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I looked into donating to Mozilla, and (as always) the first question I asked was “what will this be spent on?” It turns out it wouldn’t go to software develop

by hedora 2y ago

I looked into donating to Mozilla, and (as always) the first question I asked was “what will this be spent on?” It turns out it wouldn’t go to software development, so I did not donate: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2024/article/financing-an-open-internet-mozillas-path-forward/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2024/a... Even worse, they’re spending the revenue they do get in wildly irresponsible ways. The AI initiative makes no sense. Currently, dozens of industry leading groups are doing a great job converting unlimited Chinese govt grants, monopoly rents, and VC money into open infrastructure and open weights Targeted advertising is fundamentally unethical, regardless of whether it respects privacy. Examples: - A friend struggled with prescription drug addiction and repeatedly relapsed due to targeted ads. - Entire industries are built on targeting people with gambling problems. - Companies like Cambridge Analytica explicitly target mentally ill people to change election outcomes and dismantle democracies. Anyway, I wish they’d spin off Firefox and related stuff (Rust made sense, I think FirefoxOS did too), and abandon the rest of their “mission”.

jonkoops 2y ago
I really wish they would do to Firefox what they did to Thunderbird, which is to spin it off into its own thing so it can stand independently. I want to support Firefox, but I do not feel comfortable donating to the Mozilla foundation. Firefox should just do a Wikipedia style beg button once a year and be transparent on where the money is being spent.
aeve890 2y ago
>Companies like Cambridge Analytica explicitly target mentally ill people to change election outcomes and dismantle democracies. What's not that years ago? Also wdym with targeting mentally ill people to dismantle democracies? Last thing I read about that was a FB api abuse to collect user data but nothing about targeting a specific demographic
- jonwest 2y ago
  I think the sentiment was that the mentally ill would be more susceptible to misinformation.
EasyMark 2y ago
Why do people keep bring this up? It's been known for years and years that you can't donate directly to firefox unless you just donate to one of the forked projects like librewolf or waterfox that might eventually make changes that will go back upstream. I agree that mozilla needs to take a step back, slim down to just the browser and browser related tasks like open standards and then move forward instead of trying to save the world. If one of their offerings like security monitoring or VPN or such actually is a net money maker they should keep those as well, but everything else should go.
- yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
  > Why do people keep bring this up? It's been known for years and years that you can't donate directly to firefox Maybe it's been known to you, but there are people in these threads over the last 72 hours who have thought that money they give to Mozilla supports Firefox. So it should keep getting repeated until everyone knows.
  - Tempest1981 2y ago
    Ten Thousand: https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/
gruez 2y ago
>The AI initiative makes no sense. Currently, dozens of industry leading groups are doing a great job converting unlimited Chinese govt grants, monopoly rents, and VC money into open infrastructure and open weights Open weights yes, but what about the applications that people actually use? "AI" goes far beyond a LLM hooked up to a chat UI. >Targeted advertising is fundamentally unethical, regardless of whether it respects privacy. Examples: [...] I don't see how listing a bunch of worst case examples is is supposed to prove the claim that "Targeted advertising is fundamentally unethical". Contextual advertising is "targeted advertising", but I don't see what's unethical about putting software developer job ads next to stackoverflow, for instance. >Anyway, I wish they’d spin off Firefox and related stuff (Rust made sense, I think FirefoxOS did too), and abandon the rest of their “mission”. How is firefox going to get revenue?
- autoexec 2y ago
  > I don't see how listing a bunch of worst case examples is is supposed to prove the claim that "Targeted advertising is fundamentally unethical". I'd agree that targeted advertising isn't an inherent evil, but left unrestricted it will inevitably be used in evil ways and bring about surveillance capitalism which is very much evil.
eh_why_not 2y ago
> I wish they’d spin off Firefox and related stuff..., and abandon the rest of their “mission”. I wish the community (I don't have the technical skills myself) would fork Firefox back into a privacy-focused browser; strip out all the Mozilla "products" code that's snuck in it, and manage the development in a non-profit organization like how the Linux kernel gets developed.
- ycombinatrix 2y ago
  LibreWolf?
  - fsckboy 2y ago
    no! bring back the IceWeasel! (oh, apparently it still exists, but it's called IceCat now, which explains it's lack of popularity)
    - Ballas 2y ago
      Can you elaborate on what objections you have to Librewolf and why IceCat is better?
    - aragilar 2y ago
      The Iceweasel in Debian was Firefox without branding, IceCat (which was called Iceweasel before Debian created Iceweasel) is a GNU fork (and there are Thunderbird and Skymonkey equivalents).
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

by hedora 2y ago

jonkoops 2y ago

I really wish they would do to Firefox what they did to Thunderbird, which is to spin it off into its own thing so it can stand independently. I want to support Firefox, but I do not feel comfortable donating to the Mozilla foundation. Firefox should just do a Wikipedia style beg button once a year and be transparent on where the money is being spent.

aeve890 2y ago

>Companies like Cambridge Analytica explicitly target mentally ill people to change election outcomes and dismantle democracies. What's not that years ago? Also wdym with targeting mentally ill people to dismantle democracies? Last thing I read about that was a FB api abuse to collect user data but nothing about targeting a specific demographic

jonwest 2y ago
I think the sentiment was that the mentally ill would be more susceptible to misinformation.

EasyMark 2y ago

Why do people keep bring this up? It's been known for years and years that you can't donate directly to firefox unless you just donate to one of the forked projects like librewolf or waterfox that might eventually make changes that will go back upstream. I agree that mozilla needs to take a step back, slim down to just the browser and browser related tasks like open standards and then move forward instead of trying to save the world. If one of their offerings like security monitoring or VPN or such actually is a net money maker they should keep those as well, but everything else should go.

yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
> Why do people keep bring this up? It's been known for years and years that you can't donate directly to firefox Maybe it's been known to you, but there are people in these threads over the last 72 hours who have thought that money they give to Mozilla supports Firefox. So it should keep getting repeated until everyone knows.
- Tempest1981 2y ago
  Ten Thousand: https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/

gruez 2y ago

>The AI initiative makes no sense. Currently, dozens of industry leading groups are doing a great job converting unlimited Chinese govt grants, monopoly rents, and VC money into open infrastructure and open weights Open weights yes, but what about the applications that people actually use? "AI" goes far beyond a LLM hooked up to a chat UI. >Targeted advertising is fundamentally unethical, regardless of whether it respects privacy. Examples: [...] I don't see how listing a bunch of worst case examples is is supposed to prove the claim that "Targeted advertising is fundamentally unethical". Contextual advertising is "targeted advertising", but I don't see what's unethical about putting software developer job ads next to stackoverflow, for instance. >Anyway, I wish they’d spin off Firefox and related stuff (Rust made sense, I think FirefoxOS did too), and abandon the rest of their “mission”. How is firefox going to get revenue?

autoexec 2y ago
> I don't see how listing a bunch of worst case examples is is supposed to prove the claim that "Targeted advertising is fundamentally unethical". I'd agree that targeted advertising isn't an inherent evil, but left unrestricted it will inevitably be used in evil ways and bring about surveillance capitalism which is very much evil.

eh_why_not 2y ago

> I wish they’d spin off Firefox and related stuff..., and abandon the rest of their “mission”. I wish the community (I don't have the technical skills myself) would fork Firefox back into a privacy-focused browser; strip out all the Mozilla "products" code that's snuck in it, and manage the development in a non-profit organization like how the Linux kernel gets developed.

ycombinatrix 2y ago
LibreWolf?
- fsckboy 2y ago
  no! bring back the IceWeasel! (oh, apparently it still exists, but it's called IceCat now, which explains it's lack of popularity)
  - Ballas 2y ago
    Can you elaborate on what objections you have to Librewolf and why IceCat is better?
  - aragilar 2y ago
    The Iceweasel in Debian was Firefox without branding, IceCat (which was called Iceweasel before Debian created Iceweasel) is a GNU fork (and there are Thunderbird and Skymonkey equivalents).

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]