Vivaldi don’t make money with selling user data, but the smal Vivaldi cooperative also ned to pay the infrastructure, servers and also they want to eat from time to time. For this reason, the business model is based on sponsored links and search engines that it includes by default, which the user is free to use to support Vivaldi, or also to delete them if not. Apart from this there are some products in the store, such as caps, t-shirts, etc. Spreading Vivaldi, to gain new users naturally also helps. After the insistence of the users, it has finally been decided to also accept donations, which at first was not foreseen.
In my experience this is only partially true. Free Software advocates value privacy (such that the most highly regarded “privacy browser” is GNU IceCat, which is a synthesis of Mozilla technology and GNU philosophy), but privacy advocates do not really value software freedom, and
frequentlysometimes trash FOSS in order to promote proprietary “privacy friendly” apps like Vivaldi. They will claim that it doesn’t matter if it’s FOSS or not as long as it is “privacy focused” and they will make this claim even in nominally “FOSS” focused spaces on e.g. reddit, as if to say that the Free Software movement is worthless except as a means to privacy.It’s refreshing to see some push back against the “FOSS doesn’t matter” idea here on Lemmy.
edit: word choice
deleted by creator
Maybe frequently was a bad choice of words there. It’s just my personal experience in some free software focused subreddits specifically /r/fossdroid and /r/fdroid. It could be a problem specifically in the Android community, I don’t see it as often in the general free software subs (although /r/freesoftware is mostly people mistaking Libre for Gratis, and /r/opensource is, well, an open source subreddit not really a free software one). Did not mean to impugn the privacy community in general, just venting about interactions I’ve had in FOSS spaces.