Thanks for sharing! Really interesting history in this article. It’s scary to think what a world would look like if Sun didn’t sue Microsoft into oblivion and put an end to this strategy.
We could be living in a world where Windows is the dominant desktop OS instead of our beloved Solaris.
To be serious, though, being sued/forced to settle isn’t an indicator that the strategy hasn’t worked. In fact, as is evident by the continued doubling down on the strategy by Microsoft and the unfettered execution of this strategy with Chrome, it’s clear that the value far outweighs the cost of the occasional settlement. The only real deterrent is antitrust regulation and that has been just about entirely defanged. These concerns are especially pertinent for something like Lemmy where there’s no central entity to soak the legal fees to go to court.
For those that look at this and still think the solution might just be more money, first recognize that Google donates only to keep Firefox as a viable competitor to avoid anti-trust legislation.
If we raised half a million dollars, we haven’t saved anyone any money except Google - they’d simply donate only 100k next year so Firefox remains competitive, but not successful.
I don’t disagree with the sentiment of the post, but we also have to realize that we’d only be improving things after the first ~600k.