8 ms·

How about 500 mil yearly to create an OS from scratch? Is that laughable too? The level of complexity to create a modern web browser, specially one that has in

How about 500 mil yearly to create an OS from scratch? Is that laughable too? The level of complexity to create a modern web browser, specially one that has in-house engines like Firefox, is comparable to a modern OS.

calvinmorrison 6y ago
How much do you think the Debian non-profit makes per year? What about ArchLinux? How many full time developers are paid by the Linux Foundation? It's funny, their budget is much smaller than firefox https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/460503801 https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/460... Maybe all this complexity and constant changes to the web comes from the fact that there are hundreds and hundreds of employees paid to tinker around. Mozilla is effectively a $500 Million dollar corporation, not a non-profit. Money corrupts absolutely.
- ylyn 6y ago
  > How much do you think the Debian non-profit makes per year? What about ArchLinux? These are distributions. Their main role is to package upstream software. That is different from actually writing an entire OS. You should compare to however much Microsoft pays all of the developers that work on the different components of Windows. > How many full time developers are paid by the Linux Foundation? > > It's funny, their budget is much smaller than firefox That's because the vast majority of Linux development is not done by employees of the Linux Foundation. Only a few top-level maintainers, including Linus Torvalds and Greg K-H, are employed by the Linux Foundation. Most Linux code these days is written by people employed by companies like Intel, Huawei, Google, Red Hat, NXP, Facebook, etc. See https://lwn.net/Articles/839772/ https://lwn.net/Articles/839772/ for example. You would do good by reading a bit before saying things online.
  - pwdisswordfish0 6y ago
    > Only a few top-level maintainers, including Linus Torvalds and Greg K-H, are employed by the Linux Foundation. Most Linux code these days is written by people employed by companies like Intel, Huawei, Google, Red Hat, NXP, Facebook, etc. This supposed to be a defense of Mozilla? There's a /r/selfawarewolves-style obliviousness to what you're saying.
dangwu 6y ago
That complexity is mostly due to Gecko, right? What's stopping Mozilla from switching to Blink? Does using Google's engine conflict with their mission? Edit: Getting downvotes for this honest question. I didn't realize that browser rendering engines held that much control. Apologies for the silly thought.
- stefs 6y ago
  that would be a monoculture disaster. monocultures are not resilient.
  - Spivak 6y ago
    Not resilient to disease maybe but I'm sure webdevs will be overjoyed at having a much easier time porting sites. The power dynamic that matters is political not technical. Google doesn't really get to exert control over the web with their rendering engine or V8 it's the actual high-level browser policy that matters and Firefox doesn't actually have to follow any of it. Firefox gutted all of their internals with project Servo. If they had instead integrated Blink would it have been any different? I always think it's interesting what things people want to have diverse ecosystems with competing implementations (browsers) and what things people consider that an unnecessary duplication of effort (Wayland compositors).
    - ylyn 6y ago
      So you've seen the same person say both of that?
      - Spivak 6y ago
        We're on the internet. There's only one other human and the rest are bots. If you go into threads about Wayland the overwhelming public opinion is that having lots of compositors is silly. And then you go into threads about browsers the overwhelming public opinion is that having multiple browser implementations is sacred.
    - minikites 6y ago
senko 6y ago
> How about 500 mil yearly to create an OS from scratch? When was Mozilla trying to create an OS from scratch? The closest they came was FirefoxOS which was using Gecko browser engine (existing) on top of Linux kernel (existing) and a host of other existing open source projects, and FirefoxOS was (unfortunately) a dismal failure.
- gchamonlive 6y ago
  Maybe I wasn't clear enough. The level of complexity of a modern web browser is comparable to that of a OS. It is not an OS though.

calvinmorrison 6y ago

How much do you think the Debian non-profit makes per year? What about ArchLinux? How many full time developers are paid by the Linux Foundation? It's funny, their budget is much smaller than firefox https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/460503801 https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/460... Maybe all this complexity and constant changes to the web comes from the fact that there are hundreds and hundreds of employees paid to tinker around. Mozilla is effectively a $500 Million dollar corporation, not a non-profit. Money corrupts absolutely.

ylyn 6y ago
> How much do you think the Debian non-profit makes per year? What about ArchLinux? These are distributions. Their main role is to package upstream software. That is different from actually writing an entire OS. You should compare to however much Microsoft pays all of the developers that work on the different components of Windows. > How many full time developers are paid by the Linux Foundation? > > It's funny, their budget is much smaller than firefox That's because the vast majority of Linux development is not done by employees of the Linux Foundation. Only a few top-level maintainers, including Linus Torvalds and Greg K-H, are employed by the Linux Foundation. Most Linux code these days is written by people employed by companies like Intel, Huawei, Google, Red Hat, NXP, Facebook, etc. See https://lwn.net/Articles/839772/ https://lwn.net/Articles/839772/ for example. You would do good by reading a bit before saying things online.
- pwdisswordfish0 6y ago
  > Only a few top-level maintainers, including Linus Torvalds and Greg K-H, are employed by the Linux Foundation. Most Linux code these days is written by people employed by companies like Intel, Huawei, Google, Red Hat, NXP, Facebook, etc. This supposed to be a defense of Mozilla? There's a /r/selfawarewolves-style obliviousness to what you're saying.

dangwu 6y ago

That complexity is mostly due to Gecko, right? What's stopping Mozilla from switching to Blink? Does using Google's engine conflict with their mission? Edit: Getting downvotes for this honest question. I didn't realize that browser rendering engines held that much control. Apologies for the silly thought.

stefs 6y ago
that would be a monoculture disaster. monocultures are not resilient.
- Spivak 6y ago
  Not resilient to disease maybe but I'm sure webdevs will be overjoyed at having a much easier time porting sites. The power dynamic that matters is political not technical. Google doesn't really get to exert control over the web with their rendering engine or V8 it's the actual high-level browser policy that matters and Firefox doesn't actually have to follow any of it. Firefox gutted all of their internals with project Servo. If they had instead integrated Blink would it have been any different? I always think it's interesting what things people want to have diverse ecosystems with competing implementations (browsers) and what things people consider that an unnecessary duplication of effort (Wayland compositors).
  - ylyn 6y ago
    So you've seen the same person say both of that?
    - Spivak 6y ago
      We're on the internet. There's only one other human and the rest are bots. If you go into threads about Wayland the overwhelming public opinion is that having lots of compositors is silly. And then you go into threads about browsers the overwhelming public opinion is that having multiple browser implementations is sacred.
  - minikites 6y ago

senko 6y ago

> How about 500 mil yearly to create an OS from scratch? When was Mozilla trying to create an OS from scratch? The closest they came was FirefoxOS which was using Gecko browser engine (existing) on top of Linux kernel (existing) and a host of other existing open source projects, and FirefoxOS was (unfortunately) a dismal failure.

gchamonlive 6y ago
Maybe I wasn't clear enough. The level of complexity of a modern web browser is comparable to that of a OS. It is not an OS though.