Comment by neilv 9 days ago
Why haven't some EU and/or Latin American countries funded a Web browser in a meaningful way, in an effort to be less under the thumb of US tech companies?
They could fork Firefox or Chromium, poach some current developers, hire some more, and assert a strong presence on standards.
>you think a government can?
Do I think a government can fund a group of developers to fork some existing code and run with it? Yes, I do. Radical concept, I know...
I think you severely underestimate the size and complexity of something like Chromium. Not every project is fork and work material.
Well, a bunch of volunteers seem to have little trouble forking Firefox and creating Pale Moon, Waterfox, LibreWolf, and IceCat. You think a government can't do that? All they have to do really is throw some money to these existing groups.
Why do you keep bringing up Chromium anyway? We're talking about Firefox here.
A government funding a 1 billion dollars a year software project? That would never fly in any country.
There's no way you need $1B/year to properly fund the ongoing development and maintenance of an existing web browser. The Ladybird team is making an all-new browser from scratch for almost nothing. Just because Mozilla is wasting so much money doesn't mean you actually need that much to do the same job.
Easily doable, let me guess you never worked on a browser engine?
I haven't, but the Ladybird browser devs are doing so at this moment, and they don't seem to need billions of dollars.
>Why haven't some EU and/or Latin American countries funded a Web browser in a meaningful way, in an effort to be less under the thumb of US tech companies?
As with many things, it's just like Dark Helmet said in Spaceballs: "Evil will always triumph, because good is dumb."
Not to say that the US (or Mozilla or Google) is evil and the EU and LATAM are good (LATAM in particular is a really screwed up place, with a few exceptions that aren't as broken like Chile), but while the US obviously has its problems and does really stupid stuff (see the current election), other places do incredibly stupid stuff too (see Germany disarming, shutting down all its nuclear power and trying to make itself dependent on Russian fossil fuel energy). Honestly, I think the main reason the US is still doing as well as it is (see the strength of the USD) is because everyone else is so busy shooting themselves in the foot with a shotgun.
So yes, I totally agree: theoretically it should be pretty simple to just fork Firefox (or Chromium, though I think the former is a much better choice so we don't the whole web dependent on a single browser engine, if for no other reason), poach some current devs, hire some new ones locally, and then become the new "open standard". But good luck getting some national government (or even a group of them, like with the EU) having some vision and backing such a move.
IME, the best developers tend to be genuinely passionate about principles.
They aren't necessarily working for Mozilla now, because they can see right through a lot of obviously bad moves Mozilla has made, and ridiculously overpaid executives.
"Go where the biggest paycheck is" is people who care more about career than mission. Why would you even want those people, unless you can't get the mission ones.
Maybe, but if you actually want to poach people, you have to make large pay offers to get them to jump ship. So instead of just paying the prevailing rate for SWEs in $country, they need to actually look at how much those devs are making in the US and match that. Sure, it'll be expensive, but if it's only a handful of key people, it doesn't matter.
Trick is to start some sort of commune in Colombia and attract talent with the local amenities. Nice private community full of 10-15 software engineers, private chefs, security, etc would be less than $1-2k/month per person. Maybe turn it into a vacation spot: “tired of your work? Take 6 month sabbatical to come party in LATAM while making meaningful software. Work hard/play hard - apply by linking to the most meaningful PR you have contributed to an FOSS project.”
Honestly not a bad plan.
After this election, not a horrible idea, but I'm not sure Columbia is the best choice for a destination. Panama would probably be a lot better, and you wouldn't need to make a commune. Panama City is a pretty decent-looking place, and even has a subway system that makes the public transit in the US look bad. Costa Rica would be good too.
Go for it. But based on reaction to my prior comment it looks like everyone wants someone to drop everything and dedicate their life to a web browser, but nobody wants to do it themselves.
a EU funded/developed browser would have a built-in blacklist. malinformation is the greatest threat to so-called democracies
A built-in blacklist is fine. It's trivially easy to download some source code and delete a blacklist and recompile.
Microsoft gave up on building a Web Browser engine and you think a government can? Browser engines are really hard to build. They requires a lot of (very expensive) niche technical talent. Not to mention the need to keep up with the rate of Google's improvements to Chrome/Blink. We're at a point where Chrome has a 10 year head start to any other engine other than Firefox, building a general purpose new engine from scratch is basically off the table, and hard forking Chrome/Blink is also off the table (because why would you toss the ~1bn$ Google puts into chrome every year?). We're in a world of a single browser engine, no way to go back for the foreseeable future.