It’s been about a year since the previous entry in this series of observations on things going on at the time. While that’s hardly a requirement for another — ah, well, let’s just do this, shall we?
The one-man development band behind one of my long-time app faves, the unbelievably full-featured MailMate email app for macOS, has announced a move to the subscription model. Previously, MailMate was a one-time purchase of about $50 but came with encouragement to donate to the project as a patron, particularly if the app was in play within a business environment. Starting with the currently-in-beta v.2.0, this changes to a $40/year subscription (i.e., $10 every three months). One interesting aspect is that a non-business user can still download and use MailMate without paying for it but, after a while, it will start to put identifying text in headers that make clear one is being a freeloader; those who’ve seen online videos that are “watermarked” with logos of unlicensed video-editing apps will get the idea. Business users are required to get the necessary number of per-user subscriptions, although the enforcement mechanism will still be the “header shaming,” if you will. Those MailMate users who bought their one-time-purchase licenses years ago are grandfathered until as late as July 1, 2025; after the applicable date, each such user must either drop MailMate or avoid the “header shaming” by starting on the subscription plan.
It’s increasingly likely that most web browsers will be affected by the ongoing battle between the U.S. Department of Justice and Google over the latter’s perceived search monopoly, but it’ll be later this year before the planned ruling that could clarify what the effects will be. A November, 2024, DoJ filing pushed for Google to divest itself of the Chrome browser. However, at this time, it’s unclear whether that would also require Google to cease being part of the Chromium project on which not only Chrome but also Microsoft Edge, Brave, Opera, and numerous other browsers depend. As one observer put it:
If [the DoJ is] is really just saying, ‘Give up Chrome,’ that would be very weird because Google would still control all the underlying technology and they could just tank anyone who would try to do stuff with it, including anyone who ends up owning Chrome.
Given that Google made well over ninety percent of 2024’s code commitments to the Chromium project — and that many other key projects, such as Electron, are Chromium-based — it will be extremely important how Chromium itself falls out from all this. And then there are Google’s counter-proposal and the creation of Supporters of Chromium-based Browsers, each of which is a completely different story.
One other aspect of the DoJ/Google snarl is that Google could be forced to stop paying other browser-makers to include Google as their default search engines. If so, the organization behind the already ailing Firefox, which is the last major cross-platform browser not based on Chromium, would lose the vast majority of its annual funding. (And there are other, lesser-known browsers which depend on Firefox’s Gecko engine. I’d guess they also would go down the drain soon thereafter, no matter how industrious or high-minded their developers might be.) Given how low Firefox’s market share currently sits, one can imagine the DoJ wouldn’t spend much time worrying about it.
Whether one definitely does get more cynical as one ages, I can’t say. In my own case, however, I increasingly realize and reluctantly accept that most of my choices in life are from among products and services controlled by really nasty people and/or entities, and my only true alternative would be to go totally off the grid à la Ted Kaczynski — which I’m not going to do. If that makes me a lesser human being, well, then, it does. In the same vein, I did find considerable common ground with Kev Quirk’s blog post, “On Virtue Signalling.”1
My writing app marks signalling as a typo. Of course, my writing app doesn’t know that Quirk is using the UK spelling. ↩︎
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