It appears that despite being the only vendor to provide an actual choice in the matter, Mozilla cannot escape bad faith scrutiny.

This is the wrong argument. Claiming that Mozilla is doing it wrong because the technology purist part of their userbase decided they don't want AI is simply short-sighted. The kill switch is the best option, because it let's Firefox be like a typical user would expect, while still giving the option to deactivate things. Deactivate by default and the typical user feels patronized.

These are crappy arguments. The author is seeking to re-litigate Piracy of IP is bad, and AI is bad.

If those are your axioms then you will find the old world is already in the rear-view mirror, and they want to pull back every other project to stay with them in that world.

AI is here. Free software succeeded - make as much as you want. This technology a force multiplier.

You can debate it's morality, but most people want to do their work.

Theres a big difference between NOT truly open and opaque.Opus is downloadable and auditable. That’s not the same thing as undisclosed proprietary scraping. If your standard is absolute purity test, then yeah no one in AI passes. But claiming Mozilla is indistinguishable from OpenAI because they used scraped data is disingenous.

Mozilla can't make it my problem if I stop using Firefox and use something else. Competition is great.

The only trap is the article.