From having a free browser, free web server (as in Apache/Linux, not the hardware/connection) to being able to read the very HTML code that's used to send you that stuff. Now it's paywalls, gated communities and Valley technologists crying about moochers from the steering wheels of their Teslas.
• smitty1e 6y ago
  "Die" is a bit heavy, but the point has merit: stuff costs. What would be great from Mozilla is a subscription model.
• bananaowl 6y ago
  I value time the further into my professional life I get. So for me, paying for good quality documentation, wether it comes in form of a website or a book, is a better bargain than me trying to read up on 10 blog posts and going down the rabbit hole of the source code.
• alfonsodev 6y ago
  I recommend Michael Widenius's video[1] about "Doing business with Open Source" it goes trough different models, and explains the reasoning behind MySQL license model, although I'm aware how different is a browser from a database it might help to think about this problem from different angles. In the case of Firefox, if I'm not mistaken they do only consumer focus products, maybe they could release something that companies are willing to pay for. They could captilize on the good reputation while it lasts, and maybe employees that resonate with Mozilla history will promote their products to their bosses for free. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krcKkiKBKms https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krcKkiKBKms
  • pea 6y ago
    This makes a lot of sense. I would rather they either built amazing orthoganal SaaS products and charged me for them, or had some >$100k ACV enterprise plays. On the former, it's of course a massive shift off of their current focus and they'd get a lot of kickback from the community, but you could imagine a world where they had a model like 37 Signals/Basecamp/Hey etc. On the latter, I don't know anything about the browser market in proper enterprise and if there are many opportunities for products there - you would presume there could be some value capture though.
• npmisdown 6y ago
  That's essentially my problem with the open source. I was an open source apologist some time ago, but since I quit full-time job and started to freelance/working on my own personal projects I began to realize, that I as an independent developer can't actually profit from it. In fact, it takes a lot of my time to contribute to something and I get nothing in return. From my perspective: * Behind every popular open source project there is a company (typically big), which pays core team salary to maintain open source project. Community is typically do work for free. The bigger the project, the better for the company public image. * Open source projects end up to be designed by committee, which inevitably turns projects to bloatware, which are hard to maintain and hard to use. * Increase in technology turn-over. Projects become hyped and die faster that * Competition is becoming more difficult. Why to try to make another deployment manager if there's Kubernetes? * En-masse community memebers get nothing from contrubuting to projects while doing a lot of work for free. One may argue that in return they get polished product, but in reality that's far from true.
  • alfonsodev 6y ago
    > * Open source projects end up to be designed by committee, which inevitably turns projects to bloatware, which are hard to maintain and hard to use. That's a concer of mine too and that's why I'm in favor of the BDFL[1] figure. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benevolent_dictator_for_life https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benevolent_dictator_for_life > * Competition is becoming more difficult. Why to try to make another deployment manager if there's Kubernetes? At the same time, you can also study how Kubernetes does the job, and come up with radical superior solutions.
    • Draiken 6y ago
      > At the same time, you can also study how Kubernetes does the job, and come up with radical superior solutions. I feel that's a bit of a reach. A small team will magically come up with something better than hundreds/thousands of developers that thought/developed k8s? It's nice to think anyone can do that, but I believe only another company (and probably not a small one) could try and do that. I doubt bunch of open source contributors could come close to that.
• mrtksn 6y ago
  Micropayments are proven to work but everyone seems to hates micropayments. Software is good when regularly updated but everyone hates on subscriptions, claiming to be OK with one time payment but that business model got almost wiped out because people actually don’t like to pay one the (sustainable) one time fee too. Pay with your data and liberties business model seems to be the darling of the masses. Cult of free is actually just that and Mozilla is also part of it as it is making its revenue from Google.
  • takluyver 6y ago
    > Micropayments are proven to work Do you mean that it's technically feasible to implement them, or that they actually work economically to fund viable, competitive businesses.
    • mrtksn 6y ago
      Fund the business. Yes, everyone hates on them but there's a reason why every game and every software is switching to "pay for the extra feature or resource or pay monthly" model. I also find it far less fun-killing than the ad-supported ones. The ad-supported games and software(I will count the websites also in this) has terrible user experience as it is geared to interrupt you and make you do something else. Free(as in beer) software has become a bait to direct you to something else. You want to drive a virtual car? Here is your virtual car but why don't you check the bubble popping game first? Here are your bubbles to pop but why don't you try jumping over hops instead? Here are the hops you may want to jump but wouldn't you not like to get angry for this political issue first? This endless ad-supported stream of offers, I believe, is taking the oxygen of truly high quality works. Why would you buy the 0.99$ app or game when you can use the free version, right?
      • takluyver 6y ago
        I see in-app purchases and subscription models as quite different from micropayments. Micropayments would mean something like Spotify - you pay some amount up front, and the company pays artists a tiny amount for each time someone listens to their work. A quick search suggests that that amount is on average less than half a US cent per play on Spotify, and similar services range from about 1/10 to 2 cents per play. It's not a system that the artists are very happy with.
• selectnull 6y ago
  I would gladly pay for MDN access. Mozilla has done a wonderful work with that, it's a goto place for any kind of web related documentation (and I'm probably not the only one).
• bambax 6y ago
  > by requesting donations from inside Firefox... Donations are a bad idea. Companies can't make donations (usually). But they can buy software licenses. They should sell something. Not sure what, though.
• auggierose 6y ago
  Isn't it a big blow to Rust that the servo team was fired?!?
  • est31 6y ago
    5 years ago it would have been worse because the community was smaller back then. But it's grown since and more companies have adopted Rust, contributing back by maintaining own open source projects.
• deleted 6y ago
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• Draiken 6y ago
  I agree with the author that this expectation everyone has that things are actually free hurts everyone. Some people say they'd pay for Firefox. Some say they'd support it, but nothing outside of the main browser. But are there really enough people to fund something as big as Mozilla? Sure there might be some excesses (like I keep reading about the CEO's salary every other comment), but it seems few realize that the commercial ventures were created for a reason: to bring money in. If Mozilla only ever worked on the browser, would they have survived up until now? I reckon no. I do think they should create some sort of recurring donation system in a Patreon style (even without rewards, maybe with nice lists for the biggest donors) and test the waters. Are there really a lot of people willing to put money where their mouth is? I hope so, but my gut feeling also says no.
  • luckylion 6y ago
    > But are there really enough people to fund something as big as Mozilla? I believe so. My favorite example is JetBrains. They're making about half of what Mozilla is Making (if you include the other commercial competitors, it's much probably closer, and they're competing with Microsoft giving a free IDE away), people are happy to pay. JetBrains' products are significantly better than the free alternatives though.
• schemy 6y ago
  The cult of free for corporations must die. I am not the same thing as Google and pretending that is true in any sense is how we got in this mess. Firefox should require licenses to run when you're using your corporate computer, it shouldn't when you're running it at home.
• xyzal 6y ago
  I am SO waiting for Mozilla to give my ANY endpoint to throw my money at, and I bet I am not alone. Why cannot I have an Firefox mug? Or get that VPN running in Europe finally?
  • wildpeaks 6y ago
    Pocket is useful and has some paid features: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/pocket/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/pocket/
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• cesaref 6y ago
  So just explain to me why something like linux can be free, but a web browser can't.
  • ChrisSD 6y ago
    Corporations spend a lot of money funding Linux. Not only providing resources but even assigning full time developers to work on the kernel.
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    • MaxBarraclough 6y ago
      Right, because the enhancements directly benefit the company donating the kernel code. A similar thing happens with compilers: Sony donate code to Clang/LLVM. Couldn't that apply to web browsers too, though? If a company stands to benefit by some browser feature becoming widely available, perhaps it would make sense for them to do the work on the major browsers and donate the code. From their point of view, this might be better than waiting for the browser vendors (who may view it as a low priority) to do it. I don't know of this ever happening, but I can't see a reason it never could.
      • ChrisSD 6y ago
        The trouble is Firefox is, objectively, not a major browser. I think it's below 5% share at the moment. If companies were to contribute to a browser it'd be Chromium. But there's rarely a reason to do so as Google itself has more than enough resources to throw at Chrome whenever needed.
• checksbalances 6y ago
  Mozilla already asks for donations. And they get plenty of donations. They have a spending problem. Spending money not on firefox or thunderbird, but spending way to much for public policy and other things.
• chiefalchemist 6y ago
  Things I would pay Mozilla for: - Privacy and security-centic browser-based email (to replace Gmail). - Basic browser-based apps to replace Google docs, sheets, etc. - A legit no logs VPN - A privacy-centric replacement for Google analytics - A privacy focused comms tool - a la Zoom, Whatsapp or Messenger. In short, an alternative to Apple without the commitment to their hardware.I understand that many of these exist on their own. I'm asking (read: begging) for a unified offering (again a la Apple), one vendor to pay, and so on. The problem with Firefox and free is that they're trying to compete again an entity (i.e., Google) that has the same type of product as a loss leader. That's a suicide mission on Mozilla's part. Without a blue ocean (e.g., Apple) they will struggle - just like every other company that doesn't seek higher less competitive ground.
• belorn 6y ago
  It is difficult to have a discussing about funding Firefox without knowing what kind of company or organization that Mozilla want to be. Do they want to be an advocacy non-profit like EFF and ACLU, getting their main revenue from donations (and then maybe pay their CEO similar to those organizations)? Do they want to be more like IBM, using the free open source products to promote and support the paid services and proprietary products (in which the CEO get paid according to market rates)? Or are they more like the Linux foundation, focusing around maintaining and developing a core open source project, funded and paid by corporate sponsors and donations.
• senko 6y ago
  It boggles my mind that Mozilla didn't build an endownment with all the money they've received in the past 10-15 years (mid-billions!). They could've been a bit slimmer and slowly build an alternative revenue stream that would make them much more resilient to shocks like these and, long-term, independent of Google or other competitors' cooperation. Looks like they spent like the money will be flowing forever.
  • chii 6y ago
    Interesting you bring this up - why don't normal businesses also setup endowments like this? How come i've only seen universities do this?
    • Aeolun 6y ago
      Normal businesses generally don’t have enough free money to do something like this. While the business has value by virtue of its assets, the amount of free cash is much less. Software is an exception in this since you basically only have free cash, there are no physical assets as such.
      • mschuster91 6y ago
        > Normal businesses generally don’t have enough free money to do something like this. And why don't they? Decades ago, having cash reserves was a Good Thing. We need to get at the root of the issue and that is that companies have gotten used way too much on government bailouts and redistributing everything possible to shareholders/customers.
        • bsder 6y ago
          Err, no. The problem started with people like Carl Icahn. If your company has too much cash, someone will attempt take control to carve it up and get their hands on the cash. So, every business basically runs fairly close to cashless or even carries debt in order to avoid corporate raiders unless they have SO much cash that nobody can even hope to buy them (see: Apple).
• tlocke 6y ago
  Perhaps the problem is the reverse: The more things that aren't free, the more money people need. By expanding the amount of free things, that reduces the amount of money required to produce new free things. Put another way, if 'software is eating the world', then if it's free software the cost of goods and services should drop dramatically.
  • gridlockd 6y ago
    > Put another way, if 'software is eating the world', then if it's free software the cost of goods and services should drop dramatically. Software cost generally isn't a "dramatic" part of cost, wherever you look. Because of zero marginal cost, the price of widely-used software approaches zero naturally. Only highly specialized software commands high prices, those reflect the cost of developing or replacing it, as well as the value that it is providing.
    • tlocke 6y ago
      Is that true? I can buy a blank laptop for £215 (https://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/notebooks/gemini-IV/ https://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/notebooks/gemini-IV/) and then install Debian for free. The same laptop with Microsoft Windows / Office costs £352. So I'd say that in this case at least, software is a dramatic part of the cost.
      • gridlockd 6y ago
        You were talking about the "cost of goods and services", by which I assumed you meant COGS as a factor of running a business. Let's say you put a minimum wage worker to some task on that laptop. Over the amortization period (3 years) of that laptop, that extra cost of the Windows license amounts to maybe 0.1% of the cost of that worker, assuming they use nothing but that laptop to perform the work. Now, let's say that the worker needs to learn how to use Linux and it costs you, say, 20 hours in opportunity cost to get them up to speed. Linux is now more expensive than Windows.
        • 6y ago
• martin_drapeau 6y ago
  I hate to break it to you developers and tech people out there, but Firefox isn't used by consumers. It has become a niche web browser for you guys. I've been a developer for 20 years and briefly used it in 2009-2010. Then Chrome took over and I switched to what my customers use. I have zero reasons to use Firefox. I do feel bad about since it is dear to the community of developers I am part of. In the end though, and logically, I don't have any incentive to use Firefox. Mozilla in my mind is a lab company with one product to monetize it: Firefox. At the end of the day though if you're product can't bring in enough money, you need to cut. Seems to be what's happening.
  • veddox 6y ago
    > Firefox isn't used by consumers Though there are big regional differences: It still has a 13% market share in Germany... 22% if you only look at the desktop. Worldwide, across all platforms, it's 4%. (https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share)
  • chrismorgan 6y ago
    I happen to be staying with a non-technical man of around retiring age at present. Yesterday he had his laptop returned from a service which included an OS reinstall. After that, Firefox was installed and Chrome was not; he knows of Firefox, but has been a Chrome user for whatever reason. He observed: “Firefox? But no Google. I suppose they’ve installed Firefox and didn’t reinstall Google. Hmm. Firefox. Is it any good?” I responded: “well, I use Firefox”. So now he’s using Firefox and having no difficulty. (I then watched him hunt-and-peck “www.google.com” into the address bar. I told him that he didn’t need to do that, he could just type his search term straight away. In this case, he wanted to access Gmail. I despair sometimes, really I do. But this all matched what he’d been doing in Chrome, it wasn’t anything specific to Firefox.) The observations here: 1. Most casual users don’t actually care which browser they use. (Citation needed, to be sure, but among casual users, I suspect it’s the substantial majority.) 2. Corollary: often I have seen cases where a different browser is installed, and the user just accepts it and keeps going. This has been used most parasitically by Google, bundling their browser with other things (an obnoxious practice in the industry at large that is I think not as common as it used to be, but is still widespread in certain niches). A great many users that have Chrome don’t even know how it ended up on their computer; it just… became their default browser at some point. 3. Google as a whole has been extremely underhanded in its marketing and positioning of Chrome, abusing their position of strength in one industry in order to dominate another. There has been some grumbling about this in legal circles, but not a great deal of action; yet if current trends continue, antitrust lawsuits will assuredly come. He wasn’t calling it “Chrome”, he was calling it “Google”. Google search, Google mail, Google browser, Google horizontals.
• bullen 6y ago
  And then the footer says: "If you like this page, why not donate a little bit of money to help me pay my bills and create more free content?" To live like you teach would make the article a "pay-wall, didn't read" for me, seems we're in a catch 22?
• senko 6y ago
  > Small company gives away software for free. A company employing ~1000 people, with $500m+ revenue, is not a small company. It's not even mid-sized. This is a large multinational, only seeming small when compared with FAANG.
  • chii 6y ago
    revenue isn't a good measure of business size. a $500m revenue might translate to very low "profit". Most size measurements will use owned asset value (or market cap, which is a very rough guesstimate of the net present value of all future profit of the company) as a measure, as it is more directly comparable between different businesses. Mozilla, is at best, a small-cap software company. Calling them mid-sized is probably not wrong either, but would be closer to being wrong than right imho.
    • octodog 6y ago
      You are missing the point. They are smaller than the big tech companies but they are not objectively small. In my country a company is generally deemed to be large if it employs more than 500 people, which is easily surpassed here.
    • luckylion 6y ago
      > a $500m revenue might translate to very low "profit" 2017 they had a net income of ~$90m.
    • marvin 6y ago
      There is a definition in certain stock market indexes of a "small cap company" that actually means "big company". Mozilla is one of those.
      • Rastonbury 6y ago
        You don't businesses worth single digit millions listing, its small cap in the realm of public markets
• phendrenad2 6y ago
  Mozilla should abandon Firefox, fork Chromium, create the gold standard privacy-focused Chromium variant, and they should ask for donations. But they won't, and I think we'll have forgotten Firefox existed in about 10 years.
  • tonyedgecombe 6y ago
    Webkit might be a better option if you want to have something to counter Chrome.
  • raxxorrax 6y ago
    Gecko is completely fine, it is superior to V8 in many cases. There are already many products like this.
  • MaxBarraclough 6y ago
    > fork Chromium, create the gold standard privacy-focused Chromium variant There are already projects that do this.
• podgaj 6y ago
  Maybe get rid of capitalism instead?
• ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
  I tend to do all my work for free, and in open-source[0]. One big reason, is that I don't feel like I really want to watch other people destroy my work, like they did for thirty years. Another reason, is that I am not particularly thrilled about having someone else calling the shots on my work. I do what I do for love, not money or status. Once money comes into the picture, the fun drains out like a popped balloon. I write my stuff as enterprise-class software. It may be the "tinkering" of an old codger, but it is nothing to sneeze at. And I set the agenda. If you don't want to use my stuff; fine. No loss to me. It's great stuff, but tastes differ. If, on the other hand, you pay me to do work for you, then you get to call the shots. That's just the way of the world. It doesn't matter whether or not it's "fun." You are paying me for a service, and it is my fiduciary responsibility to deliver. I spent my entire career delivering software on schedule, and to spec. Like I said, I found it annoying that it wasn't treated so well, after delivery, but it was their property, and I had no say. I just found out that a company that makes two great, free, open-source utilities I use all the time, has been sold; throwing their future into doubt. That sucks, but it is also not something that I really have a right to whine about. I am not particularly thrilled with corporations making commercial products on the back of free, open-source projects; even really high-quality ones (I won't list any, because there are religious wars over them). If it's free, then you get what you pay for. [0] https://riftvalleysoftware.com/open-source-projects https://riftvalleysoftware.com/open-source-projects
• aazaa 6y ago
  > So allow me to make a modest proposal: build in a donations function in Firefox itself — for instance by adding a simple “Please support us” message to the update page you get to see whenever you update the browser, and by adding a Donations item to the main menu. The core problem is the product itself. People haven't paid for web browsers in 25 years. Rather than trying to fit the square peg of "ending free" into the round hole of browser software, a more sustaining change would be for Mozilla to develop a product that people will pay for. One they have not been conditioned over the course of decades to get for free. In other words, Mozilla needs a product (or service) built not for the masses but a small group of people who: 1. have a problem that needs to be solved; and 2. have money to spend Whether or not Mozilla has the leadership or even culture to pull this off is another question.
• TheRealDunkirk 6y ago
  Mozilla needs to "rent" the browser, just like every other application or app on the market today. $5/mo, or $50/yr. They could continue to give away a version that, say, doesn't allow plugins or something.
  • causalmodels 6y ago
    Problem with a no plugin version is that I bet the user numbers would drop severely and the ecosystem would die as a result.
  • MaxBarraclough 6y ago
    Out of the question. Firefox is not Opera. It's Free* and Open Source software, and that's central to its appeal. You can't treat it as a paid-for proprietary software product. * Hopefully this doesn't need to be said, but Free in this context refers to software freedom, not to price.
    • TheRealDunkirk 6y ago
      That's utter bollocks. This has been central to the debate since it started in the 90's. You absolutely can charge for Free Software, and many people have done so. I collectively paid a lot of money for boxed releases of Red Hat and SuSE back in the day, to support development. The risk, of course, is that someone else will take the codebase, and produce a free-as-in-beer version (ala White Box Linux). I say: let them. I'm willing to pay for a supported, professional version, and I have a history of doing so.
      • MaxBarraclough 6y ago
        I don't know of a single Free Software project that gets significant income from selling the software. Introducing the option of paying for Firefox would change nothing, as people would continue to download Firefox without paying, and Firefox would continue to auto-update itself without charge. People are already able to donate to Mozilla (although not directly to Firefox), if that's what they want to do. > I collectively paid a lot of money for boxed releases of Red Hat and SuSE back in the day, to support development. Right, exactly. It's essentially an optional donation, and sadly, few people choose to make optional donations. > I'm willing to pay for a supported, professional version Charging for premium support is a different idea. I'm not opposed to paid Free Software support, in principle I think it's a great idea, but I doubt it would generate much revenue.
• ChrisSD 6y ago
  > Mozilla should take a small step in that direction by requesting donations from inside Firefox — on an entirely voluntary basis. That's a sure fire way to annoy users. Mozilla have tried various ways diversify their funding. Vocal users have reacted strongly against anything they perceive as "ads" in their browser, no matter how benign. And yes "please support us" will be seen as an ad/nag. Just as it was when they promoted Mozilla donations for a time.
• 72deluxe 6y ago
  I wonder if it is not so much "the cult of the free" as "the art of directionless misspending". Look at all the projects Mozilla got involved in that were not really related to the browser. Also, from the list of jobs laid off there are some jobs that seem superfluous to the main core concept of browser development: Diversity and Inclusion Lead, Office and Culture Project Manager, Director of Strategic Alliances and Platform Strategy - Mixed Reality, Global Event Maker, Senior University Recruiter, Senior Product Designer + Growth, Staff Business Strategist, Lead UX Designer for Brand, Senior Brand Designer, Head of Design, Senior Executive Assistant, Brand Designer. I am not even sure what some of those jobs involve! Some even sound like invented jobs to me. I mean, is a "brand designer" someone who actually draws graphics or is it just someone who thinks what the "brand" should involve? ie. The Web, a browser. Education welcomed.
  • losvedir 6y ago
    I mean, someone has to come up with "moz://a". It's cute, to be sure, but it felt like kind of a slap in the face when I saw that rebrand logo front and center on the blog post about Mozilla laying off 250 staff.
    • sukilot 6y ago
      That logo was launched 3 years ago
      • KMag 6y ago
        Never let reality spoil a good selective-memory-based rant.
      • TheAdamAndChe 6y ago
        Yes, and it is an icon of the priorities that got them in this mess.
  • acqq 6y ago
    > the list of jobs laid off Where is it? I've seen in other posts that real developers (even "almost all Servo team") were laid off?
• pietrovismara 6y ago
  It's not the cult of the free. It's the cult of the profit that must go.
• m000 6y ago
  Mozilla needs a more focused leadership to survive, not a perpetual gofundme campaign. The current leadership focused on free lock-in features (Firefox Lockwise, Pocket integration etc). But that's how you play when you have deep pockets. Mozilla Corp. never had them. If instead Mozilla Corp. had focused on cross-browser freemium/paid features, they could have been self-sustained by now. E.g. I would definitely pay for a Firefox Account that included: - Password manager with cross-browser cloud sync. They already have Lockwise. Only need to make it cross-browser. - Firefox send. Great convenience feature. Trivial to integrate to other browsers. Currently "unavailable while we work on product improvements." WTF? - Cross-browser bookmarks sync with improvements in core functionality. E.g. make tagging easy, support tag-based dynamic folders to the bookmarks bar. I wish they had brought the person behind Buku bookmarks manager aboard instead of buying Pocket.
  • konaraddi 6y ago
    > Firefox send. Great convenience feature. Trivial to integrate to other browsers. Currently "unavailable while we work on product improvements." WTF? "In light of recent reports of Firefox Send being used to distribute malware we have decided to temporarily take the service offline to implement new features..." https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/what-happened-firefox-send https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/what-happened-firefox-s... What do you mean by "integrate to other browsers"? Firefox Send is a website.
• loraa 6y ago
  The bigshits need to stop paying themselves ridiculous salaries.
• stupidcar 6y ago
  People can and do pay for "free" web services like Firefox. They pay with their personal data. This is exchanged into regular currency via the advertising industry. Services that cannot or will not exploit this income stream will inevitably run into financial trouble. Economically, spending personal data makes sense for a lot of people. Unlike money, you generate personal data continuously and effortlessly. You can spend it multiple times, many people spend it with little obvious downside, and the process is completely frictionless. Consider the effort involved with setting up, maintaining and eventually cancelling a subscription to a money-financed service, vs. a data-financed one, which you simply start and stop using at your leisure. Some people do not like this situation. They object to the entire notion of personal data being used as a currency. They attempt to prevent it via advocacy and legislation. Advocacy does not seem to work, at least on its own. Many people, if you explain the situation to them in terms of privacy, will express a theoretical desire not to trade away their personal data. However, their behaviour is not consistent with this. Faced with a choice between using data-financed and money-financed services, the majority chooses the former. Legislation attempts to resolve this dilemma, either by outlawing the use of personal data as a currency at all, or more often by making the spending of personal data more a onerous and explicit process, in the hope that a closer equivalence in terms of convenience combined with repeated reminders of people's stated preference to maintain their privacy will alter their behaviour. Personally, I'm skeptical this type of legislation will succeed. Clicking a few checkboxes and cookie banners is still far more convenient than giving my credit card details to every single website or app I want to use. And most humans act in opposition to their stated ideals and desires in myriad ways, every single day.
• real_fredfred 6y ago
  The cult of work must die
• noelwelsh 6y ago
  There are some interesting behavioural economics experiments on "the power of free". Here is a decent overview: https://thedecisionlab.com/insights/business/impact-free-consumer-decision-making/ https://thedecisionlab.com/insights/business/impact-free-con... In essence, people overvalue free goods. This means it is very hard for a paid product to compete against free goods, even when the paid product is itself cheap and better quality. This explains a lot about the state of the Internet, where a large number of eyeballs go to free products maintained by a large companies with other revenue streams or to low quality junk. It also makes me, unfortunately, doubtful that any efforts to directly monetize Firefox will be successful.
• cat199 6y ago
  > This brings us to the core point I’d like to make: the culture of volunteering in web development, and especially within the Mozilla segments of our community. To my mind it’s not only outdated and should be replaced, it should never have been allowed to take root in the first place Never 'been allowed'? By whom? This 'cult of the free' is also historically how software development was done long before the web ever existed - the 'cult of not free' arising from the PC era is the one encroaching on open software, and it's attendant software profit incentive is largely what created the need to document for-profit browser incompatibilities which the author is complaining needs commercial support..
• Invictus0 6y ago
  Off topic but I really like how the top banner on this page draws your eye to the start of the text. Never seen that before!
• earthboundkid 6y ago
  Just putting this out there: The government should have grants for critical OSS infrastructure, like it does for medicine, scientific research, and even (though highly gutted now) art. It’s only because the web got started after the Regan years that this isn’t blindingly obvious to everyone. Why is FireFox getting its money from Google and not Uncle Sam? If MDN closes, productivity for millions of web developers across the county will plummet. Why is this being left to charity?
  • wott 6y ago
    > If MDN closes, productivity for millions of web developers across the county will plummet. If that should happen, I would consider it a gift from heaven ;-)
• m3at 6y ago
  Regarding donations that the author mention, it is always tricky to balance between getting a stable revenue stream (monthly patronage) and simplicity for the user (one time payment so I don't have one more expense to keep track of). As a user/consumer I found that setting a monthly sponsorship budget helps. I spend a part of it monthly when available (ex through Patreon), then sum up what is left by the end of the year and do one time donations (for projects that work that way, ex Wikipedia or Thunderbird). I'm curious how others sponsor software or projects you care about?
• joemazerino 6y ago
  Wait until OP learns that even asking for donations won't net them positive returns.
• passthejoe 6y ago
  When executives are making $500k/year, and there are millions in Google money floating around, it's hard to make the case for donations.
• CodexArcanum 6y ago
  The problem of the cult of the free is a microcosm of the larger global struggle against capitalism. Who will (or rather, can) build an open and secure browser? Obviously, a corporation (like Google, MS, Apple, etc) can't be trusted because they have too many conflicting interests. The MS monopoly lawsuit was about browsers; how people connect to the internet is a big huge deal and there's a lot of money and power to be gained if you become top-dog in that space. Just ask Google, whose dominance of the browser space with Chrome has massively shaped the way to web works today, making it much friendlier to invasive DRM, micropayment schemes, invasive advertising, and many other consumer exploiting features. So you need an independent source for a browser, but browsers are big and very complicated and need strong security and on and on. It's neither easy nor cheap, but why would the average person want to pay for an independent browser when MS, Apple, and Google will all give you a great browser "for free?" There is no real answer to this under our current economic model. Donations and fund-raising are patches on a broken system, usually requiring additional support from advertisers, corporate donations, influencing foundations, and so on. If the money isn't coming from consumers buying or donating, then it's coming from someone with money and a vested interest that their money is buying influence for. The Internet was built on public money from university grants and military funding. But the internet was stolen from the public decades ago and sold to big capital. Until we fix that, Mozilla is just another in a long line of past and future downsizings as the corporate world continues to pillage and privatize the Internet.
• Eric_WVGG 6y ago
  The problem I have with non-free software isn't that it's free, but that the community and support are much, much worse than OSS alternatives. Back in the site-backed-by-CMS days, I was always on the lookout for something better than Wordpress. Every time I thought I landed on a good alternative, I'd start to hunt down some esoteric needs that just didn't exist, and discussions with the staff who ran said solutions were usually fruitless. Meanwhile, the answer to literally any problem with Wordpress was just sitting there on Stack Overflow. Today I've moved on to JAMstack, and while everything is massively superior from both a consumer and developer perspective, the headless CMS offerings — which seem like a natural fit for the OSS world — are mostly proprietary and very, very expensive. It feels just like trying Wordpress alternatives, where the support is uncommunicative and the community is nonexistent. My clients can afford to pay for a good headless CMS, but I'm seriously considering using Wordpress API for "headless" because the paid options are a pain in the ass.