A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 4, 2023 13:18 UTC (Tue) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454)
In reply to: A quarter century of Mozilla by pizza
Parent article: A quarter century of Mozilla

Mozilla never understood that their success was linked to the success of the FLOSS desktop, because that’s the only established platform where they are not in competition with the platform owner, who has many ways to make sure they never succeed over his own corporate projects.

With web offerings replacing traditional local apps they had a golden chance to make the FLOSS desktop shine, growing with it (and the multiplicity of distributions is a protection against someone taking over their success via a fork).

Instead, they blew it first by chasing proprietary platforms that were all too happy to get their features first while limiting their platform share, second by trying to corner this opportunity with their own Firefox OS, and third getting distracted from their core competencies favouring the startups of their buddies.

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 20, 2023 16:07 UTC (Thu) by immibis (subscriber, #105511) [Link] (1 responses)

I don't think that Mozilla could have ever been successful and not evil. That's just not a possible outcome within the socio-economic power structures we find ourselves in. A successful version of Mozilla looks like Google - using their technical prowess to form a monopoly in one market and expand to adjacent markets and form monopolies there. Suppose Firefox was the best web browser - Firefox OS might have taken off and we'd all use Firefox Phones and pay for things with Firefox Pay. Pretty much the same position Google is in. We might have Firefox Home voice assistants spying on us instead of Google Home. And I assure you, a detachment of sweaty nerds on LWN would be celebrating 25 years of Google Chrome bravely competing against the evil Firefox monopoly.

Power corrupts.

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 30, 2023 14:44 UTC (Sun) by sammythesnake (guest, #17693) [Link]

> Power corrupts.

Let's not forget that the flipside is also true: "Corruption Empowers". I.e. those who play fair and eschew evilness miss out on successful (shitty, but undeniably successful) strategies to gain market share / revenue / control...

That's why "enshittification" is so endemic, why legal tools like anti-trust legislation, monopoly commissions etc. exist (with somewhat limited success) and so on.

Sadly, we live in a world where those with the influence (obviously this involves money, but not *just* money) to do so are so richly rewarded for using that influence primarily as a tool to get more influence that inevitably the top of the pile is utterly dominated by those whose priorities heavily lean that way. Any influence spent elsewhere means getting behind on the race to own The World.

Those with enough influence can outspend governments on finding bugs in the legal code, and even influence the drafting of that legal code in the first place through political "donations" etc.

We've reached the point where a handful of people have gained such an egregiously disproportionate share of "The World" that the phrase "The World is Not Enough" starts feeling literally true for them and they start working on projects like "leaving the planet", and "owning lumps of space"

Yay.