How does it work anyway? I mean, how does Firefox make money? Are they paid per google search or something like that?

And, do they make money if I use forks of firefox and use Google on them?

And, what are the total number of active users for Mozilla and do the forks account into this count?

    • lemmyvore@feddit.nl
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      1 year ago

      That’s a common misconception. Microsoft paid Apple so they would drop a lawsuit that accused Microsoft of stealing concepts and ideas from Apple’s MacOS and putting them into Windows. Which was ironic because Apple had stolen them from the Xerox Palo Alto research lab previously. Gates anecdotally told Jobs “Steve, it’s like I broke into a house to rob it and found out you’d already cleaned out the place”.

      But it was Apple not Xerox or Microsoft that had put those concepts on the market first and they would’ve had a strong case. So Gates paid for it to go away and also arranged some cross licensing so it wouldn’t happen again.

      • Pons_Aelius@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        It was Bill hedging his bets. The antitrust case against MS was huge and scared them shitless. They had seen what had happened to Bell Telephone.

        Yes, it allowed Apple to survive and become what it is today.

        But, MS was not broken up.

            • bob_wiley@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              I wonder what was the bigger financial mistake, selling that stock, or Steve Ballmer as CEO.

              • Kidplayer_666@lemm.ee
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                1 year ago

                Developers, developers, developers, DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS (old Balmer meme)

              • WhoRoger@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                Wasn’t it Ballmer’s big push for online services like cloud that allowed MS to grow so much beyond Windows?

                • bob_wiley@lemmy.world
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                  1 year ago

                  Maybe, but their current CEO ran that division, so I’m giving him the credit, seeing as he also turned the whole company around once he became CEO.