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Is there some way to ensure the donation money will actually go to Firefox and not to some sort of "diversity" campaign?

interactivecode 7y ago
Yikes why would you not want companies investing in diversity? Especially if they are the interface to our online world?
- lordgrenville 7y ago
  Ignoring the specific case, it's totally reasonable to say "I want to donate to nonprofit X because of thing Y that they do that I value, but I'd like the money earmarked for that thing only, not for all their other activities, which I may or may not support". (Quickly googled example: https://www.nonprofitissues.com/to-the-point/can-earmarked-contributions-be-used-general-funds-purposes-permissible https://www.nonprofitissues.com/to-the-point/can-earmarked-c... )
  - nulbyte 7y ago
    In the US, where Mozulla Foundation is organized, the organization often does not have a legal obligation to honor an unsolicited restriction. Mozilla would first have to solicit donations specifically for Firefox before a donor should reasonably expect donated funds to be used solely for Firefox.
- martin_a 7y ago
  While wording could be improved, the point stands. I want my money to be used for working on Firefox (the core browser) and for that exclusively. Not something like Pocket or whatever Mozilla thinks it should bring out that nobody asked for. There is no way to ensure this, so I will not give any money at all.
  - sakisv 7y ago
    > There is no way to ensure this, so I will not give any money at all. Please keep in mind that this is not a personal attack as I don't know you and I don't find it particularly constructive to engage in this kind of attacks, so please only focus on my argument: I cannot understand this way of thinking. On one hand we have the option to give Mozilla some money to use them however they see fit. This means that from the sum of the donations they can use whatever percentage they see fit to fund different products/aspects, e.g. the engineering department so that they can keep working on Firefox, the marketing department to increase the awareness and drive adoption, the user researchers to better understand their user needs etc. On the other hand we have the "default" stance where we don't support what Mozilla is doing. This means that the development of Firefox, the marketing to raise awareness etc, are depended on Google and on Pocket which is something that we want to get away from. I think it mostly boils down to some simple questions and how we feel about the answers: - Do I prefer to know that all my money go to hire more engineers and improve Firefox? Probably (tbh personally I would focus a bit more on user research, it's the everyday people that they should be after, not us) - Do I prefer to allow Mozilla to be depended on Google? Definitely not. - Can my donations be used to make the current situation worse (i.e. tie them tighter on Google's business)? No. So for me, although I don't control where my money goes, I think that they can only be used to improve things.
    - ramphastidae 7y ago
      > I cannot understand this way of thinking. If you ask me, it’s because most of us work very hard for our money and don’t have a lot to spare. If we are going to make the sacrifice of donating, we want to make sure the sacrifice is worth it. If my hard earned money is going to be used for something like the moz://@ nonsense, it’s not worth the sacrifice. If it’s going to be used to support development of privacy features in the browser, then it is.
    - martin_a 7y ago
      > I cannot understand this way of thinking. I want Mozilla to build a browser and a mail program. Nothing else. It's easy as that. And if I have to "fear" that they will use my money to build something else, I will not donate to them. Think of them as a company with several products. People would buy Firefox, they would buy Thunderbird, but probably nobody would buy the aforementioned "moz://" product or Pocket. In a traditional company this would lead to a production stop of the later two and to a better focus on the first two products. With Mozilla, and other donation-based "companies" it will not work that way. There will be other stuff that gets allocated lots of money, because "the money is there" and needs to be used.
- nprateem 7y ago
  Jeepers it's almost like the OP wants the choice of what their money gets spent on.
- longcommonname 7y ago
  Wanting their funds to not go to diversity doesn't equate to not wanting Mozilla to fund diversity.
- input_sh 7y ago
  Because they're not interested in donating, and they need a handy excuse to justify that.
- richthegeek 7y ago
  I suppose if he wanted to donate to a diversity campaign, he'd donate to one directly. Wikipedia is a big one for this: the donation campaign is all about 'keeping our servers running', and then huge chunks of the spending goes on community feelgood stuff. I've nothing against diversity campaigning but if you were to treat donation like any other 'purchase' you'd be pretty miffed if you thought you were ordering a cheeseburger and you got a carrot and the waiter gave himself a bottle of beer.
  - oarsinsync 7y ago
    Orders and purchases are different from donations and gifts.
    - faeyanpiraat 7y ago
      The point is that they say they will use it for purpose X, but instead they use it for Y. A lie is a lie whether it is related to a donation or a purchase.
      - Ensorceled 7y ago
        Mozilla is quite open about what they do and where the money goes, nobody is lying: "The direct work of the Mozilla Foundation focuses on fueling the movement for a healthy internet. We do this by supporting a diverse group of fellows working on key internet issues, connecting open Internet leaders at events like MozFest, publishing critical research in the Internet Health Report, and rallying citizens around advocacy issues that connect the wellbeing of the Internet directly to everyday life."
        RobertRoberts 7y ago
        But what if you want to only support software development and not social development? I think this is the crux of this thread of discussion.
        7y ago
- chronolitus 7y ago
  It could be that your parent comment wanted to spark a discussion on whether there is value added from Marketing campaigns, rather than about politics / diversity in the workplace.
- ecmascript 7y ago
  Because diversity in the tech world isn't real. Just read about Brendan Eich. He got fired because he had the incorrect opinion. In my world, that is the complete opposite of diversity.
  - sprafa 7y ago
    Brendan Eich worked against equal rights. Don’t you know Karl Popper’s formulation - a tolerant world cannot tolerate intolerance.
    - ecmascript 7y ago
      No he did not. He funded a political campaign. No I do not know that formulation and I completely disagree with that. It's like saying you need heavy censorship in order to have free speech. Complete bullshit.
      - Jonnax 7y ago
        They funded a homophobic political campaign. Websites started user agent detecting Firefox and putting banners saying to not use Firefox because of their homophobic CEO. It's pathetic that people like you hide behind censorship arguments and "diversity of thought" when defending the right to attack minorities. This kind of disingenuous thinking makes me question anyone evangelising Brave as a web browser.
        ecmascript 7y ago
        Just because someone donate to a political campaign that wants to stop same-sex marriage doesn't automatically make that person homophobic. He didn't attack any minority, stop spreading objectively false information. I am defending his right to believe whatever he likes in private. It will be a quick downhill (as we already have seen) as soon as you start listing bad values and try to hate on people that have these values. You may think I'm pathetic if you wish, I don't care. But remember, I will defend your right to your opinion too. It's kind of obvious you do not believe in the same thing and if more people would be like you we would find ourselves in a dark dystopia. You could move to China, they are well on their way to building the kind of society you seem to strive for. :)
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  Diversity != diversity campaigns != diversity campaigns as implemented by a given organization.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- gjs278 7y ago
  because computers don’t need diversity. you can either code or you can’t. who you are in the real world doesn’t matter.
- avip 7y ago
  Possibly because affirmative diversity could be seen as incompatible with meritocracy.
  - thristian 7y ago
    "Meritocracy" is an unattainable goal, like "utopia". It sounds good in the abstract, but "merit" is such a subjective concept that it's useless for any practical purpose. Every person's life is as much a product of random chance as innate potential, so there's no objective measure of merit by which a meritocracy could be judged. I'm sure there's reasonable arguments against affirmative diversity in general or Mozilla's diversity projects in specific, but incompatibility with meritocracy is not a strong one.
    - drevil-v2 7y ago
      How do you define diversity though? How do you slice and dice and at what point do you say it is done? Say I am a hiring manager at Mozilla and I hire a college graduate from Rwandan not because he is best but because of a diversity quota. What if there is also a Sudanese grad who is looking for a job or a Nepalese transgender MtF? How do I decide at that point? Is it my call and only my call or should there be regulation and legislation to deal with situations like this? I have one spot and many diverse candidates. How do I choose?
      - guerrilla 7y ago
        > How do you slice and dice and at what point do you say it is done? When everyone has an equal opportunity. You should be able to derive the rest of the answers to your questions from that.
        ThrowawayR2 7y ago
        > When everyone has an equal opportunity. "Equal opportunity" is an unattainable goal, like "utopia". It sounds good in the abstract, but "equal opportunity" is such a subjective concept that it's useless for any practical purpose. Every person's life is as much a product of random chance as innate potential, so there's no objective measure of equal opportunity by which a society that enforces equal opportunity could be judged. (Very much /s, of course.) The point being that any arguments made against the unattainability of true meritocracy apply just as well to true equal opportunity.
- marble-drink 7y ago
  "Diversity" in tech means "we should have programmers with skin colour X or genital configuration Y". But I don't care about people's skin colour or genitals. It turns out people are diverse anyway and that's why not everyone end up in tech.
  - johnisgood 7y ago
    Yeah, and it is insane how much amount of money you can receive in the name of diversity. I am pretty sure people who are getting fat rich from it are perfectly aware of this. Slightly off-topic but it is also funny that X would praise diversity, and at the same time imply that we should balance some things out when it is the people themselves who are the cause for the imbalance. They make the assumption that imbalance is bad. Imbalance is not a problem! We do not have to balance/even things out. Examples: construction workers? Mostly males. Nurses? Mostly females, although this has been changing. So what? I do not see these people trying to push women into getting to construction work. Let people decide. We do not have to intervene. If women do not want to get into construction, that is fine! If they do not want to get into IT, that is also fine (but apparently it is not)!
    - marble-drink 7y ago
      I live right next to a major highway construction project. They work in all weathers (or at least try to) and 24 hours a day. 100% male. Funny how nobody is crying foul about this clear case of discrimination. Yet in tech/IT we're failing if the numbers are not 50/50 apparently.
  - rifung 7y ago
    > It turns out people are diverse anyway and that's why not everyone end up in tech That's true but also ignores the problem that many people drop out of tech due to discrimination or feeling like they don't belong even though they are interested. "While a majority of the men in the study reported that their internship experiences were positive, women’s experiences were much more of a mixed bag, full of ageism, sexism, and not being taken seriously" https://www.womenintech.com/mit-study-figures-out-why-so-many-girls-are-dropping-out-of-stem-programs/ https://www.womenintech.com/mit-study-figures-out-why-so-man...
- protomyth 7y ago
  Because Mozilla's version of diversity ignores the people I wish would get a shot in technology. I can donate to local initiatives myself. I especially don't want my "interface to our online world" to have opinions on the subject.
- owl57 7y ago
  "…as the chairman of cultural department of our house..." "Chairwoman," Philip Philipovich corrected her. "Would like to ask you," at this point the woman pulled out of her coat-front a few brightly coloured journals, still damp from the snow, "to take a few journals sold for the benefit of German children. 50 kopecks each." "No, thank you," replied Philip Philipovich briefly, glancing at the journals. The four indicated total amazement and the woman went the colour of cranberry juice. "Why do you refuse?" "I don't want them." "You have no sympathy for the children of Germany?" "On the contrary." "You grudge fifty copecks?" "No." "Why then?" "I don't want them." -- "The Heart of a Dog", Mikhail Bulgakov
- tomp 7y ago
  For example: https://medium.com/aleria/unconscious-bias-trainings-are-often-a-waste-of-your-money-456b82a46cc9 https://medium.com/aleria/unconscious-bias-trainings-are-oft... Unconscious Bias Trainings are (Often) a Waste of Your Money
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
  Consider that this company specifically once fired a guy because someone revealed he had a fetish, then ask yourself how much they really care about diversity and how much is just a show they put on.
newscracker 7y ago
I get the desire to fund one specific project directly (like I get to do with Mozilla Thunderbird where I know I'm donating to that project directly) or at least have part of one's donations go to the development of Firefox. But it doesn't seem like that's possible at all. I have edited my comment above to reflect that. I personally value everything that Mozilla Foundation does (including diversity campaigns) and wouldn't hesitate to donate to it (I've been donating for a few years now), but I would also like to donate to Mozilla Corporation and directly fund its activities, even if it means some money may go to Pocket or Lockwise or anything else. I don't want to micromanage how the company manages my money. It would be defeatist and unfair to ask that, IMO.
- enz 7y ago
  If you have a company, hiring FF developers who are allowed to contribute directly to Firefox may be a good contribution.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  Donations have a nice way of revealing value misalignment between the donating and receiving party. Like e.g. I'd like to donate to Firefox, maaaybe Thunderbird, but not Pocket or diversity campaigns. Money is technically fungible, but that works only if it's enough of unassigned money - if N dollars get donated "for Firefox" and then Firefox development receives less than N dollars, I'd feel cheated as a "for Firefox" donor. Anyway, I can see this being inconvenient for Mozilla. But it is desirable for some users. I don't see how it is defeatist, and it's not unfair either - donors can say, "we want to give money for specific purposes", and Mozilla can accept or refuse. Neither outcome is unfair to anyone; donations are still voluntary transactions.
  - wutbrodo 7y ago
    "Defeatist and unfair" are bizarre ways to describe it, but I'm not sure how the earmarking process would work: what would prevent Firefox from ostensibly allocating your dollars as donated to Firefox and shifted unconstrained dollars from Firefox to another initiative, with your donation ending up funding non-FF activities relative to the counterfactual? Barring the narrow case where they have more FF-only donations than unconstrained ones, this just seems like an accounting fiction.
jdc 7y ago
If you are trying to avoid funding administration/marketing you can offer bug bounties for Firefox or Servo.
- ShinTakuya 7y ago
  That's a good solution, I might start doing that.
- thomas 7y ago
  How would one go about this? I don’t see a way to donate to a bounty or create one.
  - jdc 7y ago
    You can use a generic OSS bug bounty market place, eg. Bounty Source. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_bounty https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_bounty
    - oarsinsync 7y ago
      Which then take 10% off the top for administration of the platform. You cannot avoid funding administration, as that function enables the distribution of the money in the first place.
      - jdc 7y ago
        Of course distribution isn't free, but it can be made very efficient. So it follows that people will shop around.
frankzander 7y ago
Good point!
srtjstjsj 7y ago
Money is fungible. You could donate simply to keep them afloat regardless of their campaigns, in acknowledgement that the sum total of their activities is a massive positive that doesn't need nitpicking. Otherwise, you can recruit and hire someone to write the features you approve of.
- liability 7y ago
  If I give Mozilla more money than they were anticipating, will they put it aside for a rainy day? Or will they expand their ambitions to fit their new budget and find themselves impoverished again next year? Money is fungible but budgets have a nasty habit of being elastic.
  - ryacko 7y ago
    Mozilla can go a full year without revenue currently (their financials are public). I wish more of their meeting minutes were public though. https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2017/mozilla-fdn-2017-fs-short-form-final-0927.pdf https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2017/mozilla-fdn-201...
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  Money is fungible only if there's more money in each budget than money donated for that budget. If there was total $N donations explicitly marked "for Firefox", but Firefox budget could only use $M < $N, then the remaining $(N - M) isn't free to be reallocated to a different budget.
sprafa 7y ago
What’s bothering you, really? So you have evidence Mozilla is splurging their money into political campaigns ?
jshowa3 7y ago
In most donations, you're donating to the product as a whole. There's no way to ever know where your money explicitly goes. At least I've never seen a charity operate that way. Even if you did donate to development, development is not averse to administration, marketing, hiring, and diversity. And developers are not spending time at Firefox getting the product in the hands of people so it can get better with feedback. Marketing and all the other areas you find "problematic" are trying to do that. Either way, even if your money doesn't go where you want it, that's a bad reason to not donate considering there's no indication that their product is substantially inferior to competition, they're making hugely poor decisions, etc.
- gnode 7y ago
  That's unfortunately often how it is, but it doesn't need to be that way. As an example, Ubuntu's donation page allows you to select how you wish your contribution to be allocated: https://ubuntu.com/download/desktop/thank-you https://ubuntu.com/download/desktop/thank-you FOSS foundations should (and typically do) accept code contributions that aren't restricted to their leadership's agenda, so why should they not accept financial contributions beyond their agenda?
  - jshowa3 7y ago
    Because a restriction on code contribution makes sense due to the fact there's often only one area where the code makes sense. If it doesn't fit the vision of whatever the code is trying to do, then there's no reason not to restrict it. Financial contributions affect all areas of the organization and the needs/wants of the organization changes daily, some times spontaneously. People simply donating to "writing code" doesn't make an organization function. There has to be some sort of PR. There has to be some sort of administration. There has to be marketing, quality, distribution, etc.
jancsika 7y ago
Sure: pay money directly to one of a thousand developers to implement missing functionality or fix pressing bugs in Firefox and make a pull request on it. For example: I see that Firefox still hasn't yet made all SVG elements attributes into presentation attributes per the SVG 2 spec. So right now in Firefox you can't do 'rect.style.width = "12px"' but in Chrome you can. Not sure you could easily get full coverage (e.g., I'd bet css "d" atty would be tricky). But there's probably a fairly workable introductory subset for which one could create a fairly clean patch set. Or pick a different self-contained, non-controversial feature/bug and fund a dev to attack it.
- bytematic 7y ago
  I like the approach but I don't think I could individually fund a dev, or really do much more than buy them a few meals
  - jancsika 7y ago
    Hell, just start by filtering the open bugs for stale pull requests. Find the handful that look relatively self-contained and get in touch with the dev who wrote the patch and go from there. A lot of times they just assumed nobody gave a shit and will quickly revise the patch if there was a problem with it. Better yet-- buy a few meals for a dev to write a tool to generate this data for you.
- newscracker 7y ago
  I'm sure that funding for "a tiny feature" or fixing "one tiny bug" would be beyond what most users can pay for at an individual level and still have the developer make a decent living. All the work that's desired to be done needs collective donations to be pooled and used since individual donations would be very small by nature.
  - jancsika 7y ago
    I'm addressing a single HN poster who seems genuinely puzzled about how to target their support directly toward improvements to the FF codebase. You've jumped to discussing an imagined general purpose digital payment pooling system that works at scale.
itronitron 7y ago
when you buy a product or service, do you get to tell the company how they can spend the money?

interactivecode 7y ago

Yikes why would you not want companies investing in diversity? Especially if they are the interface to our online world?

lordgrenville 7y ago
Ignoring the specific case, it's totally reasonable to say "I want to donate to nonprofit X because of thing Y that they do that I value, but I'd like the money earmarked for that thing only, not for all their other activities, which I may or may not support". (Quickly googled example: https://www.nonprofitissues.com/to-the-point/can-earmarked-contributions-be-used-general-funds-purposes-permissible https://www.nonprofitissues.com/to-the-point/can-earmarked-c... )
- nulbyte 7y ago
  In the US, where Mozulla Foundation is organized, the organization often does not have a legal obligation to honor an unsolicited restriction. Mozilla would first have to solicit donations specifically for Firefox before a donor should reasonably expect donated funds to be used solely for Firefox.
martin_a 7y ago
While wording could be improved, the point stands. I want my money to be used for working on Firefox (the core browser) and for that exclusively. Not something like Pocket or whatever Mozilla thinks it should bring out that nobody asked for. There is no way to ensure this, so I will not give any money at all.
- sakisv 7y ago
  > There is no way to ensure this, so I will not give any money at all. Please keep in mind that this is not a personal attack as I don't know you and I don't find it particularly constructive to engage in this kind of attacks, so please only focus on my argument: I cannot understand this way of thinking. On one hand we have the option to give Mozilla some money to use them however they see fit. This means that from the sum of the donations they can use whatever percentage they see fit to fund different products/aspects, e.g. the engineering department so that they can keep working on Firefox, the marketing department to increase the awareness and drive adoption, the user researchers to better understand their user needs etc. On the other hand we have the "default" stance where we don't support what Mozilla is doing. This means that the development of Firefox, the marketing to raise awareness etc, are depended on Google and on Pocket which is something that we want to get away from. I think it mostly boils down to some simple questions and how we feel about the answers: - Do I prefer to know that all my money go to hire more engineers and improve Firefox? Probably (tbh personally I would focus a bit more on user research, it's the everyday people that they should be after, not us) - Do I prefer to allow Mozilla to be depended on Google? Definitely not. - Can my donations be used to make the current situation worse (i.e. tie them tighter on Google's business)? No. So for me, although I don't control where my money goes, I think that they can only be used to improve things.
  - ramphastidae 7y ago
    > I cannot understand this way of thinking. If you ask me, it’s because most of us work very hard for our money and don’t have a lot to spare. If we are going to make the sacrifice of donating, we want to make sure the sacrifice is worth it. If my hard earned money is going to be used for something like the moz://@ nonsense, it’s not worth the sacrifice. If it’s going to be used to support development of privacy features in the browser, then it is.
  - martin_a 7y ago
    > I cannot understand this way of thinking. I want Mozilla to build a browser and a mail program. Nothing else. It's easy as that. And if I have to "fear" that they will use my money to build something else, I will not donate to them. Think of them as a company with several products. People would buy Firefox, they would buy Thunderbird, but probably nobody would buy the aforementioned "moz://" product or Pocket. In a traditional company this would lead to a production stop of the later two and to a better focus on the first two products. With Mozilla, and other donation-based "companies" it will not work that way. There will be other stuff that gets allocated lots of money, because "the money is there" and needs to be used.
nprateem 7y ago
Jeepers it's almost like the OP wants the choice of what their money gets spent on.
longcommonname 7y ago
Wanting their funds to not go to diversity doesn't equate to not wanting Mozilla to fund diversity.
input_sh 7y ago
Because they're not interested in donating, and they need a handy excuse to justify that.
richthegeek 7y ago
I suppose if he wanted to donate to a diversity campaign, he'd donate to one directly. Wikipedia is a big one for this: the donation campaign is all about 'keeping our servers running', and then huge chunks of the spending goes on community feelgood stuff. I've nothing against diversity campaigning but if you were to treat donation like any other 'purchase' you'd be pretty miffed if you thought you were ordering a cheeseburger and you got a carrot and the waiter gave himself a bottle of beer.
- oarsinsync 7y ago
  Orders and purchases are different from donations and gifts.
  - faeyanpiraat 7y ago
    The point is that they say they will use it for purpose X, but instead they use it for Y. A lie is a lie whether it is related to a donation or a purchase.
    - Ensorceled 7y ago
      Mozilla is quite open about what they do and where the money goes, nobody is lying: "The direct work of the Mozilla Foundation focuses on fueling the movement for a healthy internet. We do this by supporting a diverse group of fellows working on key internet issues, connecting open Internet leaders at events like MozFest, publishing critical research in the Internet Health Report, and rallying citizens around advocacy issues that connect the wellbeing of the Internet directly to everyday life."
      - RobertRoberts 7y ago
        But what if you want to only support software development and not social development? I think this is the crux of this thread of discussion.
        7y ago
chronolitus 7y ago
It could be that your parent comment wanted to spark a discussion on whether there is value added from Marketing campaigns, rather than about politics / diversity in the workplace.
ecmascript 7y ago
Because diversity in the tech world isn't real. Just read about Brendan Eich. He got fired because he had the incorrect opinion. In my world, that is the complete opposite of diversity.
- sprafa 7y ago
  Brendan Eich worked against equal rights. Don’t you know Karl Popper’s formulation - a tolerant world cannot tolerate intolerance.
  - ecmascript 7y ago
    No he did not. He funded a political campaign. No I do not know that formulation and I completely disagree with that. It's like saying you need heavy censorship in order to have free speech. Complete bullshit.
    - Jonnax 7y ago
      They funded a homophobic political campaign. Websites started user agent detecting Firefox and putting banners saying to not use Firefox because of their homophobic CEO. It's pathetic that people like you hide behind censorship arguments and "diversity of thought" when defending the right to attack minorities. This kind of disingenuous thinking makes me question anyone evangelising Brave as a web browser.
      - ecmascript 7y ago
        Just because someone donate to a political campaign that wants to stop same-sex marriage doesn't automatically make that person homophobic. He didn't attack any minority, stop spreading objectively false information. I am defending his right to believe whatever he likes in private. It will be a quick downhill (as we already have seen) as soon as you start listing bad values and try to hate on people that have these values. You may think I'm pathetic if you wish, I don't care. But remember, I will defend your right to your opinion too. It's kind of obvious you do not believe in the same thing and if more people would be like you we would find ourselves in a dark dystopia. You could move to China, they are well on their way to building the kind of society you seem to strive for. :)
TeMPOraL 7y ago
Diversity != diversity campaigns != diversity campaigns as implemented by a given organization.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
gjs278 7y ago
because computers don’t need diversity. you can either code or you can’t. who you are in the real world doesn’t matter.
avip 7y ago
Possibly because affirmative diversity could be seen as incompatible with meritocracy.
- thristian 7y ago
  "Meritocracy" is an unattainable goal, like "utopia". It sounds good in the abstract, but "merit" is such a subjective concept that it's useless for any practical purpose. Every person's life is as much a product of random chance as innate potential, so there's no objective measure of merit by which a meritocracy could be judged. I'm sure there's reasonable arguments against affirmative diversity in general or Mozilla's diversity projects in specific, but incompatibility with meritocracy is not a strong one.
  - drevil-v2 7y ago
    How do you define diversity though? How do you slice and dice and at what point do you say it is done? Say I am a hiring manager at Mozilla and I hire a college graduate from Rwandan not because he is best but because of a diversity quota. What if there is also a Sudanese grad who is looking for a job or a Nepalese transgender MtF? How do I decide at that point? Is it my call and only my call or should there be regulation and legislation to deal with situations like this? I have one spot and many diverse candidates. How do I choose?
    - guerrilla 7y ago
      > How do you slice and dice and at what point do you say it is done? When everyone has an equal opportunity. You should be able to derive the rest of the answers to your questions from that.
      - ThrowawayR2 7y ago
        > When everyone has an equal opportunity. "Equal opportunity" is an unattainable goal, like "utopia". It sounds good in the abstract, but "equal opportunity" is such a subjective concept that it's useless for any practical purpose. Every person's life is as much a product of random chance as innate potential, so there's no objective measure of equal opportunity by which a society that enforces equal opportunity could be judged. (Very much /s, of course.) The point being that any arguments made against the unattainability of true meritocracy apply just as well to true equal opportunity.
marble-drink 7y ago
"Diversity" in tech means "we should have programmers with skin colour X or genital configuration Y". But I don't care about people's skin colour or genitals. It turns out people are diverse anyway and that's why not everyone end up in tech.
- johnisgood 7y ago
  Yeah, and it is insane how much amount of money you can receive in the name of diversity. I am pretty sure people who are getting fat rich from it are perfectly aware of this. Slightly off-topic but it is also funny that X would praise diversity, and at the same time imply that we should balance some things out when it is the people themselves who are the cause for the imbalance. They make the assumption that imbalance is bad. Imbalance is not a problem! We do not have to balance/even things out. Examples: construction workers? Mostly males. Nurses? Mostly females, although this has been changing. So what? I do not see these people trying to push women into getting to construction work. Let people decide. We do not have to intervene. If women do not want to get into construction, that is fine! If they do not want to get into IT, that is also fine (but apparently it is not)!
  - marble-drink 7y ago
    I live right next to a major highway construction project. They work in all weathers (or at least try to) and 24 hours a day. 100% male. Funny how nobody is crying foul about this clear case of discrimination. Yet in tech/IT we're failing if the numbers are not 50/50 apparently.
- rifung 7y ago
  > It turns out people are diverse anyway and that's why not everyone end up in tech That's true but also ignores the problem that many people drop out of tech due to discrimination or feeling like they don't belong even though they are interested. "While a majority of the men in the study reported that their internship experiences were positive, women’s experiences were much more of a mixed bag, full of ageism, sexism, and not being taken seriously" https://www.womenintech.com/mit-study-figures-out-why-so-many-girls-are-dropping-out-of-stem-programs/ https://www.womenintech.com/mit-study-figures-out-why-so-man...
protomyth 7y ago
Because Mozilla's version of diversity ignores the people I wish would get a shot in technology. I can donate to local initiatives myself. I especially don't want my "interface to our online world" to have opinions on the subject.
owl57 7y ago
"…as the chairman of cultural department of our house..." "Chairwoman," Philip Philipovich corrected her. "Would like to ask you," at this point the woman pulled out of her coat-front a few brightly coloured journals, still damp from the snow, "to take a few journals sold for the benefit of German children. 50 kopecks each." "No, thank you," replied Philip Philipovich briefly, glancing at the journals. The four indicated total amazement and the woman went the colour of cranberry juice. "Why do you refuse?" "I don't want them." "You have no sympathy for the children of Germany?" "On the contrary." "You grudge fifty copecks?" "No." "Why then?" "I don't want them." -- "The Heart of a Dog", Mikhail Bulgakov
tomp 7y ago
For example: https://medium.com/aleria/unconscious-bias-trainings-are-often-a-waste-of-your-money-456b82a46cc9 https://medium.com/aleria/unconscious-bias-trainings-are-oft... Unconscious Bias Trainings are (Often) a Waste of Your Money
AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
Consider that this company specifically once fired a guy because someone revealed he had a fetish, then ask yourself how much they really care about diversity and how much is just a show they put on.

newscracker 7y ago

I get the desire to fund one specific project directly (like I get to do with Mozilla Thunderbird where I know I'm donating to that project directly) or at least have part of one's donations go to the development of Firefox. But it doesn't seem like that's possible at all. I have edited my comment above to reflect that. I personally value everything that Mozilla Foundation does (including diversity campaigns) and wouldn't hesitate to donate to it (I've been donating for a few years now), but I would also like to donate to Mozilla Corporation and directly fund its activities, even if it means some money may go to Pocket or Lockwise or anything else. I don't want to micromanage how the company manages my money. It would be defeatist and unfair to ask that, IMO.

enz 7y ago
If you have a company, hiring FF developers who are allowed to contribute directly to Firefox may be a good contribution.
TeMPOraL 7y ago
Donations have a nice way of revealing value misalignment between the donating and receiving party. Like e.g. I'd like to donate to Firefox, maaaybe Thunderbird, but not Pocket or diversity campaigns. Money is technically fungible, but that works only if it's enough of unassigned money - if N dollars get donated "for Firefox" and then Firefox development receives less than N dollars, I'd feel cheated as a "for Firefox" donor. Anyway, I can see this being inconvenient for Mozilla. But it is desirable for some users. I don't see how it is defeatist, and it's not unfair either - donors can say, "we want to give money for specific purposes", and Mozilla can accept or refuse. Neither outcome is unfair to anyone; donations are still voluntary transactions.
- wutbrodo 7y ago
  "Defeatist and unfair" are bizarre ways to describe it, but I'm not sure how the earmarking process would work: what would prevent Firefox from ostensibly allocating your dollars as donated to Firefox and shifted unconstrained dollars from Firefox to another initiative, with your donation ending up funding non-FF activities relative to the counterfactual? Barring the narrow case where they have more FF-only donations than unconstrained ones, this just seems like an accounting fiction.

jdc 7y ago

If you are trying to avoid funding administration/marketing you can offer bug bounties for Firefox or Servo.

ShinTakuya 7y ago
That's a good solution, I might start doing that.
thomas 7y ago
How would one go about this? I don’t see a way to donate to a bounty or create one.
- jdc 7y ago
  You can use a generic OSS bug bounty market place, eg. Bounty Source. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_bounty https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_bounty
  - oarsinsync 7y ago
    Which then take 10% off the top for administration of the platform. You cannot avoid funding administration, as that function enables the distribution of the money in the first place.
    - jdc 7y ago
      Of course distribution isn't free, but it can be made very efficient. So it follows that people will shop around.

frankzander 7y ago

Good point!

srtjstjsj 7y ago

Money is fungible. You could donate simply to keep them afloat regardless of their campaigns, in acknowledgement that the sum total of their activities is a massive positive that doesn't need nitpicking. Otherwise, you can recruit and hire someone to write the features you approve of.

liability 7y ago
If I give Mozilla more money than they were anticipating, will they put it aside for a rainy day? Or will they expand their ambitions to fit their new budget and find themselves impoverished again next year? Money is fungible but budgets have a nasty habit of being elastic.
- ryacko 7y ago
  Mozilla can go a full year without revenue currently (their financials are public). I wish more of their meeting minutes were public though. https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2017/mozilla-fdn-2017-fs-short-form-final-0927.pdf https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2017/mozilla-fdn-201...
TeMPOraL 7y ago
Money is fungible only if there's more money in each budget than money donated for that budget. If there was total $N donations explicitly marked "for Firefox", but Firefox budget could only use $M < $N, then the remaining $(N - M) isn't free to be reallocated to a different budget.

sprafa 7y ago

What’s bothering you, really? So you have evidence Mozilla is splurging their money into political campaigns ?

jshowa3 7y ago

In most donations, you're donating to the product as a whole. There's no way to ever know where your money explicitly goes. At least I've never seen a charity operate that way. Even if you did donate to development, development is not averse to administration, marketing, hiring, and diversity. And developers are not spending time at Firefox getting the product in the hands of people so it can get better with feedback. Marketing and all the other areas you find "problematic" are trying to do that. Either way, even if your money doesn't go where you want it, that's a bad reason to not donate considering there's no indication that their product is substantially inferior to competition, they're making hugely poor decisions, etc.

gnode 7y ago
That's unfortunately often how it is, but it doesn't need to be that way. As an example, Ubuntu's donation page allows you to select how you wish your contribution to be allocated: https://ubuntu.com/download/desktop/thank-you https://ubuntu.com/download/desktop/thank-you FOSS foundations should (and typically do) accept code contributions that aren't restricted to their leadership's agenda, so why should they not accept financial contributions beyond their agenda?
- jshowa3 7y ago
  Because a restriction on code contribution makes sense due to the fact there's often only one area where the code makes sense. If it doesn't fit the vision of whatever the code is trying to do, then there's no reason not to restrict it. Financial contributions affect all areas of the organization and the needs/wants of the organization changes daily, some times spontaneously. People simply donating to "writing code" doesn't make an organization function. There has to be some sort of PR. There has to be some sort of administration. There has to be marketing, quality, distribution, etc.

jancsika 7y ago

Sure: pay money directly to one of a thousand developers to implement missing functionality or fix pressing bugs in Firefox and make a pull request on it. For example: I see that Firefox still hasn't yet made all SVG elements attributes into presentation attributes per the SVG 2 spec. So right now in Firefox you can't do 'rect.style.width = "12px"' but in Chrome you can. Not sure you could easily get full coverage (e.g., I'd bet css "d" atty would be tricky). But there's probably a fairly workable introductory subset for which one could create a fairly clean patch set. Or pick a different self-contained, non-controversial feature/bug and fund a dev to attack it.

bytematic 7y ago
I like the approach but I don't think I could individually fund a dev, or really do much more than buy them a few meals
- jancsika 7y ago
  Hell, just start by filtering the open bugs for stale pull requests. Find the handful that look relatively self-contained and get in touch with the dev who wrote the patch and go from there. A lot of times they just assumed nobody gave a shit and will quickly revise the patch if there was a problem with it. Better yet-- buy a few meals for a dev to write a tool to generate this data for you.
newscracker 7y ago
I'm sure that funding for "a tiny feature" or fixing "one tiny bug" would be beyond what most users can pay for at an individual level and still have the developer make a decent living. All the work that's desired to be done needs collective donations to be pooled and used since individual donations would be very small by nature.
- jancsika 7y ago
  I'm addressing a single HN poster who seems genuinely puzzled about how to target their support directly toward improvements to the FF codebase. You've jumped to discussing an imagined general purpose digital payment pooling system that works at scale.

itronitron 7y ago

when you buy a product or service, do you get to tell the company how they can spend the money?