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> 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 th

> 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.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

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.

deleted 6y ago

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