> when Firefox does things to push away users like Mozilla buying up an ad-tech company

What would you have them do? Somehow they have to make some money somehow.

Alternatively they have to live purely from donations, which means that people like you and I have to part with of our money. Or they could be purely open source, in which case people like and I donate our time.

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autoexec 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It's not an either/or situation. For many years now people have been begging Mozilla to allow them to give money to help fund firefox (and only firefox) but Mozilla has refused. I can't promise that allowing it would provide all the funds they need, but certainly every little bit helps. People could continue to contribute code to the project, but that requires a lot more time, effort, and no small amount of skill compared to the time it takes to enter your credit card number and submit and an online form. Contributing code to Firefox is still a good thing, but it's a process (https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/contributing/contrib...) that won't be for everyone.

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glenstein 2 hours ago | parent [-]

There is no precedent for donations on the scale of what Mozilla gets from search licensing. The best online fundraising drive on the planet is Wikipedia with orders of magnitude more users and they don't raise half of what Mozilla spends on keeping up with Google.

It's not the panacea people keep assuming it is, it's just one of many accusations that gets flung at the wall.

	▲	aragilar 27 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Except Thunderbird now does run on donations (though is looking a relevant additional funding sources, e.g. providing hosted email: https://www.tb.pro/en-US/). This is not to say Mozilla can't seek out other sources of money, or develop appropriate ancillary services, but the absence of an option to just give money for Firefox (and Firefox only) is noticeable.

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themaninthedark 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

How is it that we can have a plethora of different Linux distributions, the Linux kernel, the FreeBSD kernel, the OpenBSD kernel, GIMP, LibreOffice and several other large projects that are run and maintained by donations and volunteers.

Yet somehow Firefox is different? It needs to make money! It needs to make money so much that they keep spinning up all sorts of new projects so that they can make more money, or at least that was the argument for some of what they were doing.

At this point in time, if they had taken all the money they spent on their various projects and put it in a trust they would probably be able to fund development without taking in any more money.

And it's not like people wouldn't donate to them either, look at how much Wikipedia has pulled in from donations.

	▲	glenstein 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		We've got a live one. Most of their expenses are developing the core browser, the side bets (with a few exceptions, notably FirefoxOS, which I think was a GOOD side bet and worth the effort) were not that expensive. They're developing 40 million lines of code, and a lot of the things you're comparing it to actually aren't as comparably large or cutthroat. >At this point in time, if they had taken all the money they spent on their various projects and put it in a trust they would probably be able to fund development without taking in any more money. They already do that, they have a huge endowment set aside. It's obvious that people don't actually care about it because they don't know, and they only mention the possibility to make the accusation, never to give them credit once they discover Mozilla already does this and has been doing it for about 2 decades. >And it's not like people wouldn't donate to them either, look at how much Wikipedia has pulled in from donations. Another delusional argument. Wikipedia brings in a fraction of what Mozilla gets, and with orders of magnitude more users. And that's the best pure online fundraising program on planet Earth. Again, people only think this through to the point of being able to make the accusation not to the point of figuring out if it would actually work or not.