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| ▲ | sfink 6 days ago | parent [-] | | Contributors are people. Donations are dollars. People ≠ dollars. Unless you grind them up and eat them as sausages, but don't do that. The anti-theft threads will get stuck in your teeth. | | |
| ▲ | smt88 6 days ago | parent [-] | | The contributors are paid by Mozilla Foundation. This is not complicated. | | |
| ▲ | sfink 6 days ago | parent [-] | | Hm. I'm dumb so you'll need to spell it out for me. MoFo and MoCo both have contributors, yes. Both have unpaid contributors, which apparently are not who you're talking about. Both also have paid people who work for them. Whether or not you call them "contributors" or "employees" doesn't matter much, I guess. But still, MoFo contributors, paid or not, do not work on Firefox. Firefox is not a MoFo product. Most MoCo contributors do work on Firefox. Firefox is a MoCo product. It's confusing because MoFo owns MoCo, but owning a company does not mean its products are your products, nor that you can freely assist with those products (especially in an arms-length setup involving taxes, which is the very reason for the MoFo/MoCo split in the first place.) MoFo does other things, non-Firefox things, like advocacy and pissing off HN commenters who assume that "Mozilla does X" headlines always mean MoCo is doing X. One of us is confused. I have that uneasy sensation I get when something is going "whoosh!" over my head, so it might be me. | | |
| ▲ | smt88 6 days ago | parent [-] | | > Most MoCo contributors do work on Firefox. Firefox is a MoCo product. This is true. > But still, MoFo contributors, paid or not, do not work on Firefox. This is not true, based on what I've read about it. Do you have personal experience with these orgs that suggests otherwise? Regardless, nothing is stopping Foundation funds from being directed to Firefox development. If someone gave them, for example, $1M that could only be spent on Firefox, they could pay Corporation or an external consultancy to contribute to the open-source Firefox repositories. This is already happening, either through Foundation or Corporation. One of the biggest Servo contributors works for a FOSS consultancy. There are corollaries to what I'm describing in most large nonprofits in the US. You get money that a donor requires you to spend in a certain way, and you spend that money that way. If you can't do it with in-house people, you give it to consultants. | | |
| ▲ | sfink 5 days ago | parent [-] | | > This is not true, based on what I've read about it. Do you have personal experience with these orgs that suggests otherwise? Yes, I work for MoCo. > Regardless, nothing is stopping Foundation funds from being directed to Firefox development. If someone gave them, for example, $1M that could only be spent on Firefox, they could pay Corporation or an external consultancy to contribute to the open-source Firefox repositories. I don't really understand the whole setup, but I believe tax law is what is stopping this. What you are describing would be fraud (or something like it; IANAL). Money flows MoCo->MoFo (via dividends). Paying MoCo for something directly or hiring consultants to provide value would be "private inurement" [1], a phrase which here means that lawyers like scary words. It is using tax-exempt money to enrich private individuals. But the tl;dr is that the MoFo/MoCo split was created specifically so that money could flow MoCo->MoFo and not the other way around, in order for MoCo to do business-y stuff without jeopardizing MoFo's non-profit status. Nvidia's game where it pays companies to buy their chips would not fly in the non-profit sector. > This is already happening, either through Foundation or Corporation. One of the biggest Servo contributors works for a FOSS consultancy. Servo was split out from Mozilla during COVID, and sadly is now completely unaffiliated. It is in the Linux Foundation Europe now. (Igalia is great, though!) [1] https://legalclarity.org/private-inurement-definition-exampl... |
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