There are talks in the EU with the DMA about bringing this back.
vinhill
But they speak from a high a position of superiority and rightness.
Yeah, I guess your point stands. But also, it's 221 mio for Mozilla as a whole. Firefox might again be a fraction of this. While e.g. the Linux foundation has a lower budget, with all the contributed work hours of volunteers / corporations, a fork of Firefox is more realistic than the 500 mio make it out to be.
It's basically like a copy of the original repository. But you can pull in and merge changes from the original, make a pull request for the original to pull your changes. Fork+pull request enables you to contribute to someone else's repository. Things like Chromium are in part forks of Safari, just that they diverged over time.
Cost of development was 221 mio in 2022
https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2022/mozilla-fdn-2022-fs-final-0908.pdf
The same with resumes. Using a LLM to write a resume and cover letter out of key facts, sending it, turning it back into key facts around the applicant.
Mozilla has a budget of around 200 mil for software development, so the 7 mil are probably not enough. Not defending the high pay though.
Also, AI Integration into browsers could very well be a deciding factor for mainstream users when choosing a browser. So having some expertise around e.g. running LLMs privacy preserving on client hardware for page summarisation could pay off. Llamafile for example, is something cool coming from the Mozilla AI stuff.
Even if this were not covered by copyright. Our copyright system is broken and laws can be changed. Especially if they don't correspond to what the majority sees as moral.
Tbh, if you get such a notice, you could also disagree with them and get a lawyer. It's just that your situation is much more clearly in breach of copyright.
Google does not just show a link. It scrapes the content of the page to build a search index, i.e. consomes the content. This happens without explicit permission and in the past, there were no opt-out ways. Then they use this knowledge to provide search go users and incorporate ads to make money without paying the original pages. Google also started to show you these handy answers by showing some text section scraped from the page.
Like, there certainly is a similarity. And there is the difference that Google mostly feeds users to the original webpage while GenAI can replace the content.
Realistically, that would be quite an overreaction and the corporation does have valuable knowledge and skill in creating trains. But how great it would be if this were to cause open source code to be a requirement...
I wouldn't assume a corporation is a moral entity, Spotify's only goal is to maximise profit. Maybe it's a problem of our economic system or regulations around monopolies.