As the OP says, the point is not that they needed unpaid work, if that's what you mean. The point is that volunteers shaped what Firefox, MDN, Thunderbird, Mozilla itself were.
This is why I refuse to donate to Mozilla, despite only paying for open source products, believing that 100% open source should be mandatory in every democractic government, Firefox and Thunderbird being my daily drivers for many years, and donating several hundred dollars every year on FLOSS projects.
Many of Mozillas product decisions prove that the Mozilla corporation is not aligned with the interests of FLOSS. I can't donate to Firefox or Thunderbird specifically, neither at the feature or product level. There is no way to ensure my donations go to enriching these products, instead of profit generating features that benefit the Mozilla corporation. One example is the container VPN proxy, which only allows you to implement a VPN per container if you pay for Mozilla VPN. This is a feature that should be universally available to all users, and all VPN providers, but they locked it behind a paywall for profit.
The is the same (logically analogous) reason I no longer use Reddit after the API changes in 2023, after using the platform for 15 years, and has become common among newer FOSS startups like OpenAI, minio, and bambu; using the philosophy of open source &/or unpaid community labor to achieve a certain level of trust, growth, users, funding, and market saturation, only to screw them all over in the name of profit. This for-profit parasitic greed and corruption in FLOSS is the antithesis to the philosophy of the FLOSS community.
In a sane world this type of community exploitation would be criminally prosecutable. Reddit decision makers would see the inside of a prison cell; the moderators and commenters – as well as the developers who built the 3rd party apps that grew the company from nothing for over a decade – would be given shares/ownership, and paid from the company for their time and labor; same for every other scammer that exploits these "bait-and-switch" deceptive tactics to succeed in businesss. Unfortunately for us all, we live in a world ruled by parasites.
"In 2018 she received a total of $2,458,350 in compensation from Mozilla, which represents a 400% payrise since 2008. On the same period, Firefox marketshare was down 85%. When asked about her salary she stated "I learned that my pay was about an 80% discount to market. Meaning that competitive roles elsewhere were paying about 5 times as much. That's too big a discount to ask people and their families to commit to."
In 2020, after returning to the position of CEO, her salary had risen to over $3 million. In the same year the Mozilla Corporation laid off approximately 250 employees due to shrinking revenues. Baker blamed this on the Coronavirus pandemic"
Incidentally, I have recently come across some Mozilla job postings with salary ranges I would consider to be at a considerable "discount to market". For example, here is a senior role at 59 000 euro per year: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/mozilla/jobs/7843229
> I can't donate to Firefox or Thunderbird specifically, neither at the feature or product level. There is no way to ensure my donations go to enriching these products, instead of profit generating features that benefit the Mozilla corporation.
Thunderbird is no longer owned by the Mozilla corporation, so now you can donate directly to them.
Won't somebody think of the children appears to be the world's most effective method of bringing in restrictive and privacy destroying laws, yet they just don't work.
The idea is that people who have politics like yours can be “visited” by the police and asked to “voluntarily” come down to the station for an interview about “hateful rhetoric” on social media. Doesn’t matter how you vote if actual political opposition is outlawed, which is where the UK is heading rapidly aided by digital surveillance.
Well yes, the great cabal of people bringing in these immense rafts of surveillance are the very people who commit, or who certainly hang out with the people who commit the most heinous acts. See the Epstein files.
Notice the same people will also talk during the daytime about morals and equality, while then conducting genocide in the evening.
Flea markets in East Germany even now are fascinating for classic tech, classic tech books, and many other things. Even as simple as going to one at Mauerpark or the Karlshorst race track, you will see working examples of classic DDR tech that you can buy and explore. Just like people explore classic macs, it's as interesting to see.
Sounds like a dream. Maybe I'll go someday. Eastern bloc tech is unendingly fascinating to me. I think it's genuinely impressive what they accomplished with the US actively sabotaging their access to information and hardware. And even then, they largely copied Western interfaces. I suspect this was partly to facilitate cloned hardware, but i do also suspect they wanted their systems to be approachable by engineers from around the world, too, so diverging too much would have been detrimental.
I think you are spot on. Due to the inability to buy parts from the world over, you had to repair any personal machines you had whether it be computers to cars, therefore access and knowledge was essential. A replica of that ethos today would be MNT Research.
> but i do also suspect they wanted their systems to be approachable by engineers from around the world
It was more about saving resources on software development. East German standard software was usually pirated copies of western standard software with the copyright strings patched to something else. Creating an entirely different evolutionary branch for hardware and software instead of copying doesn't make economic sense, especially when the goal is to catch up.
> with the US actively sabotaging their access to information and hardware
More like they didn't see the need and didn't invest in early computing and so lagged behind. Something the US very nearly almost did as post-war a lot of people didn't see the point. Software engineers (though they weren't called that) were seen as unimportant secretaries who just typed letters into the computer. Grace Hopper's Navy computing unit famously had to raid other offices at night for resources.
> I suspect this was partly to facilitate cloned hardware, but i do also suspect they wanted their systems to be approachable by engineers from around the world, too, so diverging too much would have been detrimental.
Computing advanced so quickly it showed the Soviet-style communist system for the lumbering boondoggle it was. By the time the central committee deigned to allocate resources for computing they were a generation behind and that only got worse. They stole western design and software because they didn't have the economic leeway to do it themselves.
You need to remember: by the 60s/70s the western economies were taking off in says Warsaw countries were never able to match. They simply did less and did it less efficiently across almost all sectors of the economy. No one had to cheat them or restrict them. They shot themselves in the foot repeatedly.
There were no startups. You had to petition the central government for permission to build more computers. They would assign you a quota. You built that many computers. In the mean time 12 new startups were founded in the US and two of them came up with new chip designs and shipped them to customers. Doesn't take a genius to understand why the soviet sphere was a compete non-entity in computing.
There is some validity to a marketplace selling items from a larger range of retailers, however the quality is so poor for many items that it simply is no good for society in any way.
> the quality is so poor for many items that it simply is no good for society in any way.
There are some that are genuinely dangerous and bad for society, but there are tons of goods that are "the same thing but half the price because it lasts a quarter the time" that have genuine utility.
Harbor Freight has basically made a drop-shipping business out of it. I often have tools that I need but will probably use 4 times in my life, and the Harbor Freight stuff is crap but will probably work 4 times.
Copy that over a bunch of verticals and it starts to make sense. Clothing for a costume I'll wear maybe twice, niche cooking gadgets for very specific things, tools to do a one-time repair on a car, a flash drive to turn over photos to family members, yada yada.
I think the dirty secret is that a lot of it is not "1/2 the price that lasts 1/4 the time" but "1/4 the price that lasts 9/10 the time" or "1/2 the price for the exact same product without half of the budget going to marketing".
It's not all of it. Some things are seriously worse quality. But really a ton of the "better quality" is just better marketing.
> some that are genuinely dangerous ... tools that I need but will probably use 4 times in my life, and the Harbor Freight stuff is crap but will probably work 4 times
Forehead hit hood, but I caught myself so it was a "gentle" reminder instead of a concussion. I should have splurged that time I broke a socket tightening an axle bolt. 150 ft-lbs + 180 degrees is a fair bit of torque.
They have replicated a neuromorphic algorithm (brain like) on a FPGA, but this implementation at this scale is doubtful to have any improvement over a brute force effort. Quite a few companies feel this is the way forward, although the end goal would be potentially better using photonic chips than qubits and obviously better than an fpga.
The title is especially buzzword based with minimal meaning for the actual paper.
reply