One of the myths that comes up again and again in FOSS is "It's run by a non-profit, it's safe, the corporate world cannot take it over".
Mozilla shows how incorrect this assumption is: mastodon.social/@sarahjamielew…
Non-profits can be captured by corporations very easily:
1. Evil corporation donates massive amount of money to a non-profit, far more than it got from individuals, grants etc.
2. Non-profit uses the massive donation to greatly extend its features and pay itself much bigger salaries
3. Non-profit can no longer function without corporate donations
4. Non-profit captured, does whatever corporation wants
#FOSS
Sarah Jamie Lewis (@sarahjamielewis@mastodon.social)
Mozilla has a new CEO. Once again iterating that the future of Firefox is AI first, AI by default: "Firefox will grow from a browser into a broader ecosystem of trusted software" "It will evolve into a modern AI browser" "AI should always be a cho…Sarah Jamie Lewis (Mastodon)
babble encat
in reply to FediThing • • •FediThing
in reply to babble encat • • •@babble_endanger
It's difficult.
In theory corporate donations should be approached with caution by FOSS, they may be selling themselves without even realising it.
In reality, it's a lot easier to say this than do this. FOSS developers do important hard work which is usually unpaid or low paid, and if someone offers them a chance to get a decent wage it is difficult/impossible for anyone in that situation to turn it down (especially if they have a family or others dependent on them).
It keeps coming back to the same thing: we need to be paying FOSS creators properly. Perhaps government funding from increased taxes on big tech?
Florian Berger (privat)
in reply to FediThing • • •@babble_endanger
That.
pmonks (330ppm)
in reply to FediThing • • •FediThing
in reply to pmonks (330ppm) • • •@pmonks
A lot of people use a de-crapified version of Firefox called @librewolf
FediThing
in reply to FediThing • • •p.s. To be absolutely clear, I'm not criticising non-profits, it's great that organisations are run by non-profits 👍
I'm just trying to make the point that this status alone isn't going to protect them from corporate takeover. There needs to also be additional structural protection to protect them such as decentralised infrastructure, non-corporate funding, alternatives that can be switched to easily etc etc.
If people are able to switch away from the non-profit very easily, this makes it much less attractive for corporate takeovers. Corporations want to lock people in to whatever they control.
Chip Butty
in reply to FediThing • • •Incident Creator ❎
in reply to FediThing • • •LFA
in reply to FediThing • • •yuhasz01
in reply to FediThing • • •