As the OP says, the point is not that they needed unpaid work, if that's what you mean. The point is that volunteers shaped what Firefox, MDN, Thunderbird, Mozilla itself were.

▲

TalkingCodeMonk 8 hours ago | parent [-]

This is why I refuse to donate to Mozilla, despite only paying for open source products, believing that 100% open source should be mandatory in every democractic government, Firefox and Thunderbird being my daily drivers for many years, and donating several hundred dollars every year on FLOSS projects.

Many of Mozillas product decisions prove that the Mozilla corporation is not aligned with the interests of FLOSS. I can't donate to Firefox or Thunderbird specifically, neither at the feature or product level. There is no way to ensure my donations go to enriching these products, instead of profit generating features that benefit the Mozilla corporation. One example is the container VPN proxy, which only allows you to implement a VPN per container if you pay for Mozilla VPN. This is a feature that should be universally available to all users, and all VPN providers, but they locked it behind a paywall for profit.

The is the same (logically analogous) reason I no longer use Reddit after the API changes in 2023, after using the platform for 15 years, and has become common among newer FOSS startups like OpenAI, minio, and bambu; using the philosophy of open source &/or unpaid community labor to achieve a certain level of trust, growth, users, funding, and market saturation, only to screw them all over in the name of profit. This for-profit parasitic greed and corruption in FLOSS is the antithesis to the philosophy of the FLOSS community.

In a sane world this type of community exploitation would be criminally prosecutable. Reddit decision makers would see the inside of a prison cell; the moderators and commenters – as well as the developers who built the 3rd party apps that grew the company from nothing for over a decade – would be given shares/ownership, and paid from the company for their time and labor; same for every other scammer that exploits these "bait-and-switch" deceptive tactics to succeed in businesss. Unfortunately for us all, we live in a world ruled by parasites.

▲

blackhaz 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Not to mention scandals like this...

"In 2018 she received a total of $2,458,350 in compensation from Mozilla, which represents a 400% payrise since 2008. On the same period, Firefox marketshare was down 85%. When asked about her salary she stated "I learned that my pay was about an 80% discount to market. Meaning that competitive roles elsewhere were paying about 5 times as much. That's too big a discount to ask people and their families to commit to."

In 2020, after returning to the position of CEO, her salary had risen to over $3 million. In the same year the Mozilla Corporation laid off approximately 250 employees due to shrinking revenues. Baker blamed this on the Coronavirus pandemic"

▲

veeti 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Incidentally, I have recently come across some Mozilla job postings with salary ranges I would consider to be at a considerable "discount to market". For example, here is a senior role at 59 000 euro per year: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/mozilla/jobs/7843229

▲

tjpnz 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Failed their way to the top.

▲

archerx 7 hours ago | parent [-]

Imagine getting paid millions to kill a company, who needs enemies/competitors when you have “leaders” like that?

	▲	pmontra 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I remember Nokia and their CEO from Microsoft.

▲

yorwba 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> I can't donate to Firefox or Thunderbird specifically, neither at the feature or product level. There is no way to ensure my donations go to enriching these products, instead of profit generating features that benefit the Mozilla corporation.

Thunderbird is no longer owned by the Mozilla corporation, so now you can donate directly to them.

	▲	AnthonyMouse 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		How do we get this to happen with Firefox?