I agree with the untrue and revisionism bit, but I disagree with it being the opposite of what happened.

People were trying to figure out how to make money off of the Internet from the early days of the Internet being publicly accessible (rather than a tool used by academic and military institutions). It can be attributed to the downfall of Gopher. It can be attributed to the rise of Netscape and Internet Explorer. While the early web was nowhere near as commercial as it is today, we quickly saw the development of search engines and (ad supported) hosting services that were. By the time 2000's hit, VC money was very much starting to drive the game. In the minds of most people, the Internet was only 5 to 10 years old at that point. (The actual Internet may be much older, but few people took notice of it until the mid-1990's.)

> I don't want constant updates.

> all I want is bug fixes and security updates.

GP wasn't differentiating between different types of updates in their argument, because it doesn't make sense - they're discussing the economics of it, which doesn't care if you're fixing bugs or not.

>> How are they supposed to pay software salaries and keep the lights on? People don’t like paying for software, demand constant updates and hate subscriptions.

I suspect then it doesn't matter whether Mozilla kills itself or not. You should be fine with the current release of Firefox. Maybe you'd lose the installer, so all you have to do is put it somewhere safe and you're good.

People weren't happily paying, there was huge pirate business that was run on porn, gambling ads and spyware revenue. Then there were organizations with lots of lawyers paid by the "pay once use forever" companies to enforce the pay part because people didn't want to pay.

One time fee software ment that once your growth slows down you no longer make money and have plenty of customers to support for free. That's why this model was destroyed by the subscription and ad based "free" software.

The last example is Affinity which was the champion of pay once use forever model, very recently they end up getting acquired and their software turned into "free" + subscription.

I think they are trying to balance it between making as much as money possible, risking being sued for monopolistic practices and risking exodus. Microsoft once overplayed their hand and the anger and consumer dissatisfaction was so strong that people left Internet Explorer en masse.

So the best situation for google would be to have borderline monopoly where they pay for the existence of their competition and the competition(Firefox) blocks adblockers too by default but leaving Chrome and Firefox is harder than forcing installin adblockers through the unofficial way.

So basically, all the people who swear they never clicked ads manage to block ads, Firefox and Chrome print money by making sure that ads are shown and clocked by the masses.

People seem to forget the non-commercial web ever existed.

That was ine inception age when very few people were online, its not the stage of mass adoption. The mass adoption starts with the dot.com era with mass infrastructure build up.

But sure, if you think that we should start counting from these years you can do that and add a "public funded" era at the beginning.

I take your point, but I think the comment was referring to Web 2.0.