Comment by flossly
7 hours ago
I really wish a patron would step up and sponsor this project. Not just by money, but also by plugging it in their browser-carrying products. Maybe Hauwei of Samgsung; they now sling a browser derived of another for-profit --usually competitor-- company's browser.
Huawei are funding Servo. They have a small full time team on it and are the main reason the project got revived in 2022.
That’s interesting, anyone have more info on how why this came about? The why is pretty clear at least.
It came about because US sanctions on Huawei mean that they are unable to make contributions to any of the major browser engines which are all controlled by US entities.
I was not aware of this, and now I suddenly understand the weird hate that the project gets from drive-by commenters. (I don’t agree with it, but I can see a plausible motivation.)
I don't really see why they would do that?
Being dependent on a direct competitor is not a comfortable position to be in. It's ameliorated significantly by Chromium being open source, but not completely.
Samsung web browser uses chromium, I doubt they care
Sanctions
So right now Servo is funded by the community, and this is no good because why? Instead you propose that this project should be funded by a for-profit company with it's own objectives in this world (that often starts with "more money"), again leading me to ask why?
The setup right now seems to give enough people enough time to work on it to move forward, why on earth would you want to involve companies infamous for their shit software quality, like Samsung?
> So right now Servo is funded by the community, and this is no good because why?
Because look at Mozilla... You need to get the browser in front of people. A browser that works on the real web, is such a huge project, you cannot do it as a hobby community-funded project for ever. You need user-share-%.
Samsung can put it in front of Samsung appliance users.
Samsung has put Enlightenment 17 in front of every Tizen user. I am not seeing the flood of apps implemented on EFL coming out
I think it is actually Mozilla people look at when they ask "why" :-P
Probably because broad adoption would help making it a real option to use in the near future?
So sure, Samsung would bundle it with their usual crap, but if it helps making the engine more mature, great, but I also don't see why they would in the first place.
It had broad adoption, Mozilla threw it away.
The same would occur again.
7 replies →
> Instead you propose that this project should be funded by a for-profit company with it's own objectives in this world (that often starts with "more money"), again leading me to ask why?
You understand that Mozilla Firefox is not funded by the "community" and is completely funded by Google's money. Even donating does not fund the browser.
Mozilla knows that the open source "community" has no money, and cannot replace the amount of money Google is paying them and the employees who work on the browser.
The question is are you ready to fill the $600M a year black hole for Google to NOT pay Mozilla to fund Firefox?
It only makes sense for Servo to get funding from for-profit companies at this point, which is one of the only ways open source can work.