>Mozilla can already hire from anywhere, too, can't they? No, not that I'm aware of. Sure, they can hire someone from EU and fly them to the US to work, but I

>Mozilla can already hire from anywhere, too, can't they? No, not that I'm aware of. Sure, they can hire someone from EU and fly them to the US to work, but I'm not aware of them having offices in the EU. Why would the EU want to pay for EU devs to be flown to the US and paid inflated US salaries, instead of just keeping that talent at home? >In any case, I already mentioned in my comment that the EU can pay someone other than Mozilla. The point I wanted to make is that the EU should not fork Firefox, but rather try to get their favourite contributions upstreamed, if possible. That's impossible. Any time you have a different entity working on a software project, it becomes forked. So either you just keep the internal fork and upstream as much as you can, and hope that the parent org takes these submissions, or you release your fork publicly if the parent org isn't cooperative enough. Either way, it's a fork. Quite simply, every time you clone a git repo, it's a fork. Anyway, sure, they should try to get their contributions upstreamed, but what if Mozilla is recalcitrant? The EU would be correct to release their own version for EU use. >In any case, I still think it would be a waste of taxpayer money for the EU to pick winners (ie award the project to someone). Instead they should focus on streamlining bureaucracies and regulation etc so that private entities (companies, or foundations or otherwise) that provide what people want (software or otherwise) can flourish in the EU. So, just let Google own the browser market? I don't see how this is useful or productive. Streamlining regulations isn't going to magically make it economically feasible for some start-up to somehow make money making a web browser.