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Anger abound regarding advertising etc but question: what's the alternative for Mozilla to be a viable company without depending on money from advertising eithe
by lakechfoma 9y ago
Anger abound regarding advertising etc but question: what's the alternative for Mozilla to be a viable company without depending on money from advertising either in the form of Pocket and new tab or via search engines paying for default?
We can all pay a subscription to use Firefox instead. But of course Firefox is open source so...
I mean I'd love for something like Facebook to cost $10 a year, I think that could work. But I don't see any other business model for Mozilla besides charitable donations.
- kibwen 9y agoBy law, Mozilla can't use charitable donations to fund browser development. The rules around what charities can spend their donations on is pretty specific. Mozilla's charity funds are used for web-related education and outreach. Of course, Mozilla could use non-charitable (i.e. not tax-deductible) donations to fund browser dev.
- lakechfoma 9y agoAh I guess I meant non-charitable then! I'm pretty clueless on how the money aspect in a non-profit works.
- pbhjpbhj 9y agoBy law in which jurisdiction? In what jurisdiction can't you use donations to pay for programming effort?
- Nomentatus 9y agoThe U.S. but not just the U.S. It's not programming per se; if the United Way wants some DB code done, that could be charitable since the effort isn't to build infrastructure but is part of, say, helping kids in hospital. I hope this rule/ruling goes away for BSD type open source, but it's real.
- occamrazor 9y agoYou can use donations of course, but they won’t qualify as charitable for tax purposes.
- carussell 9y agoSomeone tries to make this plea in every thread, but it's bunk and shows an ignorance of history, an ignorance of the concrete figures actually at play, and it helps perpetuate the image of a frail non-profit that Mozilla really rides hard, piggybacking on the circumstances and accumulated goodwill from an era that no longer matches reality today. Mozilla in 2018 brings in 10 times as much revenue as it did in 2008, but is 1/10th as effective and doing 1/10th as much good work. 0307ea7a0f89f4c893e89e6a4992b82b1a812c22e9510410f9e4279a52368d04
- nkkollaw 9y agoWhat's "0307ea7a0f89f4c893e89e6a4992b82b1a812c22e9510410f9e4279a52368d04"..? A checksum of your comment?
- StavrosK 9y agoIt's a commitment hash. He wants to be noted as saying something without saying it right now. When he does say it, you can verify that he had the comment ready now by checking the hash. Its for predictions you only want to reveal after they happen.
- lakechfoma 9y agoAnd again, your comment is just anger and not an actual answer of what alternatives there are. What is your point? Do you care to actually answer my curiosity on what business models besides advertising are available to fund the continuing development of Firefox?
- bigbluedots 9y agoI'd be very happy to pay $20 a year to use Firefox, however I don't think enough people would do this for them to ha e enough revenue.