In a blog post, Mozilla announced that it was firing 250 engineers: “Sadly, the changes also include a significant reduction in our workforce by approximately 250 people.” Ouch.
Changing World, Changing Mozilla
Then again, as @aral recently said:
We could fork Firefox and have an independent EU org develop it. No need for the rest of Mozilla.
The criticism stems from the fact that 90% of Mozilla’s revenue is paid for by… Google!
Or, as Katyanna Quach writes in The Register:
Mozilla gets the vast, vast majority of its funding from Google, Yandex, and Baidu, who pay to be the default search engine in Firefox in their regions. In 2018, Moz had a $451m cash pile, 95 per cent of which, some $430m, was provided by these web giants. Those deals will expire in November 2020 unless renewed or renegotiated.
With an ever decreasing market share, those deals are surely going to be renegotiated.
But, I guess what I’m more concerned about is this: think about how big Mozilla is. They had a thousand engineers!
What fascinates me about seemingly retro tech is the dream of having these tools be feasible in the human realm. People like us can use them and make them, without having to form a company, without business plans and lawyers and project managers. The web browser project is so big, so monstrous, it needs hundreds of people to get right, to implement all the features, because we kept adding them and adding them, letting corporations out-organize us.
This is what happened. We used to have so many browser engines. Now you need a thousand engineers to compete, apparently.
And yes, I know, this is never going to stop: people see business opportunities and jump in, and with venture capital it is possible to out-organize us, again and again. Welcome to capitalism. But there’s hope: the grim reaper that cuts down enterprises in a pandemic, in an economic crisis. When profits are gone, we’re still there. Gopher is still there. RSS is still there. Plan 9 is still there. Emacs is still there. (Vim, too.) Forth is still there. Email is still there.
True, a crisis is never the tabula rasa one might wish. Many companies are better off after the war. As @sqwishy reminded me:
Business are affected negatively but some few benefit; Zoom has almost become a household name for conference calls in the way that the word “Powerpoint” is used in place of “slideshow”. That is not better for tech.
And yet, remember IBM? There were huge. Huge! “Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM equipment.” And yet, here we are. IBM is a shadow of its former self. DB2 is still around. I can’t think of any other IBM product these days. The giants will come down one day.
The resistance is never big. In the movies, underdogs are the main characters. We never see the sea of people that’s going along with the system. The resistance is small. The resistance isn’t pure. I still use Firefox. I still use the web. But I use it less. I use text browsers when I can. I use simple Mastodon clients. I know IRC, Bitlbee, Brutaldon, Lynx and Gemini are not strictly “better” than the modern web; to my coworkers all these things seem very retro. But they’re my scale. I am not a thousand developers. I’m human scale.
Or, as @Shufei puts it:
Stepping back, I see I hardly go on the mainstream web anymore. Half of my Wikipedia reading is via Gopherpedia. Archive.org. Libgen. Git-tub. What else is there? The rest is corpo caca. And yet, that is what most people seem to like. Why else would they be on FB? I do think it’s time to recognize that what we have is a demimonde, a resistance, and invest energy in it accordingly. This is it.
Indeed. I still use Wikipedia on the web. But I also feel like I’m using less and less of the mainstream web. It’s all corpo caca.
If we’re the resistance, then we need to think in terms of propaganda. What are our posters? Our jokes? What new names do we give the things we like, the things we dislike? In German, we call this process “Wortschöpfung”, word creation.
Let’s not be coprophages, let’s not be dung eaters. We don’t want the corpo caca.
#Philosophy #Programming #Web #Gopher #Gemini
(Please contact me if you want to remove your comment.)
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I’ve noticed this too! You know how with search engines you can filter out a word by putting a minus sign in front of it? Is there a way to filter out websites that have javascript from search results? Because that’d do the trick. Bye bye corporate top 10 lists of weird tricks, hello somebody’s weird passion project homepage.
– Anonymous 2020-08-13 02:25 UTC
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I think that’s basically why Gemini is not simply HTTP1.0 with a simple HTML subset and no scripts: because you can never tell which links go back to the corpo caca web. Perhaps there’s an extension that unlinks the biggest corporate sites from all web pages? That would be interesting.
– Alex 2020-08-13 07:25 UTC
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Sounds like http://wiby.me/ is what you’re talking about. http://wiby.me/about/
– Anonymous 2020-08-13 08:18 UTC
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Wiby sounds very interesting! Thanks.
– Alex 2020-08-13 09:17 UTC
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Good comment regarding standards growing in complexity. Whenever a committee meets to talk about new developments, there’s the danger of capture. They start adding features because they can, and everybody adds them because they must. And over the years, the number of competitors starts to dwindle. How many C++ compilers are there?
– Alex 2020-08-13 18:01 UTC
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I really enjoyed this post! I am absolutely enjoying the longform gemini posts lately 🙂
– elphermVSbpm 2020-08-14 09:44 UTC
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Thanks!
– Alex Schroeder 2020-08-14 15:07 UTC
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“As a non-profit open-source operation, Mozilla spends as much as it receives; its 2018 staffing bill was $286m with a headcount of about 1,000, or about $286,000 per person, on average.”
Well, they’re certainly making more money than I am. But so do the Google engineers, of course.
– Alex Schroeder 2020-08-14 15:08 UTC