Alternative hypothesis: most 'secret family recipes' are in fact original. However, the average SFR never get passed around, because it produces average-tasting stuff.
The recipe on food labels come from companies that know the product inside-out, have incentive to help you optimize the taste/effort tradeoff, and maybe have spent time and money on research. They tastes better, so they're the ones people remember.
tl;dr: people remember a disproportionately high number of plagiarized recipes because those are the good ones.
Are we going to get a browser that caters to our own needs? No, evidently power users are no longer the target demographic.
Are we going to make a browser that we can recommend to our nontechie friends? No, I don't trust them to navigate all the opt-outs and dark patterns around your telemetry. I don't even trust myself to never misclick.
Is contributing going to win us goodwill from our collegues? No, you've alienated them too.
Is this about ideology, then? Are we building a browser for a better world? ..it would be much more convincing if you guys didn't fire your CEO over political speech.
And that's where we're at right now. Maybe the 97% or whatever non-addon-using demographic in your telemetry data will make up the shortfall in contributions.
...or you could just scrap the whole idea and not bother with it.
This is true for the user, too. If the only viable choices are 'verify claims at great cost and no gain every few months', or 'use some other privacy-respecting browser', I am going to recommend the second.
what percentage of FF users on the planet do you expect could read a paper on differential privacy and actually verify those points, while understanding all the ifs and gotchas, and be able to tell if any of the arguments are wrong? What percentage of that elite group would actually be willing to devote the time and energy, for free, for every one of the thousands of softwares they use?
Look at it from a security-conscious user's perspective: I would have to verify that:
1. The concept is sound.
2. It is implemented as described.
3. It is implemented with no bugs.
4. Mozilla is trustworthy
5. Any third-parties Mozilla involves in this process are also trustworthy.
6. All of the above will remain true.
Doing this would take a tremendous amount of both time and expertise, if even possible. If every piece of software I use makes me do this every year or so, I would get nothing else done.
In practical terms, your argument is no better than just saying, 'trust us, we're good for it', regardless of the merits of your tech. And we know Mozilla baked Google Analytics into FF's addon page, so trust is in short supply.
1. Any data collection at all deanonymizes the user, cf panopticlick.
2. Frankly even opt-out is not acceptable. I can't recommend any software that peridically asks users for data access, since there exist non-technical users who have a nonzero chance of clicking yes to everything. If they are related to me in some way this compromises my privacy also.
Look at it this way: whenever you are running a program you didn't write yourself, you're running a bunch of commands you never checked. This is no different to, say, downloading a precompiled executable and running it, with all the same problems and tradeoffs.
Going pro depends significantly on the economics of supply and demand, if it's defined as 'finding enough people to pay you to do this for a living'. It's easy to go pro as a plumber. Not so easy when you have to compete vs 300000 people for a PGA slot.
Nonesense, obviously the money is in selling recorded conversations to the highest bidder. Identifying spending patterns via image recognition of pets and babies would be up there also.
Academic code typically just has to work once or a handful of times, for a small number of highly expert users, frequently just for the author. Ease of update is of the essence - you'll rewrite most of it many times, as your understanding the problem change. You can use all sorts of ugly hacks so long as you get what you're after.
If any of it ever becomes commercially released or whatever, there'll need to be a complete rewrite that makes it usable and maintainable by people other than yourself. But most of the code will never get to that point because most of what you've done up until about a week ago is wrong and worthless, and the current, correct-until-next-week iteration is stuck together with duct tape.
Speed only matters on the infrequent hot paths, which is why Python is popular. The rule of thumb is nobody cares about speed / resource consumption until it needs to run on a cluster, but then you care a lot because cluster time is metered and simulations can get huge. Fortran is still fairly popular because many math libraries are on it and porting would require huge effort from a very small group of very busy people.
Most of the coders are not software engineers and don't know / don't follow best practices; on the other hand the popular best practices are not designed for their use-case and frequently don't fit. Versioning (of the I-don't-know-which-of-the-fifty-copies-on-my-laptop-is-the-right-one type) is a big issue. Data loss happens. Git/Github/etc has steep learning curve, but so does all the various workflow systems designed for research use.
The recipe on food labels come from companies that know the product inside-out, have incentive to help you optimize the taste/effort tradeoff, and maybe have spent time and money on research. They tastes better, so they're the ones people remember.
tl;dr: people remember a disproportionately high number of plagiarized recipes because those are the good ones.