@ytvwld That's the thing, though. One could plausibly develop a browser off donations, but I don't think one could plausibly *run Mozilla* off donations, because their entire organizational structure and expenses seem informed by them getting essentially bags of free money every year. They seem incapable of operating in the lean manner required to survive this.

@kescher Unfortunately, I suspect that what will happen instead is that an AI company shows up with a bag of money and shallow promises of ethics, and Mozilla will have no choice but to 'partner' with them if it wants to continue existing.

@joepie91 ugh, right.

@kescher Actually, let's try to predict the sequence of events in more detail, and I'm curious how close I'll end up being:

Mozilla will do a desperate funding drive, not just asking for donations, but also internally ask around to find investors in their own network. Nobody is willing to invest enough money for activist reasons to keep it afloat. Because of the entrenched structure of the organization, they cannot make it work with smaller offers of investments.

Eventually, a 'friendly' investor shows up who just so happens to be invested in an AI company. The AI company runs a proprietary cloud service, sure, but they've been looking to do better and go against the grain of the industry, and so they wish to partner with Mozilla, on the premise that Mozilla's ethical AI efforts are a good starting point for renewing their product to go in a more ethical direction.

However, their stakeholders need to be kept happy too, so in the short term, they would like for Mozilla to expand their AI offerings with something that integrates with their proprietary, hosted offerings. It will be optional, of course, and it would have a data protection agreement, and wouldn't it be good for the users too? After all, some AI models are just Too Hard to run locally, so for the really difficult things, they could shell out to the hosted service.

And so an integration with that proprietary service appears. There may be a paid plan associated with it, maybe for the more impressive tasks. It's all optional, so you can simply choose not to use it, so it's no problem, right? And in the end, that service will become more ethical due to Mozilla's involvement!

Huh, the AI market is trending down, it seems things are not going well, and investors are getting cagey, so the renewal of their product will have to be delayed to some later, eventual point, and for now they'll have to stick with the existing closed platform. But it's only temporary, and hey, in financially hard times we all need to do our part, right?

It's now three years later. ProprietaryCorp's AI system is still integrated into Firefox, Mozilla is now dependent on their yearly funding, so they can't just remove it. They never really came through with the ethical renewal of their platform, but they're nice people to work with, and nobody wants to rock the boat. Firefox now has a long-term integration with a proprietary hosted AI service that ensures its continued use.

@kescher I really, truly hope that I am way off-base with this prediction. But I've also seen this pattern play out verbatim so many times over the years, just substitute 'blockchain' for 'AI'...

@joepie91 @kescher Adding to this scenario: too many people use a Firefox fork so let's do a RHEL and hide the SCM first for Firefox ESR then gecko-dev.