| ▲ | netule 7 hours ago |
| Good. I really wish Mozilla would rely less on these shady backroom deals and open up to direct user funding. The Mozilla Foundation accepts donations, but they don't go toward funding Firefox; instead, they fund advocacy campaigns. > Firefox is maintained by the Mozilla Corporation, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation. While Firefox does produce revenue — chiefly through search partnerships — this earned income is largely reinvested back into the Corporation. The Mozilla Foundation’s education and advocacy efforts, which span several continents and reach millions of people, are supported by philanthropic donations.[1] [1]: https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/donate/help/#frequently... |
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| ▲ | glenstein 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| >I really wish Mozilla would rely less on these shady backroom deals and open up to direct user funding. I have nothing against this, but at best it would be a modest side hustle. The major comparables in online user fundraising are Wikipedia, which AFAIK is the largest annual online fundraising drive in the world and it raises less than 50% of what search licensing gets. Tor is another one, but off the top of my head, I think it's maybe 1/20th of what Wikipedia raises. If Firefox stood up a donation drive for the first time I would guess Tor-level revenue and maybe it might crawl upward from there depending on how things go. Also, my understanding is their organizational structure is what legally enables them to do the search licensing which is their biggest revenue stream. But it means that their browser development is done to generate commercial revenue. If they moved the core browser development under the Foundation, it would unravel the ability to do search licensing deals to support development, which are much stronger than whatever their prospect for user donations would be. I'm a bit out of my depth here but I believe it's all about the search licensing. |
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| ▲ | gldrk 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | >The major comparables in online user fundraising are Wikipedia, which AFAIK is the largest annual online fundraising drive in the world and it raises less than 50% of what search licensing gets. All this shows is that Mozilla is even less efficient than Wikimedia! There are projects such as Rust and LLVM that rival Firefox in complexity with 1/10 the combined expenses. Of course Rust has a selling point and Firefox doesn’t, but whose fault is that really? | | |
| ▲ | glenstein 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Firefox replaces more code in a month than Rusts' entire codebase even contains. Rusts' expenses are massively subsidized by donated staff time from over a dozen major tech companies. Wikipedia is a fundamentally different beast serving static content with practically zero of the engineering overhead associated with Rust let alone with Firefox. | | |
| ▲ | gldrk 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | >Firefox replaces more code in a month than Rusts' entire codebase even contains. Point taken. Rust + LLVM is almost half of Firefox though, and probably at least equivalent in terms of necessary skill. It is also not clear how much of that code could be removed without much loss of functionality. >Rusts' expenses are massively subsidized by donated staff time from over a dozen major tech companies. This is called having a selling point. If Firefox offered anything besides not being Chromium, people would work on it without getting paid by Mozilla. | | |
| ▲ | glenstein 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | There's no such thing as a developer tooling subsidy for a web browser. | | |
| ▲ | gldrk 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Okay. KDE is absolutely comparable to Firefox according to https://openhub.net/p/kde. Tiny fraction of the expenditure. I’m not even sure what their selling point is, but it’s a lot better than Mozilla’s. |
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| ▲ | aloha2436 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Rust and LLVM that rival Firefox in complexity with 1/10 the combined expenses You could argue LLVM is technically of a similar level of complexity, but operating a browser requires far more actual business than developing a compiler. More to the point, those organisations get enormous amounts of "free" labour in the form of contributions from large corporations that benefit from them, in a way that Firefox absolutely does not. |
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| ▲ | dralley 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| >Good. I really wish Mozilla would rely less on these shady backroom deals and open up to direct user funding. The Mozilla Foundation accepts donations, but they don't go toward funding Firefox; instead, they fund advocacy campaigns. Yes, charitable donations go to charitable causes, not development of a browser which produces profits for a for-profit entity. There's no legal way to channel charitable donations back into a business. To do otherwise would be tax fraud. This is not a "gotcha", this is a persistent misunderstanding of what is and is not possible in tax law. |
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| ▲ | johannes1234321 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | There are however two options available: * Make the browser development the charitable work, or * accept funding to non-charitable company However Mozilla earns "enough" from Google, so they don't have to try to make either work. | | |
| ▲ | pavon 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > Make the browser development the charitable work They probably cannot do this. The IRS generally does not consider writing open source software to meet the requirements of a 501c3, for example [1]. They aren't super consistent about it so some groups have gotten 501c3 exemption in the past, but for the most part there is a reason that 501c3 open source foundations focus on support activities, conferences, and not software development. > accept funding to non-charitable company They could do this, just like they did for Thunderbird, and I wish they would. [1] https://www.mill.law/blog/more-501c3-rejections-open-source-... | | |
| ▲ | fstarship 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The Bevy game is an example on an organisation that has gotten 501c | |
| ▲ | babypuncher 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Maybe we can make a deal with the government. In exchange for making the development of open source software a tax exempt charitable work, we remove private jets from the list of purchases that can be deducted from income taxes. Seems like a win-win. | | |
| ▲ | pseudalopex 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Why would the government wish to remove private jets from the list of purchases that can be deducted from income taxes? Why would they be unable to do this without making a deal with people who want open source software development to be designated a charitable purpose? How would making a deal with people who want open source software development fix this? |
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| ▲ | alwa 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Why isn’t the browser development organized as charitable work? From the Corp’s Wikipedia page [0]: > As a non-profit, the Mozilla Foundation is limited in terms of the types and amounts of revenue it can have. Is this an oblique way of saying they couldn’t take Google bucks that way? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation | | | |
| ▲ | glenstein 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | >Make the browser development the charitable work I don't think there's a legal way to fund development form the profitable venture and also accept charitable donations. I'm sure if donations were more a better bet than search licensing they might go that way, but as I said in a different comment, the biggest annual donor drive in the world is probably Wikipedia, probably a best case scenario for that kind of drive, and it brings in less than half of what their search licensing gets. | |
| ▲ | FuriouslyAdrift 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Then they wouldn't be able to pay their CEO $7 million a year... | | |
| ▲ | glenstein 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Search revenue minus the cost of a CEO (slightly more than 1% of that goes to the CEO) is still an amazing deal, dramatically more than what's likely on offer in terms of charitable giving. They would basically have to execute the largest donation drive in the history of the internet and replicate it on a yearly basis to replace search licensing. | |
| ▲ | OkayPhysicist 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Frankly, they probably could. That's a pretty middle-of-the-road salary for a CEO of a significant nonprofit. |
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| ▲ | icepush 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | You can make donations to a for-profit business. You just can't deduct it from your taxable income. | | | |
| ▲ | PunchyHamster 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | But then it would be possible to fund firefox development directly, just not get the tax break for it right ? | |
| ▲ | ehutch79 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | sell $50 keychains. done. | | |
| ▲ | input_sh 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The corporation already sells user-facing products: Mozilla VPN, MDN Plus, Firefox Relay, Pocket (previously). Feel free to subscribe to them to give money directly to the Mozilla Corporation, the future you're looking for is already here. | |
| ▲ | glenstein 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | They sell T-shirts, totes, and backpacks: https://mozilla-na.myspreadshop.com/ |
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| ▲ | kgwxd 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Is there not a difference between a charity and a non-profit? |
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| ▲ | abawany 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| it's particularly strange to see Mozilla engage in these silly machinations when the Thunderbird team has moved on to the model of direct user funding. |
