6. How does Waterfox make money?
Waterfox has search partnerships. That is, the default search on Waterfox is monetised. If you search with it, Waterfox gets a share of the revenue. You are under no obligation to use the default search - but if you like what Waterfox does and want to support the project, please consider using it.
Do you think that is a good situation?
Why “should” it be the goal of the dev? Who are you to decide that for the developer?
That’s a prediction and I don’t know what data you’re basing that off of. Could you share it?
Those are all assumptions. You do not know if the search engine is making enough money already. They might be trying to make money in the first place and getting it in front of users might be a way to raise awareness popularity. There are also companies like ecosia, duckduckgo, qwant, startpage and others that do care about privacy. Would you be against their sponsorship too?
Anti Commercial-AI license
Yes, it should be the most important aspect of it. If the devs can live with it through donations and the project becomes their full time work, good, but that should never come at the expense of the user.
That’s just my vision of it. Everyone is free to do whatever they want, but for me that’s a requirement for FOSS projects.
Just a logical enshitification way. Profits always comes at a price. Keeping your project free while being for-profit often means getting forked and dying, much like ownCloud.
Whatever the end goal is, it’s still advertising and it’s impacting users’ freedom of choice by setting a default and virtually discouraging the use of other engines.
This kind of info is often hidden (didn’t try Waterfox but I bet that it won’t say that the default search engine gives them money when you first start the browser), because they know it might make them look bad.
I see now.
This is probably the source of our contention. This article (and this one too) explains where I come from. As a dev, I owe users fuck all. It’s my free time, not theirs. Imagine if whatever you were doing for free were suddenly claimed by others and they started making demands how you do it.
But thank you for your answers. This is probably something we cannot agree on and something you have experience yourself. I encourage you to make something in your free time that other people use and that it becomes successful.
Anti Commercial-AI license
For sure! You have every right and I won’t expect maintainers to take their time doing things. I just expect them not to profit from my use of their work by paying with my data or similar, and if they do, good for them, but I won’t support them
That’s fair 🙂 Thank you for the discussion.
Anti Commercial-AI license
Thank you as well, and thank you for your work, as it seems you contribute to FOSS :)
Might join this team as well one day, when I’ll have the skills to!