Is there a reason why Mozilla haven't used their position and funding to just hoover up all the most successful open source projects to create a more cohesive ecosystem?
Surely any addons - like uBlock Origin - which have massive usage should just be baked in to the browser by this point?
The likes of Nextcloud and Mattermost would also be great additions in trying to create a true rival to Microsoft and Google's offerings.
Gives open source projects funding and development, Mozilla gets new avenues for subscription money to try and be more independent, and MS/Google's market shares can be chipped away at. Win win win. Potential anti-trust bait when Google start crying and withdrawing funding, too.
I'm not sure I want that kind of "conglomeration" in the FOSS space. Sure, there can be benefits to having a behemoth with a lot of resources behind it to support FOSS projects. But it also brings with it various problems of incentives and resource allocation. Managing multiple different software projects within one organisation is something a lot of well-run, for-profit companies struggle to do effectively, I don't think Mozilla would be much better at it.
Also, I personally don't have any issue with Mozilla but a lot of people seem to hate them. I can only imagine all the internet drama that would ensue if they started acquiring projects like LibreOffice and Nextcloud.
Not sure "acquisition" is the right framing in the open source space but one could certainly think of more partnerships, coordination and/or sharing of various components among the various big players and ecosystems.
FOSS on mobile is a basket case anyway (the dark side is too strong here) but the decades-long linux desktop story is not too hopeful either.
Things like deep interoperability, look-and-feel, UI conventions etc could go a long way towards making all those important applications feel like a coherent thing rather than a random patchwork stitched together with tape.
I'm guessing there are legal risk issues with this.
While ad blocking flies under the radar as a mom/pop operation with guerilla marketing the offended parties turn a blind eye.
Make it a feature of a "corporate" product, and they'll sue.
It hasn't exactly helped Eclipse and Apache stay independent, it's basically just some shared project infrastructure at a time when that's less relevant than it used to be.
> Is there a reason why Mozilla haven't used their position and funding to just hoover up all the most successful open source projects to create a more cohesive ecosystem?
How does this support their mission or make them money? They are rich, but also wasteful with their spendings. So anything has to show value for their Mission. And they are having enough projects of their own, just none which are really working well.
> Surely any addons - like uBlock Origin - which have massive usage should just be baked in to the browser by this point?
uBlock works fine on its own. It's probably better for them to be independent.
> The likes of Nextcloud and Mattermost would also be great additions
Nextcloud and Mattermost have both their own company. Do expect Mozilla to buy them out? Or should they just offer a hosted version with their own branding? What would be the value here?
> create a true rival to Microsoft and Google's offerings.
Mozilla has no real income outside of Google paying for a position in their Browser. And the money they have is far too low to compete with those behemoths in that space.
Why would Youtube, which makes money off ads, allow a web browser that blocks ads to access Youtube when they could just refuse to serve their user agent?
If a major website starting blocking user agents for any reason other than compatibility then all that would do is trigger (finally) the deprecation of user agents strings as browsers would all just pretend to be each other.
It would just be yet another zero-sum meta-war, with web browsers ultimately using randomized user agent strings just as mobiles randomize MAC addresses.
But none of that means that the war somehow can't or won't occur.
User agents are trivially fungible thing in this. That's the nature of the internet and how connections are established. Personal hardware constructs whatever packet that is going out and there's nothing special if that packet comes from a sanctioned or unsanctioned client. There's no way for a provider to distinguish the difference between what created an acceptable packet.
It's difficult for me to envision how that's rigorously enforceable to prevent something outside of the app (like a browser) to access something ultimately consumed by an API without resorting to (expensive and crackable) digital rights management at the hardware level. You can run down whatever train of thought you want, but ultimately since the client is running on machines controlled by the consumer, it can be cracked, reverse engineered, decapped, or whatever. This has been the end state for every attempt the industry has made to control user behavior. DVD CSS, Bluray, Sony's CD rootkit nonsense, every game console, satellite TV cards, analog cable TV, on and on, all broken.
I'm confident google/youtube wishes there weren't applications like FreeTube and yt-dlp. The fact of the matter is it's practically impossible to exclude them but still keep their own ecosystem functioning at an acceptable cost and with consumer buy in.
Because they don't want to get sued for monopolistic practices, I guess. Since the Goo owns Chrome and Youtube, Youtube blocking non-chrome user agents would be actionable.
Even if they whitelisted Safari, that would still be actionable.
Any competent lawyer could easily make the argument that that is a false equivalence.
They're not being forced to provide a service for free, they're not being allowed to ostracize essentially the only browser with any meaningful percentage of users that doesn't use their web engine as that is an anti-competitive and monopolistic practice.
> Surely any addons - like uBlock Origin - which have massive usage should just be baked in to the browser by this point?
Merely listing ublock origin as a "recommended extension" led to them being fined in China about two years ago. You can't even install it in mainland China right now.
Surely any addons - like uBlock Origin - which have massive usage should just be baked in to the browser by this point?
The likes of Nextcloud and Mattermost would also be great additions in trying to create a true rival to Microsoft and Google's offerings.
Gives open source projects funding and development, Mozilla gets new avenues for subscription money to try and be more independent, and MS/Google's market shares can be chipped away at. Win win win. Potential anti-trust bait when Google start crying and withdrawing funding, too.