zlacker

I can download the Firefox sources and everything else they produce.

That they make money incidentally to that is really no problem and a positive because it provides reasonable funding.

What if Firefox made a world beating browser by accident. Would they be justified in closing the source, restricting access and making people pay for it?

That's what OpenAI did.

>>dkjaud+(OP)
That's the real distinction: does the for-profit subsidiary subsume the supposed public good of the parent non-profit?

If OpenAI Co. is gatekeeping access to the fruits of OpenAI's labors, what good is OpenAI providing?

>>dkjaud+(OP)
They had one of the best browsers in the world at one point.

Their sell-out path was hundreds of millions of dollars from GOOG to make their search engine the default, and, unspoken: allow FF to become an ugly, insecure, red-headed stepchild when compared to Chrome.

Likely part of what took priority away from Thunderbird, at the time, too.

>>dkjaud+(OP)
Anyway, to answer your question, no, not okay to close up the nonprofit and go 100% for-profit in that case.

Concisely, in any human matteres: Do what you say you'll do, or, add qualifiers/don't say it.

Take funds from a subset of users who need support services or patch guarantees of some kind, use that to pay people to continue to maintain and improve the product.