5 ms·

People around here love to pile on Mozilla for every perceived slight or misstep but they rarely have any ideas on how Mozilla is supposed to fund itself. Some

People around here love to pile on Mozilla for every perceived slight or misstep but they rarely have any ideas on how Mozilla is supposed to fund itself. Some of the ire is earned but I have yet to see how Mozilla is supposed to fund Firefox development without that google search bar.

devmunchies 5y ago
> they rarely have any ideas on how Mozilla is supposed to fund itself If we’re talking about the Mozilla foundation, they should seek donations and grants and focus on being the best user web tooling. If we’re talking about the corp, they could’ve kept rust under the umbrella and pioneered the WASI runtime and built an alternative to k8s that runs webassemblies and built out a paid cloud infra. It doesn’t make sense to have a foundation that is user aligned and a corp that is user hostile. There should be aligned incentives.
agilob 5y ago
In 2013/2014 when Snowden started whiste-blowing we were hoping for Mozilla to monetize privacy, but they never did. They only recently made some very poor attempts at private email, VPN and integrated some DoH. They were very hesitant for any cryptocurrencies integration. I would be happy to pay for a serious VPN and email service (remember Mozilla owns Thuderbird) with promises like Tutanota or Proton have. They could have acquired them, but instead they acquired pocket. Mozilla had the perfect brand and enough userbase to do it. Mozilla started doing that work 5-7 years too late and did too little to be meaningful. I feel they are doomed now and their space is shrinking and there's no future for Firefox in the long term. There's a lot that can be added here: Mozilla promised to opensource pocket server and never did. They promised to hire someone full-time for Thunderbird, but never did. afair there is a German company that has full-time developer working on Thuderbird. They promised a VPN... yes, delivered something. They promised anonymous email, I know they were giving access by invites, but nothing more about it. They promised to unfork Tor browser and integrate Tor into Firefox, they were even running a few Tor nodes. Remember how hyped everyone here was for Servo in Firefox and electron competitor? MDN could have integration with GH or GL and educational content for web development, they literally had resources, brand and ability to join an online university and give degrees or at least serious bootcamps. Mozilla was a meaningful brand to do it. They had a lot of opportunities to sell privacy, we literally demanded it from them, but they weren't interested in listening. Instead they delivered 6 rebrands each breaking my muscle memory. Do you remember how they advised EU to regulate monopoly on the webbrowser market? There was time when they had all ability, but 0 will to keep it this way https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BrowserChoice.eu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BrowserChoice.eu
- Terry_Roll 5y ago
  - agilob 5y ago
    wow this escalated so fucking fast i have no idea what happened
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - Terry_Roll 5y ago
      Not really, its just the epitome of blagging which is criminal!
- kyleee 5y ago
  on the other hand, colorways
blihp 5y ago
By not spending the >$1 billion they've taken in over the last decade as fast as they got it. A billion+ is a ton of money in the open source world and had they been responsible stewards they would have been able to fund development for a very long time without short term funding concerns. The fact that they've pissed away every cent taken in is their problem.
vasco 5y ago
For starters Mozilla could operate with a much smaller footprint, much less projects in parallel and less vanity projects. That would reduce the amount of money required by a lot, which is the big problem in the first place. Developing a browser isn't easy and requires a few teams of developers, but in 2020 it spent 242 million dollars in software development costs, 137 million dollars in administrative costs and 37 million dollars in marketing and branding costs. I don't live in a lala land where I think you can develop a browser for free, but I think we can all agree that you don't need to spend this amount of money on it either. Are 100 developers enough? 200? How much does that cost? Do they all need San Francisco salaries to develop a good browser? In terms of funding, they got 440 million dollars from royalties (what they get from setting default search engines on their browser) and 25 million dollars in subscription revenue (Pocket and VPN subscriptions type things - products they actually sell). Now, can you develop a browser on 25 million dollars per year? Maybe it's cutting it short, but for sure there could be a strategy to invest more on this side of the equation to phase out the need to be Google's bitch in a more intentional way. Source: https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2020/mozilla-fdn-2020-short-form-0926.pdf https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2020/mozilla-fdn-202...
- mattnewton 5y ago
  > Are 100 developers enough? 200? How much does that cost? 100-200 developers probably roughly costs on the order of 25-50 million a year (assuming a made up number of 250k fully loaded cost with benefits and taxes, which might be lower or higher than their average, idk. This number seems almost too conservative to my gut). From this back of the envelope math, I don't think the royalties business is enough to support the development cost alone. > Do they all need San Francisco salaries to develop a good browser? If you don't want them to leave to work on safari or chrome, probably? This experiment was more or less tried by opera, right? Brave gets away with a lot lower overhead by bascially piggybacking off chrome. Opera similarly gave up selling their own browser engine and cut their development teams while switching to another wrapper on blink. Firefox could become yet another skinning of blink and chrome code, but it's not clear to me how that's helping them with being "Google's bitch in a more intentional way". I think there are problems with Mozilla's side project expenditures, there is definitely some bloat, and they have had some expensive failures like Firefox phone. However I don't think Mozilla could have survived without Google's funding and people vastly underestimate how expensive quality software is.
wintermutestwin 5y ago
>how Mozilla is supposed to fund itself. 1. Stick to building a more private browser 2. Become a non-profit or Benefit Corp 3. Fund #1 through all of us donating and encouraging our less tech savvy connections to use it and donate
- drath 5y ago
  1. Why focus on privacy? The niche is already taken by brave 2. To do so, they'd have to drop their half-billion default search engine deals 3. Currently, the donation figure is about $20mil. They'd have to somehow additionally collect $1.5 from every single user annually to prevent layoffs.
  - GekkePrutser 5y ago
    It's not a small niche. It can be shared with Brave. And Brave has things that not everyone likes like the bat token stuff. And chromium.
  - account42 5y ago
    > 2. To do so, they'd have to drop their half-billion default search engine deals Yes, that is part of the reason why they should be a non-profit - sot that they can work for the public good and not for the good of their corporate sponsor. > 3. Currently, the donation figure is about $20mil. Donation figure for what? Currently you CANNOT donate towards Firefox development.
    - drath 5y ago
      > Donation figure for what? Currently you CANNOT donate towards Firefox development. To Mozilla foundation. Most people I heard donating to them don't realize their money aren't and couldn't be put into Firefox development.
- account42 5y ago
  > 3. Fund #1 through all of us donating and encouraging our less tech savvy connections to use it and donate They could also try to seek government funding. EU and other non-US countries should have an interest in there being a browser that is not beholden to a US for-profit corporation.
roughly 5y ago
It'd be a nice start if they'd let me give them money for their product.
- GekkePrutser 5y ago
  Indeed. And something like apple's iCloud relay. I would pay for that. I won't pay for a Mullvad subscription that's less useful than actual Mullvad because it just works in the browser and it doesn't fix all the issues iCloud relay solves. If they'd sell actual privacy features I'd pay for it totally. Sync too.
- wussboy 5y ago
  I say this every time it comes up. I would happily pay $5/month for a “platinum” branded Firefox browser if that $5 would go to support development costs. I’d love to have other people see it when I share my screen both inside and outside my organization.
modo_mario 5y ago
It would help if they didn't increase the board and leadership compensation and spend loads of money on social justice projects whilst at the same time cutting on development as their footprint on the browser market keeps shrinking. Sure it's probably not going to make it but they're still not things they can sensibly afford to do.
hackerfromthefu 5y ago
This has been done to death in other threads.. mozilla's raison d'etre today is as a lighting rod to prevent real competition to google. Follow the money, and why the mozilla ceo gets big bucks for performance that's against mozilla's public goals - they are instead meeting mozilla's private goals. Your raising a discussion about mozilla in a brave thread plays right into mozilla's purpose of muddying the waters for actual competition against google. Please don't derail brave discussions with off topic stuff.
- MomoXenosaga 5y ago
  You can use the same reasoning for why Google is happy with "competition" from Chromium based browsers.

devmunchies 5y ago

> they rarely have any ideas on how Mozilla is supposed to fund itself If we’re talking about the Mozilla foundation, they should seek donations and grants and focus on being the best user web tooling. If we’re talking about the corp, they could’ve kept rust under the umbrella and pioneered the WASI runtime and built an alternative to k8s that runs webassemblies and built out a paid cloud infra. It doesn’t make sense to have a foundation that is user aligned and a corp that is user hostile. There should be aligned incentives.

agilob 5y ago

In 2013/2014 when Snowden started whiste-blowing we were hoping for Mozilla to monetize privacy, but they never did. They only recently made some very poor attempts at private email, VPN and integrated some DoH. They were very hesitant for any cryptocurrencies integration. I would be happy to pay for a serious VPN and email service (remember Mozilla owns Thuderbird) with promises like Tutanota or Proton have. They could have acquired them, but instead they acquired pocket. Mozilla had the perfect brand and enough userbase to do it. Mozilla started doing that work 5-7 years too late and did too little to be meaningful. I feel they are doomed now and their space is shrinking and there's no future for Firefox in the long term. There's a lot that can be added here: Mozilla promised to opensource pocket server and never did. They promised to hire someone full-time for Thunderbird, but never did. afair there is a German company that has full-time developer working on Thuderbird. They promised a VPN... yes, delivered something. They promised anonymous email, I know they were giving access by invites, but nothing more about it. They promised to unfork Tor browser and integrate Tor into Firefox, they were even running a few Tor nodes. Remember how hyped everyone here was for Servo in Firefox and electron competitor? MDN could have integration with GH or GL and educational content for web development, they literally had resources, brand and ability to join an online university and give degrees or at least serious bootcamps. Mozilla was a meaningful brand to do it. They had a lot of opportunities to sell privacy, we literally demanded it from them, but they weren't interested in listening. Instead they delivered 6 rebrands each breaking my muscle memory. Do you remember how they advised EU to regulate monopoly on the webbrowser market? There was time when they had all ability, but 0 will to keep it this way https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BrowserChoice.eu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BrowserChoice.eu

Terry_Roll 5y ago
- agilob 5y ago
  wow this escalated so fucking fast i have no idea what happened
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - Terry_Roll 5y ago
    Not really, its just the epitome of blagging which is criminal!
kyleee 5y ago
on the other hand, colorways

blihp 5y ago

By not spending the >$1 billion they've taken in over the last decade as fast as they got it. A billion+ is a ton of money in the open source world and had they been responsible stewards they would have been able to fund development for a very long time without short term funding concerns. The fact that they've pissed away every cent taken in is their problem.

vasco 5y ago

For starters Mozilla could operate with a much smaller footprint, much less projects in parallel and less vanity projects. That would reduce the amount of money required by a lot, which is the big problem in the first place. Developing a browser isn't easy and requires a few teams of developers, but in 2020 it spent 242 million dollars in software development costs, 137 million dollars in administrative costs and 37 million dollars in marketing and branding costs. I don't live in a lala land where I think you can develop a browser for free, but I think we can all agree that you don't need to spend this amount of money on it either. Are 100 developers enough? 200? How much does that cost? Do they all need San Francisco salaries to develop a good browser? In terms of funding, they got 440 million dollars from royalties (what they get from setting default search engines on their browser) and 25 million dollars in subscription revenue (Pocket and VPN subscriptions type things - products they actually sell). Now, can you develop a browser on 25 million dollars per year? Maybe it's cutting it short, but for sure there could be a strategy to invest more on this side of the equation to phase out the need to be Google's bitch in a more intentional way. Source: https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2020/mozilla-fdn-2020-short-form-0926.pdf https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2020/mozilla-fdn-202...

mattnewton 5y ago
> Are 100 developers enough? 200? How much does that cost? 100-200 developers probably roughly costs on the order of 25-50 million a year (assuming a made up number of 250k fully loaded cost with benefits and taxes, which might be lower or higher than their average, idk. This number seems almost too conservative to my gut). From this back of the envelope math, I don't think the royalties business is enough to support the development cost alone. > Do they all need San Francisco salaries to develop a good browser? If you don't want them to leave to work on safari or chrome, probably? This experiment was more or less tried by opera, right? Brave gets away with a lot lower overhead by bascially piggybacking off chrome. Opera similarly gave up selling their own browser engine and cut their development teams while switching to another wrapper on blink. Firefox could become yet another skinning of blink and chrome code, but it's not clear to me how that's helping them with being "Google's bitch in a more intentional way". I think there are problems with Mozilla's side project expenditures, there is definitely some bloat, and they have had some expensive failures like Firefox phone. However I don't think Mozilla could have survived without Google's funding and people vastly underestimate how expensive quality software is.

wintermutestwin 5y ago

>how Mozilla is supposed to fund itself. 1. Stick to building a more private browser 2. Become a non-profit or Benefit Corp 3. Fund #1 through all of us donating and encouraging our less tech savvy connections to use it and donate

drath 5y ago
1. Why focus on privacy? The niche is already taken by brave 2. To do so, they'd have to drop their half-billion default search engine deals 3. Currently, the donation figure is about $20mil. They'd have to somehow additionally collect $1.5 from every single user annually to prevent layoffs.
- GekkePrutser 5y ago
  It's not a small niche. It can be shared with Brave. And Brave has things that not everyone likes like the bat token stuff. And chromium.
- account42 5y ago
  > 2. To do so, they'd have to drop their half-billion default search engine deals Yes, that is part of the reason why they should be a non-profit - sot that they can work for the public good and not for the good of their corporate sponsor. > 3. Currently, the donation figure is about $20mil. Donation figure for what? Currently you CANNOT donate towards Firefox development.
  - drath 5y ago
    > Donation figure for what? Currently you CANNOT donate towards Firefox development. To Mozilla foundation. Most people I heard donating to them don't realize their money aren't and couldn't be put into Firefox development.
account42 5y ago
> 3. Fund #1 through all of us donating and encouraging our less tech savvy connections to use it and donate They could also try to seek government funding. EU and other non-US countries should have an interest in there being a browser that is not beholden to a US for-profit corporation.

roughly 5y ago

It'd be a nice start if they'd let me give them money for their product.

GekkePrutser 5y ago
Indeed. And something like apple's iCloud relay. I would pay for that. I won't pay for a Mullvad subscription that's less useful than actual Mullvad because it just works in the browser and it doesn't fix all the issues iCloud relay solves. If they'd sell actual privacy features I'd pay for it totally. Sync too.
wussboy 5y ago
I say this every time it comes up. I would happily pay $5/month for a “platinum” branded Firefox browser if that $5 would go to support development costs. I’d love to have other people see it when I share my screen both inside and outside my organization.

modo_mario 5y ago

It would help if they didn't increase the board and leadership compensation and spend loads of money on social justice projects whilst at the same time cutting on development as their footprint on the browser market keeps shrinking. Sure it's probably not going to make it but they're still not things they can sensibly afford to do.

hackerfromthefu 5y ago

This has been done to death in other threads.. mozilla's raison d'etre today is as a lighting rod to prevent real competition to google. Follow the money, and why the mozilla ceo gets big bucks for performance that's against mozilla's public goals - they are instead meeting mozilla's private goals. Your raising a discussion about mozilla in a brave thread plays right into mozilla's purpose of muddying the waters for actual competition against google. Please don't derail brave discussions with off topic stuff.

MomoXenosaga 5y ago
You can use the same reasoning for why Google is happy with "competition" from Chromium based browsers.