Brian Kardell

That's a different argument, unrelated to the one that I originally responded to:

> > all of the big, successful open-source projects are either GPL, or can't be GPL because of the GPLs murky legality around linking

I don't see how your argument is relevant to that, or how it disputes the article. The article is not about funding or "organic growth". It's about survival characteristics and winning the mainstream. Blink, WebKit, and Gecko are all a mixture of permissive and weak copyleft licenses. There are no popular GPL browser engines. There are no popular proprietary browser engines. That's exactly the outcome that the article predicts! (Of course, it doesn't need to "predict" the most popular browser engines specifically. In 2015, they already looked similar and had a similar moat).

Although I have to admit now, we'd probably see proprietary browser engines if it wasn't for the "weak copyleft" part. Now I think that it's actually the most long-term competitive license type for some projects!

If we continue with the topic of web browsers, then we'll see a seemingly strong counter-example: the most popular browsers are proprietary, and have been for a long time. But that's a thin layer on top of a larger open foundation. A thin layer is easy to replicate and compete against. Thus, Chromium and Firefox shells are maintained (and kept competitive) just fine. They are less popular than Chrome or Edge, but not because they are less maintained or broadly inferior (they may…

Brian Kardell's recent post "Webrise"[1] has similar exploration of what humanity might be able to do to become responsible stewards of one it's most important common means. Less specific than this article, & spends a lot more time building context & opening the questions, but both are interested in how we maintain user-agency ongoingly, which is a powerful humanistic nigh-unto religious question to me (in a world which otherwise feels technocratically sapping of agency, a world of intensifying infernalization). This Chromium Foundation could be a candidate answer to Webrise.

To this articles point, I generally have been ok with the patronage system that Chrome gets developed under so far. But it feels like there's no one in the standards bodies room who can say no, who can keep real damage from happening when there is a crisis, which is exactly what's happening with Manifest v3, aka Web Extensions[2].

Just last night, a reply to my consternation about the situation, the stripping away of user rights & agency, prompted someone to suggest we get political, organize, change the game. This article presents some possible starting place for re-defining how we'd caretake one of humanity's greatest shared assets.

I also see a lot of hew & cry that makes me sad. I love WebPackage. The use case[3] goals are so noble & pure. But it feels like there's been a lot of outcry & people running around saying the sky is falling. And I don't get it. But I tell you- it sure feels like the…

No affiliation with Mozilla, just a very long time FF user.

They don't release this info so I don't know. That said, the best info I can find is here [0]. It claims that 87% of Firefox's contributions are from "mozilla". Red Hat also contribute. If you dig into some of Mozilla's outgoings, a lot of their non-employee outgoing spend is going on paying other vendors to work on their software. At least some of these looks like "paying people to work on firefox but not mozilla employees" - maybe it's EOR/contracting stuff. There is a huge outlier in André Bargull too, but it looks like as far as this analysis is concerned mozilla are absolutely integral to the current state of FF.

[0] https://bkardell.com/blog/2023-Mid-Season-Power-Rankings.html

Hi, Igalian here. I can tell you that Wolvic does not use Servo nor are there any immediate (or even long term at this point) plans for it to. That's not to say it couldn't happen someday or that it wouldn't be interesting. We are major contributors to a lot of major projects and many of them have something to do with web engines (see https://bkardell.com/blog/2023-Mid-Season-Power-Rankings.html) so it's easy enough to see connections, but the connections are mainly often more generally just "we have a lot of interest in web stuff, and a great reputation for contributing".