> A charitable foundation with no doners should be wound up. For many charities, probably, yeah. But Mozilla being in the position that an endowment more or le

> A charitable foundation with no doners should be wound up. For many charities, probably, yeah. But Mozilla being in the position that an endowment more or less funds at least 'support' level of maintaining a fully independent browser beholden to absolutely no one, even if literal zero money is flowing in otherwise - that's a nice thing to have. It does invite corruption, and in the end, if nobody cares about mozilla (the browser), it should indeed go away, but 'being cared about' and 'raking in the dosh' aren't quite the same. Sure, you can turn care into cash (donate buttons and the like), but if you don't have to, that's nice. Mozilla (the browser) is likely to die if the funding that they CAN provide is a decent salary but nowhere close to what other companies could possibly offer – _and_ nobody cares about it. Here's what I mean by that last one: I'm sure PKK (author of linked article), for example, could be convinced to do the job of quirksmode/MDN for a salary. And that salary does not have to be close to what PKK could get as a freelancer or at google or whatnot, but it should at least be somewhat representative of his particular skillset. Effectively, then, PKK is still donating - a lot - namely the difference between the salary he'd get vs. the salary he could get, but he gets something in return: Working on a thing he likes to do more, and contributing to the open web. Had firefox been raking in millions a month off of user donations, and spending it all on the projects they were spending it on, you might be right: That's fine, and if the money dries up, they downsize - that'd be a better way to do it vs. setting up an endowment. But that is NOT what happened. Firefox got most of the running funds via e.g. having google as default search engine. That is a cashcow that may at some point run out; at the very least you are too beholden to too few parties, and that itself is far more likely to be 'corruption' (as in, have the same downsides) than a charitable foundation with more cash than carers. Turning THAT windfall into an endowment does strike me as a wise move. Especially if you earmark that endowment for a limited purpose (presumably, earmark it for team gecko and very few other parts of moz).