Comment by robocat

9 hours ago

Which popular browsers are significantly leaning on individual contributors or volunteers?

Google decided to drop XSLT, because the volunteer-maintained libxslt had no maintainers for some time. So, instead of helping the project, they just decided to remove a feature.

  • But by (attempting to) remove this dependency, Google indeed decided to stop piggy-backing on another volunteer - as requested.

    Be careful what you wish for. :-)

Were you born before or after heartbleed uncovered the sorry state of OpenSSL and the complete absence of funding it was maintained under?

So to answer your question: Every single one of them, from Google with its billions, to Mozilla with Googles billions, none of them would spend even a cent on critical open source projects they relied on as long as they could get away with it.

Almost all of them? as I recall there was a single volunteer developer maintaining the xml/xslt libraries they were using.

Wasn't it similar with openssl 13+ years ago? Few volunteer maintainers, and only after a couple of major vulnerabilities money got thrown at that project?

I'm sure there's more and that's why the famous xkcd comic is always of relevance.