What do we have to do to set up an *independent organisation* in Europe with an endowment from our (EU taxpayers’) money to maintain a free/open, private-by-default web browser that we legislate must be included in all operating systems made available in the EU?
We would likely fork Firefox, remove all the Silicon Valley/commercial bullshit, and hire engineers from Mozilla and elsewhere who want to work somewhere where they have the freedom to work on a browser for the common good without any Silicon Valley/commercial interference.
The challenge here isn’t technical; it’s funding and independence.
To succeed, any such organisation must be free of political interference and its funding must be guaranteed via an endowment and not privy to the whims of short-term political posturing.
@aral Funding is the issue. I however lean in the direction that software should be crowd funded. That way, actual people are in the control of the project as opposed to organizations.
We need a paradigm shift. We expect everything from the internet to be free. But we need to normalize to give back to creators. We need systems that makes it easy, secure, private and convinient to tip. In a way that preserves autonomy.
this is why I look at Gnome, Kde, Enlightment, any other desktop anv
AND to clw's work
because if we have hte data, we can also support the mantaining of our GUI layer (whatever that is)
In order to have a sustainable frontend, you need the ability to flood it with data
That's the hack we suffered with the web
We should do it again
@aral @vega
look, I think I understand you argument
but it's a purely theoretical arguments
We all knwo what taxes are, this soesn't make this idea more feasible
This is something that needs to be hacked through, I'm afraid
there are no shortcuts
Sorry if I sound pessimistic