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Regarding the donations, I think the way they are structured with donations going to the non-profit Mozilla Foundation, and development of Firefox being done by

by ac29 6y ago

Regarding the donations, I think the way they are structured with donations going to the non-profit Mozilla Foundation, and development of Firefox being done by the for-profit Mozilla Corporation means that donations cant be used to support Firefox development. Its unfortunate, because I would happily donate to fund Firefox, but I'm not terribly interested in funding Mozilla's non-profit activities (at least not more than other charities I could donate to). I wonder if crowdfunding around specific development goals would be productive - certain promising features like Webrender have been in development for a very long time, and I'd be willing to contribute money to see them finished and shipped.

staktrace 6y ago
This is a bit of a silly argument, because money is fungible and dollars are dollars. Donating money to the Foundation means less of the Corporation's dollars have to go to supporting the Foundation, and so more of the Corporation's dollars go to Firefox.
- jacquesm 6y ago
  Either that, or they decide that they now have enough cash to pursue folly #12 and end up with less budget for FF. Mozilla has not been very effective with how they have spent the received money in the past, a very large fraction of that money went to dead end projects or net negatives.
- marcinzm 6y ago
  That's not how entities managed by humans function. If you give the Mozilla foundation $1, they now have $1 + their previous money. The people running the org have no incentive to lower their other revenue sources. They want to manage as large of an org as possible and you do that by not leaving money on the table.
pas 6y ago
Yep, Mozilla and/or the Firefox team is abysmal at communicating about these things. They regularly make HN front page with the release notes, but ... nothing happens, no call to action, no communication.

by ac29 6y ago

staktrace 6y ago

This is a bit of a silly argument, because money is fungible and dollars are dollars. Donating money to the Foundation means less of the Corporation's dollars have to go to supporting the Foundation, and so more of the Corporation's dollars go to Firefox.

jacquesm 6y ago
Either that, or they decide that they now have enough cash to pursue folly #12 and end up with less budget for FF. Mozilla has not been very effective with how they have spent the received money in the past, a very large fraction of that money went to dead end projects or net negatives.
marcinzm 6y ago
That's not how entities managed by humans function. If you give the Mozilla foundation $1, they now have $1 + their previous money. The people running the org have no incentive to lower their other revenue sources. They want to manage as large of an org as possible and you do that by not leaving money on the table.

pas 6y ago

Yep, Mozilla and/or the Firefox team is abysmal at communicating about these things. They regularly make HN front page with the release notes, but ... nothing happens, no call to action, no communication.