this post was submitted on 09 Feb 2024
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A lot of people in this thread seem to downplay the article with "yeah, that might be your opinion..." but two facts that are facts and not opinions are:
This means that if Google decides to stop bank rolling Mozilla it's game over. Firstly because other revenue streams are currently near insignificant when you look at the total expenses.
Secondly because since Firefox hold no significant market share, no one else would be interested in investing in Mozilla and the future of Firefox. After all, whatever Mozilla will throw up on the wall as the "grand masterplan for world dominance" would just end up in the question "Why didn't you do this before?".
I've been using Firefox for almost 20 years. I started using it because I saw what happens when one company controls the browser market. That web browser did so much damage and we only really got rid of it some year ago.
Chrome is a perfect example that the history repeats itself and that people are fucking stupid. People are actually acting surprised and complain about Google putting effort into making adblocking impossible in Chrome.
So all in all, if Mozilla doesn't find other revenue streams, Firefox is dead... It just doesn't know it yet.
Now, everyone yapping about that Linux was an insignificant player and still made it to the top just sound like enthusiasts who really doesn't know history and the harsh reality of doing business.
Linux was just a little more than hobby project (business wise) that essentially only Red Hat and Suse made real money from in the 90's.
Arguably you could say that the turning point was when the CEO of IBM, Lou Gerstner, shocked the world by saying that IBM was going to pump in 1 billion dollars in Linux during 2001. Now, that doesn't look like much today when just Red Hat has a yearly revenue of 3-4 billion, but that's how insignificant Linux was at that time.
After that milestone Linux went for the jugular on Windows Server. For ordinary people it would still take almost 10 years before they would hold something Linux in their hands.
The rocket engine that accelerated Linux and pieces that it was ready for end users was Google and Android in 2007. Linux's growth the last 20 years wasn't mainly driven by enthusiasts, it was business pumping in money in future opportunities.
What future opportunities can Mozilla sell to investors with the market share Firefox has today?
N-no. Correct about IBM though.
It seems that what made Linux and FreeBSD relevant was the late 90s' and early 00s' Web. And FreeBSD then lost to Linux, not to Windows Server or Solaris.
Only there are different kinds of businesses, and the balance between them is becoming worse.
Before IBM made that statement there were essentially no major software vendors that ported and supported their software on Linux.
Yes, one might argue that Linux-Apache-MySql-Php revolutionized things but other than that a clear majority of things were run on solutions that put money in Microsoft's pockets.
Feel free to name drop some major finance systems or similar enterprise systems you could run without Microsoft cashing in on the OS in some way between 1990-2005.
As I wrote before, it took us 20 years to get rid of IE and a lot of proprietary server side junk Microsoft blessed us with. It's not an coincidence. 99% of all companies were stuck in development tools from Microsoft.
It wasn't until the hardware really really caught up with Java requirements that things really changed.
I've just found mentions of Linux support by Oracle before that, so there were things before IBM and that statement. Though on that page there's no Linux link, but there are AIX, Solaris etc and an NT one.
Could you please, on the contrary, name some such systems strongly requiring Microsoft really? IIS and AD are not that.
I mean, OK, for the thick clients for administrators likely it'd be many things.
But everything IBM or commercial Unix-based, like, again, Oracle databases.
I'm born in 1996, so don't really know what I'm talking about. Just seems a bit skewed.