It's selling out because it was a nonprofit project, and now the Man owns it, and will try to monetize it. This is textbook selling out.
At some point, MrAlex94 will be made to compromise his principles. It might not be a big deal, it might even be good for users. But buying a product means that the company payed for control -- that's what property is. If System1 were fine with him developing it without their control, they would have just given him some money and said hey, do your own thing. But when you sell out, you give up control to The Man in exchange for that sweet, sweet cash. And, to be fair, cash has a lot of utility.
It honestly shocks me that more private no strings attached funding has not grown out of the trillions of dollar tech money made over the past couple of decades. If I had a billion I would throw money at the umatrix guy and ask nicely for a umatrix/origin browser. Make everyones life a little simpler.
Giving up control isn't easy, particularly when it's your money that's invested. That said, successful investors such as Y-Combinator do invest in people rather than a particular idea.
I imagine VCs want to own the rights so they can pull the plug if something unexpected happens, like a founder has a major life event or something. Whether or not they limit themselves to only pulling strings in the most dire circumstances is another question.
> At some point, MrAlex94 will be made to compromise his principles.
Except that at the point at which System1 crosses the line, MrAlex94 can fork the code (since it's all FOSS), create "Earthfox" (or whatever) and start again.
> But when you sell out, you give up control to The Man in exchange for that sweet, sweet cash.
I have no skin of the game (other than not wanting free software developers who stray even slightly from the perfect ideal, to be stigmatised), but this sounds rather condescending given that:
1. (to the extent that I know) MrAlex94 has spent most of his working life on an open source project, with little financial remuneration,
2. he's (most probably) not personally getting some vast amount of cash from the transaction, just his project receiving enough support to be able to employ one (?) extra person and get "fancy" features like CI builds.
If he had spent the time working on a closed source project at a company he would have almost certainly been far better off financially and he wouldn't have had to put up with such targeted attacks.
I think that there's very much space for criticising the trade-offs of the decision, but IMO your phrasing was excessively harsh.
> Except that at the point at which System1 crosses the line, MrAlex94 can fork the code (since it's all FOSS), create "Earthfox" (or whatever) and start again.
Unless of course theres a noncompete in the sale contract, a common thing when companies acquire startups.
> Except that at the point at which System1 crosses the line, MrAlex94 can fork the code (since it's all FOSS), create "Earthfox" (or whatever) and start again.
You know that's not the whole picture. Most users don't follow MrAlex94 and wouldn't know about the fork, and they won't bother changing. He didn't sell a product, he sold a userbase and a brand.
> It's selling out because it was a nonprofit project, and now the Man owns it, and will try to monetize it. This is textbook selling out.
I don't know if anyone is reading these comments anymore, but I'd like to point out that Waterfox has never been non-profit and even received investment (and similar criticism, which turned out to be unwarranted) in 2014.
> At some point, MrAlex94 will be made to compromise his principles.
People said the same in 2014, and 6 years on I never did. I'd hope that warrants some level of trust.
> At some point, MrAlex94 will be made to compromise his principles.
Did he, though? Reading his post here, it sounds like he never cared much about user privacy and thinks users were mistaken to assume that is the goal of this browser.
If you take that at face value, combined with what I would suggest is wording on the site that at least implies a focus on privacy, I'm not sure there's anything to compromise. As far as we know, he doesn't actually value privacy, selling to an ad company was always his objective, and his principles are directly aligned with theirs.
> Did he, though? Reading his post here, it sounds like he never cared much about user privacy and thinks users were mistaken to assume that is the goal of this browser.
I think that’s a bit harsh. I’ve always been privacy conscious and will remain so, especially with Waterfox.
Saying "sell out" is editorializing. You can't say what will happen in the future. Plenty of for-profit companies provide services people want while keeping founders happy. You only hear about the bad ones.
It's okay for you to trust people when you don't actively hear about them being bad, just as it is okay for other people to take what they see elsewhere and think it informs the behaviour of cases they see as related.
