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I can download the Firefox sources and everything else they produce. That they make money incidentally to that is really no problem and a positive because it p
by dkjaudyeqooe 3y ago
I can download the Firefox sources and everything else they produce.
That they make money incidentally to that is really no problem and a positive because it provides reasonable funding.
What if Firefox made a world beating browser by accident. Would they be justified in closing the source, restricting access and making people pay for it?
That's what OpenAI did.
- strbean 3y agoThat's the real distinction: does the for-profit subsidiary subsume the supposed public good of the parent non-profit? If OpenAI Co. is gatekeeping access to the fruits of OpenAI's labors, what good is OpenAI providing?
- DANmode 3y agoThey had one of the best browsers in the world at one point. Their sell-out path was hundreds of millions of dollars from GOOG to make their search engine the default, and, unspoken: allow FF to become an ugly, insecure, red-headed stepchild when compared to Chrome. Likely part of what took priority away from Thunderbird, at the time, too.
- DANmode 3y agoAnyway, to answer your question, no, not okay to close up the nonprofit and go 100% for-profit in that case. Concisely, in any human matteres: Do what you say you'll do, or, add qualifiers/don't say it. Take funds from a subset of users who need support services or patch guarantees of some kind, use that to pay people to continue to maintain and improve the product.