Billy Holmes schreef: > Paul M Foster wrote: > >> I'm trying to figure out what's wrong with this. Google pays Mozilla >> to make Google the default search engine for Firefox. Mozilla could >> have made it Yahoo or someone else, but Google paid them and that's >> bad? This > > > Some people have this idea that making money from OSS is wrong. Perhaps > if they gave Mozilla a bunch of cows and goats it would be better...
Aside from the previously-made point that no one has actually "said" that Mozilla is "making money" from this transaction (if I download and burn a Linux CD and sell such CDs to others who cannot due to lack of broadband, asking only the cost of the blank CD and shipping, I am not "making money"; I am only recouping my costs), has anyone actually "proven" that Google's position as default search engine is because Google 'paid' Mozilla for that position? I mean, Google is arguably the best search engine, so it would have presumably been the default anyway. Heaven knows that if it was a question of money, Microsoft has enough to throw around that if that was the only determining factor, the default would likely be MSN search. It does happen that you do me an honor (making my search engine the default), and I show my appreciation for that by doing you a favor (donating some money to your project). We call it 'professional courtesy', and it's not the same as 'payola', although it can look that way to the extremely suspicious. Even if Google did buy their position, if in some burst of insanity I decided that AltaVista was better, I could change my default to AltaVista. So Mozilla still gets their money (and I do want them to have some money, btw), and I still get the default search engine I want. Of course I have 50 search engines available in my search box, so 'default search engine' is not as meaningful in my case as it might be to others who don't feel the need to use the appropriate specific engine for each individual search, as I do. Holly -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
