6 ms·

The author suggests getting donations to (partially) finance Firefox. That would never work without changing the culture of Mozilla Corporation in a huge way: C

• MaxBarraclough 6y ago
  It would be possible for Mozilla to accept donations with strings attached that specify what the funds are to be spent on. Currently, they probably don't accept such donations (as far as I can tell), but that's on Mozilla. We discussed this yesterday at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24129794 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24129794
  • simonh 6y ago
    Money is the ultimate fungible asset, any restricted funds going to development frees up money that would have gone to development otherwise to go to something else instead. The only way this works is if the restricted fund donations exceed what the dev investment would have been otherwise, then it starts making a difference.
    • sukilot 6y ago
      "This idea works better the more people do it" it the most milquetoast criticism ever.
      • simonh 6y ago
        It doesn’t work at all until a lot of people do it. Below a certain, fairly high threshold all the contributions achieve essentially nothing.
  • prepend 6y ago
    As a donor I don’t like this method because unless all donations were like this, since funds are fungible, budgets would still shift around. For example, consider two features: AwesomeFeature - budget has $100 DumdumFeature - budget has $200 They currently receive $300 in donations, $50 of which have no strings attached. So there’s donation stream A with strings and $250, and donation stream B with no strings and $50. Allocation looks like this: AwesomeFeature - budget has $100, funded with A$75, B$25 DumdumFeature - budget has $200, funded with A$175, B$25. If I donate $25 and say “this can only go to awesome feature” the budgets after my donation end up as. AwesomeFeature - budget has $100, funded with A$100 DumdumFeature - budget has $225, funded with A$175, B$50.
    • sukilot 6y ago
      What you are saying as you don't want to fund your future because you are mad that other people fund their features.
      • MaxBarraclough 6y ago
        In the case of Mozilla, it's more than the money can go to one of two places: Firefox development, or the black-hole of Mozilla's other projects and expenditures, including their overpaid leadership.
      • prepend 6y ago
        What I’m saying is that there are lots of charities working toward a future I think is really good. I’d rather donate there. I’m not mad at anyone, I just want my donations to do as much good as I think they can do.
    • labawi 6y ago
      Technically yes, they could shift spending like that, but it would look bad enough, I think at least some would help where you want. Either way, asking for them not to shift funding as appropriate would be asking to control other finances not your own. If they allowed targeted donations to firefox/quantum/rust/MDN I would donate, as I'm sure many other will. As it is, I don't and won't even if firefox were to fail.
  • throw0101a 6y ago
    > It would be possible for Mozilla to accept donations with strings attached that specify what the funds are to be spent on. Best Practical, the company that does most of the work on the open source RT ticketing system, allows for sponsoring specific features or fixes: * https://rt.bestpractical.com/NoAuth/Featured https://rt.bestpractical.com/NoAuth/Featured
• Semaphor 6y ago
  > They frivolously spend on side-projects nobody needs. I’m curious, what unneeded side-projects do they have?
  • dig1 6y ago
    Just go through https://github.com/mozilla https://github.com/mozilla and I bet you didn't hear about 90% of them. If you paginate further, you'll see most of them aren't maintained much anymore.
  • rubber_duck 6y ago
    WebThings ? There are OSS projects in this space and I don't see how they plan on capturing value for the organisation or provide value to the community by building yet another solution that currently has very weak integration with 3rd party devices.
  • dandellion 6y ago
    The new crappy address bar that nobody asked for, pocket, hubs, three different mobile browsers, some useless award and probably more that I don't remember. Also annoying is how they constantly kill useful features like RSS or bookmark descriptions. I use Firefox because I still like it better than Chrome and I like to support free software, but it's obvious to me that Mozilla doesn't really care about their users and they're too busy chasing shiny things. I expect they'll keep losing market share until they become irrelevant and disappear.
    • thomasahle 6y ago
      Isn't pocket a sponsor of Mozilla? I always thought that was why it was there.
      • dwighttk 6y ago
        Mozilla bought pocket
      • marcusverus 6y ago
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• Aeolun 6y ago
  I’m perfectly happy to pay a reasonable monthly amount to keep the firefox team alive.
• jleahy 6y ago
  > Having people pay, even voluntarily, and having even a small reliance on those payments would just kill Mozilla more quickly without a visible leadership change first. Wikipedia relies on user donations, and yet they still spend vast sums of money on what might be described as frivolous side projects (eg. Wikipedia Zero). Not so long ago (late 2000s) wikipedia ran on 39 servers, mostly squid proxies, and did not cost very much money to keep running. Given the increase in server performance I imagine they could run on a similar number of servers these days (maybe less with help from a CDN). Now they spend nearly $100m per year. So there is no guarantee that this would help Mozilla.
  • corty 6y ago
    Donations to Wikipedia more than pay for the technical infrastructure, they do have lots of money to waste. Mozilla obviously doesn't. So as a donor, Mozilla wasting money is more of a problem, because as a donor I see it is actually not keeping Mozilla running and if I stop donating it will hurt far worse.
    • pwdisswordfish0 6y ago
      There's either a misconception in this comment or a misreading of it on this side. Compare the Wikimedia numbers given (nearly $100m per year to keep running) to Mozilla's, who last reported spending much more than that (over $173m) just in their non-software development spending.
      • corty 6y ago
        Absolute numbers are irrelevant here. The relation between expenses and incoming donations is important. Wikipedia raises more than it can spend, resulting in rising assets: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fundraising_statistics https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fundraising_statis...
        • pwdisswordfish0 6y ago
          It looks like the misreading part was the right one, then. The intent of your original comment is clearer now, in light of this response. You're saying that Wikimedia's spending is somewhat rational, whereas Mozilla's revenue might disappear as the result of a single party making a decision to walk away. You're not saying that Mozilla is a ragtag group of browser developers with barely any money. (There was too much focus on "Mozilla obviously doesn't [have the money to waste]" in the earlier reading.)
• mapgrep 6y ago
  > Currently, they take every chance to annoy their users, break their workflows, add new unnecessary but costly mistakes. I just use Firefox with some extensions and have seen nothing like this. I also used Thunderbird briefly (like a month). What am I missing? Do you have specific examples? If they really took “every chance to annoy their users” I think I would probably know it? The browser starts, I get to work, end of story. I get that Firefox has made some decisions people don’t like (Pocket and the suggested links on new tab) but that doesn’t mean they are annoying users on every chance or breaking my ability to work.
  • narag 6y ago
    If they really took “every chance to annoy their users” I think I would probably know it? People in HN are specially sensitive to some issues that others don't care much about. Past year we had a series of news about Firefox sending data of some "experiments" and similar. It was difficult to disable. Two or three things like that, you don't need more to lose trust here. Perception is Mozilla is not ran as an open source organization, but as an advertisement company with similar tricks to make users "engage with the product".
    • skinkestek 6y ago
      > People in HN are specially sensitive to some issues that others don't care much about. Past year we had a series of news about Firefox sending data of some "experiments" and similar. It was difficult to disable. Two or three things like that, you don't need more to lose trust here. As someone who is annoyed now: Partially true I'd say. I've also been surprised once or twice before by people who were oh so critical about Mozilla and then recommended using Chrome/Chromium or a derivative instead. There's always been someone to hate on Firefox, at least since they introduced the awesomebar a long time ago. And here I sit, wondering if - it finally catched up with me what others had seen a long time - if I changed - if Mozilla changed - or if I am the target of a successful smear campaign against Mozilla I don't know. Right now however I want I want Google to work like in 2009 and my old Firefox extensions to work with the new supposedly (I think so, honestly, but I don't know) safer API, I want corona gone and I want my insanely powerful laptop to feel insanely powerful instead of sitting here waiting for a double digit GB more RAM to arrive :-/
• libertine 6y ago
  > Currently, they take every chance to annoy their users, break their workflows, add new unnecessary but costly mistakes. They frivolously spend on side-projects nobody needs. Isn't this a symptom of being detached from reality? In a sense that they are in their bubble, and didn't had the need to look outside of it? Maybe that's the problem, they didn't have to make it work because the money was already there.