MoonshineMidnight It's actually a FOSS business model. Not every FOSS developer is purely altruistic.
Of course not. Ideally they would have mostly altruistic intentions though. Or at least stay principled enough not to run off and make sneaky (and seemingly license-breaking) deals, especially with a company that seems to be quite opposed to any thing that could be considered a FOSS (or FOSS-adjacent) principle. At the end of the day, if making money is really the primary goal (or any goal at all), then FOSS just generally isn't the path to take and anyone worth any salt at all should know this.
That's why I am happy to see Proton have a revenue based model.
Except for the part where Proton is a provider of online services (which requires server space and maintenance beyond just the coding of their apps) so subscriptions make sense. Quite a different case from just a suite of basic offline apps like SMT.
Firefox is barley hanging on as a non-profit.
Barely hanging on, due largely to the fact that most people simply don't see browsers as something to 'pay for' but just something that's there. This is thanks in no small part to Google being able to fund their browser with ad money / other funding sources, which is something people don't fully realise, take for granted and get the false notion that this is standard for browsers.
the only way they get by is 80% of their revenue is having Google as their default search engine. Google pulls that and they are toast.
I'm aware. And like many have pointed out, this is unlikely to happen since Firefox's existence stops them from getting into trouble for being a monopoly.
But either way, here's hoping the SMT fork proves to be good/trustworthy. Currently using a mixture of alternative FOSS apps but I do prefer the SMT apps, particularly for things like the Calendar and Gallery since Etar and Aves just aren't great in my opinion.