Some people do these type of contribution or charity work not just to do some good but also to feel some autonomy and mastery in a world were much of the regular top down driven drudgery work does not provide much of that feeling. These people are canaries in the coal mine. I expect more people feel a loss of purpose and rise of anxiety and depression in the world.

Exactly right!

With the AI juggernaut picking up steam, i expect this is going to happen sooner rather than later.

That said, Mozilla clearly handled this the wrong way; they should have informed the volunteers before throwing the switch.

Conversely, it's a bit strange for a for-profit company like Mozilla Corporation to rely on volunteer labor through its non-profit parent Mozilla Foundation to perform customer support.

There was a period where every company was trying to "crowd source" free labor. It died off because people didn't like working for corporations for free.

I can see why they have it under Mozilla.org. And lots of companies have community support.

But I do think we should ask ourselves whether companies have some sort of moral obligation to continue relying on unpaid labor because it might make the unpaid laborers feel a sense of meaning. I'm very sympathetic to the need to have a sense of meaning. But I'm less sympathetic to for-profit companies relying on unpaid labor and especially to the idea that we should encourage more of it.

Which I feel honestly in part explains why so many prominent figures in Free software development seem to have some mental issues to be honest. They in a way remind me of that person who at one point was responsible for over half of all edits on the Scots Wikipedia.

Even the paid professionals often started to work for free and then were hired by some company and the reality is that someone who is good at something and willing to do it for free is either a very good Samaritan, or there is some other issue at stake and in the end prominent free software figures often have fairly heated public keyboard wars over things with each other and most of all seem strangely fiercely loyal tribalists who suffer from an extreme case of n.i.h.-syndrome.

Yeah I’m not even sure it’s easy to decide which side is in the right here and it’s not as simple as people think it is.

Mozilla is painted bad here, but who knows if the automated translations do not help more people than it hurts the translators.

What if the reduced financial pressure allows Mozilla to focus more on privacy and less on ads.

Unfortunately these things are really gray, but you really can’t expect a company to keep you paying in good will.