The post seems to present a false dichotomy:
FOSS leads to enshittification, advertising, and bad practices.
Paid software ensures quality assurance.
> what would stop them from both taking my money and selling user data?
nothing.
It's why i think browser (and other platform software, such as OS, or telephony/mobile platforms) should be FOSS funded by taxes, and "regulated" so that its always open access etc.
Relying on donation (ala, altruism of individuals) do not work at scale.
If anything the average is the exact opposite. Venture capital ensures enshittification to recoup costs.
The problem is that a lot of the most influential FOSS only exists because of VC capital (or other dysfunctional markets), either because they sponsor projects directly, or they pay the salaries of the people who happen to do it themselves. FOSS has become a form of economic dumping that could be causing more harm than good. If Google couldn’t “dump” Chrome for free, or Facebook couldn’t “dump” React for free, maybe browsers or front-end frameworks would be regular, functional, competitive markets. Making it “FOSS” is just an inoculation against what would otherwise be considered an anti-competitive practice.
The poster worked at Mozilla Corporation, so I think they’re saying that unless you pay for Firefox, it’s getting funded in other ways that aren’t in its users’ best interest, like MoCo selling user data, which they’ve admitted to.
But, when MoCo sold out its users, they lost the ability to ask me to pay, because what would stop them from both taking my money and selling user data?
I’ll gladly donate and have donated to an organizations whose products I use where those organizations would rather fail and be dismantled than sell their users’ data. I’ll even pay companies that don’t lie about it. But, Mozilla said they’d never sell out, and then they did.