Leaving Mozilla

I don't know, but maybe spending 15 years working on something that you felt was not only a job but also in part a mission shapes a lot of you as a person and you want to express your feelings about that huge part of your life.

Rust was an own goal foot gun.

Interesting language with a passionate community / cult, but the value to Mozilla was vanishingly close to zero.

Librewolf, like all the forks, free-rides on the upstream work of paid Mozilla staff in order to be secure. It's a band-aid, not a solution.

I'm using Waterfox on desktop at the moment, but I really wish Mozilla would get their act back together and make all the forks unnecessary. I'm not saying they need to die: I only hope one day they aren't needed anymore.

Also, I'm afraid that's not sustainable in the long run. How long before Mozilla makes a change so big to introduce some nasty feature that it becomes impossible for forks to stay up to date with upstream? Do they really have the resources necessary to maintain an actual fork and not just a customized version?

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.