Because much of mozilla’s funding is from a deal with google, that’s why.
US$300 million annually. Approximately 90% of Mozilla’s royalties revenue for 2014 was derived from this contract
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Foundation
A lot of money, but not enough to actually to actually do a lot. They keep cutting features their “customers” like. Why?
Because development is expensive.
Google props mozilla up to pretend they don’t have a monopoly on the internet. Just enough money to barely keep up, not enough to truly stay competitive.
Mozilla wants to not rely on google money, so they are trying to expand their products. AI is overhyped, but still useful, and something worth investing in.
Mozilla: ignores years of customer complaints and requests
Are these customers donating, or purchasing mozilla products or services so that mozilla doesn’t have to rely on google’s donations?
Mozilla: creates new product nobody asked for
https://github.com/Mozilla-Ocho
Nearly 10k and 400 stars on those respective repos.
A way to run a large language model on any operating system, in any OS, in a simple, local, and privacy respecting manner?
For linux we have docker, but Windows users were starving for a good way to do this, and even on linux, removing the step of configuring docker (or other container runtimes) to work with nvidia, is nice.
And it’s still FOSS stuff they aren’t being paid for, currently. But there are plenty of ways to monetize this.
Here’s an easy one: tie in the the vpn service they have to allow you to access the web ui of the computer running the llamafile remotely. Configure something like end to end encryption or or nat traversal (so not even mozilla can sniff the traffic), and you end up with a private LLM you can access remotely.
With this, maybe they can afford some actual development on firefox, without having to rely on google money.
They could. But in countries where internet access is restricted by authorities, running any more than an insignificant amount of traffic over a VPN, even protocols as stealthy as the ones that make them indistinguishable from website (http/s) traffic, can be noticable… and being noticed can get you killed.
Snowflake, on the other hand, runs proxies to users of the snowflake browser extension, who act as entry points. It’s named so because connections are ephemeral, and last for a short time, like snowflakes. This makes it much harder to distinguish.
It’s not only about what internet traffic, it’s also about where.
And of course, the how is relevant too. Not many people want to spend the time to set up an ssl vpn (and multiple people using it makes it easier to spot).
You need to understand what you’re asking when you suggest people set up their own proxy. You’re asking them to learn a skill, most likely in their free time (free time and energy they may not even have), and without many resources to learn (censored internet), and then rest their lives and livelihoods on that skill. Depending on the regime, maybe the lives of their friends and family, as well.
Comparatively, it’s like two clicks to select snowflake as an entrypoint in the tor browser configuration options.
In my experience, best with science, math, and technology stuff:
But I’ve found it to be very good for finding scientific articles.
I disagreed particularly with:
Furthermore, F-Droid doesn’t enforce a minimum target SDK
While yes, this may be a bad thing for some, certain apps, like termux (terminal emulator, even lets you make a linux chroot, some ppl play games using wine in it) only work properly on sdk’s older than a certain version, since newer versions can be somewhat locked down.
I don’t want to say that that article is “google good, f droid bad”, but that’s what a lot of what it’s points are. It completely neglects to mention the downsides of google’s various security models, especially for a foss community like this one. App bundles, for instance, are secure yes. But they are also an advanced form of drm (at least when made by google), must be compiled server side for each device, and other things that make them not work for the foss community.
And criticizing f Droid because it has multiple repos? That criticism is completely incompatible with the common FLOSS ideas that things should be less centralized.
Don’t get me wrong, some of the points it brings up are valid, but they are biased, only focusing on on one side.
And I also don’t feel the need to be alarmed by these points. What does it matter that google signs everything (in a supposedly better way) when “everything” includes malware?
As usual, no app or product can replace human discernment. Security is a process, not a product.
However, freshtomato is another router firmware, that isn’t as feature rich or well supported as opwnwrt, but is focused on supporting broadcom chipsets.
https://www.freshtomato.org/
https://wiki.freshtomato.org/doku.php/hardware_compatibility
I flashed it to my netgear router with a broadcom chipset, it works wonderfully!