I never used adblock because if I don't like ads on a particular website I will simply not visit it anymore. And if I like it enough despite of the ads, I want to support them financially in some way.
Don't forget that ad blockers do more than filtering visible ad banners and other visual annoyances. They also block tracking scripts, fonts, and other cross-site elements that infringe on your privacy.
A grand failure on behalf of society is that this was a good business decision (it succeeded at improving their profits) because it has faced effectively zero governmental intervention despite the fact it is used as a foundation for the launch of a million scams.
Exactly, it is already a pattern that Google will start paying good money for ads and then progressively reduce the pay to its publishers. It is a bait and switch strategy, but they'll certainly say that it is just an algorithm improvement....
Most probably it was on purpose. MS is famous for the infighting of internal groups and how the management doesn't know how to control their divisions.
This makes sense, because even in the best times Windows was not the biggest money maker for Microsoft, it was Office. So MS was never fully behind Windows, it was only the means to an end, which was selling the most software for enterprises.
Ironically, Office was the original poster child for Microsoft reinventing it's own widget toolkits, even back when Microsoft had a coherent visual design and developer story.
You're considering open source development as just another commercial endeavor. The fact that this is done by a nonprofit organization means it's pursuing goals that are not strictly commercial, and that is fine. Think about the GNU project as another example. If someone is not happy with that, it is always possible to start their own company.
I don’t think they’re considering it a commercial endeavor, they’re just acknowledging that complex open source projects often require paid work to effectively maintain and develop them.
The GNU project works because it’s a bunch of small packages that are each maintained by approximately one person each for free on their spare time.
LibreOffice is a complex office suite that essentially competes with a multi-billion dollar industry of complex office applications and services.
It’s also an open source project that has pretty much always depended on corporate sponsorship and a paid variant rather than having some other form financial backing (e.g., it never went the Wikipedia route of being completely free for everyone and only surviving on donations).
If a text editor is not smaller than an office suite that handles Excel spreadsheets, PDFs, Word, PowerPoint, and Access databases, I made the right choice never using it.
The real price of gold has been deflated by paper gold/futures trading, which has the effect of multiplying the perceived amount of gold in circulation without a necessary counterpart in physical gold. Financial institutions can within limits manipulate the price of gold so that it remains lower than it should be if the physical material had to be delivered.
The goal for these companies is not to extract more oil. This is the bait. They want to produce the same amount of oil they already do, but pay less for the expenses of doing anything to comply with regulations.
reply