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Comment by simias | Hacker News Reader

>Ideally the browser is the product

I disagree. I don't have anything against paid software but it's not the only possibility, a lot of the software I use are open source projects maintained by volunteers, not products. I ideologically refuse to consider that every piece of software is a product.

Now regarding Firefox things are not really clear cut, Mozilla is effectively non-profit but clearly their well being (and the salaries of the people working for it) clearly revolves around their browser having a decent market share. The whole "selling you to Google" stems from that.

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> I ideologically refuse to consider that every piece of software is a product.

1. Who pays for the hosting? How do they pay for it?

2. Who pays for the site development? How do they pay for it?

3. Who pays for the site content? How do they pay for it?

The vast majority of sites out there are commercial products, in some forms or another. Even Wikipedia is, they're periodically begging for money.

Since we have this problem that running websites costs money, how are they going to pay for it? The ad model is quite reviled by techies. What's the alternative? How do websites make money to keep running?

Software is not only web sites/applications. In that very same application domain there are pieces of software like the Apache http server. AFAIK the Apache Foundation is founded by donations. Is httpd a product? They're not selling it and apparently they don't sell data about its users.

Ok, but my questions haven't been answered: how do we pay for websites?

There's the ad model, which people don't like, the subscription model, which almost no one uses (it's used successfully for webapps, but not by websites, there's maybe 10 or 20 successful subscription based sites in the billions of sites out there).

What else is there that doesn't involve somehow turning the browser into a product?

Putting ads in your websites doesn't turn your browser into a product any more than putting ad into a PDF turns your PDF reader into a product or getting robocall turn your phone into (more of) a product. That's completely orthogonal.

Well in the case of Brave that might not be completely true because they have this whole agenda regarding ads but that's specific to this particular browser, not a fundamental aspect of web browsing technology. ELinks is not a product because you can use it to view ads for instance.

Putting ads in my websites turns me into a product.

We need to turn this whole ecosystem on its head. How do we do that? I'd rather have the browser manage payments to the sites I use based on some usage statistics, but in this case, we still need some sort of payment system, probably centralized. It might not be turning the actual browser into a product, but it does make it put it awfully close to one.

I don't understand, are you talking about code hosting or simply just considering web services?

Regardless, hosting is a separate issue. You have open source projects who provide a piece of software that you're free to host yourself or pay somebody else to host for you. See for instance the Roundcube webmail.

It's similar to how I need to buy a computer to be able to run Emacs, that doesn't mean that Emacs itself is a product. Of course many web services are actual products and you pay for both the development and the hosting.

Here we're talking about a web browser though so the point is moot anyway.

Everything is a product when you define product as "that which is produced", which is the coherent and 'materialized' output of human activity.

I bet your work doesn't depend on selling software unless you are using two measures here.

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