this post was submitted on 08 Feb 2024
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waif can a non-profit run a for a profit??
Yes. People got to eat.
They're legit companies, but they do not operate with the goal of profit. Profit is something they may make, and in many cases it's good so they can survive losses of funding or the like.
It also means they get certain tax advantages because they are not solely focused on profit
Yesm It is weird, but it would be impossible for a foundation to develop complex software like a Web browser. Engineers cost.
i don't think konqueror, gnome's web browser, or abrowser are tied to for-profit entities, though i could be mistaken
They are skins over someone else's browser.
KDE's Konqueror uses Qt WebEngine, which is developed by the Qt Company and is based on Google:s Chromium.
GNOME's Epiphany uses WebKit, developed by Apple.
Trisquel's Abrowser is a rebranded Mozilla Firefox.
Ironically, all of these things except Abrowser are based on Konqueror’s original engine, KHTML, so Konqueror was actually the OG engine. KHTML was forked to WebKit, which was forked to Blink, which became the underpinnings of Qt WebEngine, which Konqueror now uses.
This is also why KHTML still appears in the user agent strings for all of these engines, but back in the day the Gecko engine used in Mozilla products was already a thing and KHTML was the alternative to that, hence “KHTML, like Gecko”.
KHTML was truly a milestone in Free Software history. Immense respect to KDE developers.
webkit is not developed by apple, they're just using it for safari and contributing surprisingly little to the actual project
If you look on the Github page of the project, most of the recent commits are submitted by Apple employees.
Yup, you can run a non-profit foundation with a for-profit corporation as a subsidiary, because capitalism I guess.
The idea was to try to diversify funding in an attempt to deal with the 500 million dollar existential crisis that is the Google deal, which provides the majority of their funding. What that means is that they want to be a self sustaining tech company with annual revenue of $500 million. What that means is inevitably, fuck the mission, the browser, and the users; make money.
Firefox as it stands now is on its last legs, never to return. The only way it could possibly have a real future as a browser with a market share of over 3% is if somebody without a half a billion dollar boat anchor tied to their waste forked it, and that fork managed to amass a sizeable enough team of contributors to actually maintain and iterate on a modern, secure, feature complete web browser that could keep up with Chromium and friends.
I really wish that didn't seem nearly as unlikely to me as it does.
(imho but I'm just some guy on the internet)