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I wish Mozilla would get into revenue generating, web-maximalist products like an office suite alternative to Google Workspace and Microsoft. I think there are

I wish Mozilla would get into revenue generating, web-maximalist products like an office suite alternative to Google Workspace and Microsoft. I think there are a fair number of people who want a significant brand behind these, but also an alternative to the mega-corp offerings. ie, instead of Thunderbird (which I know isn't developed by Mozilla anymore), create a hosted email platform with a PWA that can run and store data locally. These types of products would have a virtuous relationship with Firefox.

lurk2 2y ago
It would be interesting to see Mozilla diversify itself from its Google stipend, but there seems to be an inherent conflict of interest at play when a non-profit like Mozilla starts to expand its offerings beyond the core product; the tendency is for leadership to use these projects for empire-building. Wikipedia suffers from a similar problem where the core product is great, but the parent foundation uses the product to finance other projects that are only tangentially related to the product itself.
- AlotOfReading 2y ago
  Mozilla faces a very similar set of challenges as other "umbrella" open source organizations like Apache, MediaWiki, and the Linux Foundation that have notably low overlap with the current boardmembers.
- spankalee 2y ago
  This is why I think that web-centric, open source, hosted core apps would be nice to see. If you want to use the web as your primary application runtime, you're currently stuck with closed-source apps, or pretty bad open source apps that are difficult to integrate. Sandstorm did (and still is as a community project) try to integrate some existing apps into a cohesive-ish platform with nice security guarantees, but it wasn't really made accessible to every day users. Something similar to Google Workspace, but open source and hosted by a foundation could be a nice default starting point and/or a principled platform to use, for a lot of users.

lurk2 2y ago

It would be interesting to see Mozilla diversify itself from its Google stipend, but there seems to be an inherent conflict of interest at play when a non-profit like Mozilla starts to expand its offerings beyond the core product; the tendency is for leadership to use these projects for empire-building. Wikipedia suffers from a similar problem where the core product is great, but the parent foundation uses the product to finance other projects that are only tangentially related to the product itself.

AlotOfReading 2y ago
Mozilla faces a very similar set of challenges as other "umbrella" open source organizations like Apache, MediaWiki, and the Linux Foundation that have notably low overlap with the current boardmembers.
spankalee 2y ago
This is why I think that web-centric, open source, hosted core apps would be nice to see. If you want to use the web as your primary application runtime, you're currently stuck with closed-source apps, or pretty bad open source apps that are difficult to integrate. Sandstorm did (and still is as a community project) try to integrate some existing apps into a cohesive-ish platform with nice security guarantees, but it wasn't really made accessible to every day users. Something similar to Google Workspace, but open source and hosted by a foundation could be a nice default starting point and/or a principled platform to use, for a lot of users.