4 ms·

Good. I really wish Mozilla would rely less on these shady backroom deals and open up to direct user funding. The Mozilla Foundation accepts donations, but they

by netule 11mo ago

Good. I really wish Mozilla would rely less on these shady backroom deals and open up to direct user funding. The Mozilla Foundation accepts donations, but they don't go toward funding Firefox; instead, they fund advocacy campaigns. > Firefox is maintained by the Mozilla Corporation, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation. While Firefox does produce revenue — chiefly through search partnerships — this earned income is largely reinvested back into the Corporation. The Mozilla Foundation’s education and advocacy efforts, which span several continents and reach millions of people, are supported by philanthropic donations.[1] [1]: https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/donate/help/#frequently-asked-questions https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/donate/help/#frequently...

dralley 11mo ago
>Good. I really wish Mozilla would rely less on these shady backroom deals and open up to direct user funding. The Mozilla Foundation accepts donations, but they don't go toward funding Firefox; instead, they fund advocacy campaigns. Yes, charitable donations go to charitable causes, not development of a browser which produces profits for a for-profit entity. There's no legal way to channel charitable donations back into a business. To do otherwise would be tax fraud. This is not a "gotcha", this is a persistent misunderstanding of what is and is not possible in tax law.
- kgwxd 11mo ago
  Is there not a difference between a charity and a non-profit?
- PunchyHamster 11mo ago
  But then it would be possible to fund firefox development directly, just not get the tax break for it right ?
- johannes1234321 11mo ago
  There are however two options available: * Make the browser development the charitable work, or * accept funding to non-charitable company However Mozilla earns "enough" from Google, so they don't have to try to make either work.
  - alwa 11mo ago
    Why isn’t the browser development organized as charitable work? From the Corp’s Wikipedia page [0]: > As a non-profit, the Mozilla Foundation is limited in terms of the types and amounts of revenue it can have. Is this an oblique way of saying they couldn’t take Google bucks that way? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation
    - hrimfaxi 11mo ago
      Yes. https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/unrelated-business-income-tax https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/unrelated-business...
      - amadeuspagel 11mo ago
        > Even though an organization is recognized as tax exempt, it still may be liable for tax on its unrelated business income. So, they could still take Google's payment and they would still have to pay taxes on it?
  - FuriouslyAdrift 11mo ago
    Then they wouldn't be able to pay their CEO $7 million a year...
    - glenstein 11mo ago
      Search revenue minus the cost of a CEO (slightly more than 1% of that goes to the CEO) is still an amazing deal, dramatically more than what's likely on offer in terms of charitable giving. They would basically have to execute the largest donation drive in the history of the internet and replicate it on a yearly basis to replace search licensing.
    - OkayPhysicist 11mo ago
      Frankly, they probably could. That's a pretty middle-of-the-road salary for a CEO of a significant nonprofit.
- icepush 11mo ago
  You can make donations to a for-profit business. You just can't deduct it from your taxable income.
  - deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
  - spelk 11mo ago
    I don't have any input on direct user funding for Firefox, but Thunderbird is also developed by a for-profit entity and accepts direct user funding with no charitable tax deductions as well. [0] https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/donate/ https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/donate/ [0] https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/donate/ https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/donate/
  - fhd2 11mo ago
    Exactly, and to my knowledge the receiving party needs to pay profit tax on them. It's called a donation, but technically more of a pay-what-you-want model. Several businesses do that.
- ehutch79 11mo ago
  sell $50 keychains. done.
  - input_sh 11mo ago
    The corporation already sells user-facing products: Mozilla VPN, MDN Plus, Firefox Relay, Pocket (previously). Feel free to subscribe to them to give money directly to the Mozilla Corporation, the future you're looking for is already here.
  - glenstein 11mo ago
    They sell T-shirts, totes, and backpacks: https://mozilla-na.myspreadshop.com/ https://mozilla-na.myspreadshop.com/
abawany 11mo ago
it's particularly strange to see Mozilla engage in these silly machinations when the Thunderbird team has moved on to the model of direct user funding.
- glenstein 11mo ago
  Thunderbird gets $3 million and search licensing gets between $500-600 million.
  - abawany 11mo ago
    In one of your other posts, you talk about their merch sales and others also talk about their bundling of services such as vpn and etc., which all also sound like small potatoes. Does that not sound contradictory? Why bother with any of this if search licensing covers their costs many times over? And if merch and mozilla branded bundles work, then why not also let the users fund them like Thunderbird allows instead of enraging these users by signing them up unsolicited for things such as "privacy preserving ads" and such?
    - glenstein 11mo ago
      Where did you get the impression that I endorsed merch sales as a major diversification of revenue? I think it is a rounding error. I was replying to someone seemingly claiming $50 keychains were the key to solving all their revenue issues as if it presented a new and untested idea. Meanwhile, practically everyone claiming Mozilla should just start collecting donations seems like they are suggesting that it's a revenue panacea that can take the place of search. So that's the key difference. Also, if you're following what I'm saying I'm other posts, you should note I explicitly said I have nothing against donations. I said they were likely to be a modest side hustle rather than a replacement. Imagine what it's like from my perspective to go out of my way to say I have nothing against donations to have an internet rando claim I'm contradicting myself by not acknowledging their usefulness on the margins.
      - abawany 11mo ago
glenstein 11mo ago
>I really wish Mozilla would rely less on these shady backroom deals and open up to direct user funding. I have nothing against this, but at best it would be a modest side hustle. The major comparables in online user fundraising are Wikipedia, which AFAIK is the largest annual online fundraising drive in the world and it raises less than 50% of what search licensing gets. Tor is another one, but off the top of my head, I think it's maybe 1/20th of what Wikipedia raises. If Firefox stood up a donation drive for the first time I would guess Tor-level revenue and maybe it might crawl upward from there depending on how things go. Also, my understanding is their organizational structure is what legally enables them to do the search licensing which is their biggest revenue stream. But it means that their browser development is done to generate commercial revenue. If they moved the core browser development under the Foundation, it would unravel the ability to do search licensing deals to support development, which are much stronger than whatever their prospect for user donations would be. I'm a bit out of my depth here but I believe it's all about the search licensing.
- gldrk 11mo ago
  >The major comparables in online user fundraising are Wikipedia, which AFAIK is the largest annual online fundraising drive in the world and it raises less than 50% of what search licensing gets. All this shows is that Mozilla is even less efficient than Wikimedia! There are projects such as Rust and LLVM that rival Firefox in complexity with 1/10 the combined expenses. Of course Rust has a selling point and Firefox doesn’t, but whose fault is that really?
  - glenstein 11mo ago
    Firefox replaces more code in a month than Rusts' entire codebase even contains. Rusts' expenses are massively subsidized by donated staff time from over a dozen major tech companies. Wikipedia is a fundamentally different beast serving static content with practically zero of the engineering overhead associated with Rust let alone with Firefox.
    - gldrk 11mo ago
tracker1 11mo ago
It's probably too late now... but IMO, what should have been Mozilla's most natural progression towards financial security would have been with Thunderbird. Basically, they were in a position to offer what Outlook/Office365 email does a couple decades ago. Integrate better calendar and contact management, then create a best of class commercial email service platform, and commercial hosted services around that. I thought it would have been a great option long before Gmail was even a thought. Even today, they could work with or create a service like Protonmail or another system to offer these services. 10m users at $4/mo/user is $480m/year and that wouldn't be an unreasonable expectation just for the US market in 3-5 years given where they were in 2008. Of course, I had similar thoughts about Blackberry when iOS and Android hit the market... since they were already entrenched in corporate email at a lot of places, they could have created a best in breed mobile client for their integrated usage ahead of MS playing catch up. But with Mozilla, it would have been a natural extension as a commercial offering without disrupting the good will behind Firefox and Thunderbird as they were...

by netule 11mo ago

dralley 11mo ago

>Good. I really wish Mozilla would rely less on these shady backroom deals and open up to direct user funding. The Mozilla Foundation accepts donations, but they don't go toward funding Firefox; instead, they fund advocacy campaigns. Yes, charitable donations go to charitable causes, not development of a browser which produces profits for a for-profit entity. There's no legal way to channel charitable donations back into a business. To do otherwise would be tax fraud. This is not a "gotcha", this is a persistent misunderstanding of what is and is not possible in tax law.

kgwxd 11mo ago
Is there not a difference between a charity and a non-profit?
PunchyHamster 11mo ago
But then it would be possible to fund firefox development directly, just not get the tax break for it right ?
johannes1234321 11mo ago
There are however two options available: * Make the browser development the charitable work, or * accept funding to non-charitable company However Mozilla earns "enough" from Google, so they don't have to try to make either work.
- alwa 11mo ago
  Why isn’t the browser development organized as charitable work? From the Corp’s Wikipedia page [0]: > As a non-profit, the Mozilla Foundation is limited in terms of the types and amounts of revenue it can have. Is this an oblique way of saying they couldn’t take Google bucks that way? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation
  - hrimfaxi 11mo ago
    Yes. https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/unrelated-business-income-tax https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/unrelated-business...
    - amadeuspagel 11mo ago
      > Even though an organization is recognized as tax exempt, it still may be liable for tax on its unrelated business income. So, they could still take Google's payment and they would still have to pay taxes on it?
- FuriouslyAdrift 11mo ago
  Then they wouldn't be able to pay their CEO $7 million a year...
  - glenstein 11mo ago
    Search revenue minus the cost of a CEO (slightly more than 1% of that goes to the CEO) is still an amazing deal, dramatically more than what's likely on offer in terms of charitable giving. They would basically have to execute the largest donation drive in the history of the internet and replicate it on a yearly basis to replace search licensing.
  - OkayPhysicist 11mo ago
    Frankly, they probably could. That's a pretty middle-of-the-road salary for a CEO of a significant nonprofit.
icepush 11mo ago
You can make donations to a for-profit business. You just can't deduct it from your taxable income.
- deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
- spelk 11mo ago
  I don't have any input on direct user funding for Firefox, but Thunderbird is also developed by a for-profit entity and accepts direct user funding with no charitable tax deductions as well. [0] https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/donate/ https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/donate/ [0] https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/donate/ https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/donate/
- fhd2 11mo ago
  Exactly, and to my knowledge the receiving party needs to pay profit tax on them. It's called a donation, but technically more of a pay-what-you-want model. Several businesses do that.
ehutch79 11mo ago
sell $50 keychains. done.
- input_sh 11mo ago
  The corporation already sells user-facing products: Mozilla VPN, MDN Plus, Firefox Relay, Pocket (previously). Feel free to subscribe to them to give money directly to the Mozilla Corporation, the future you're looking for is already here.
- glenstein 11mo ago
  They sell T-shirts, totes, and backpacks: https://mozilla-na.myspreadshop.com/ https://mozilla-na.myspreadshop.com/

abawany 11mo ago

it's particularly strange to see Mozilla engage in these silly machinations when the Thunderbird team has moved on to the model of direct user funding.

glenstein 11mo ago
Thunderbird gets $3 million and search licensing gets between $500-600 million.
- abawany 11mo ago
  In one of your other posts, you talk about their merch sales and others also talk about their bundling of services such as vpn and etc., which all also sound like small potatoes. Does that not sound contradictory? Why bother with any of this if search licensing covers their costs many times over? And if merch and mozilla branded bundles work, then why not also let the users fund them like Thunderbird allows instead of enraging these users by signing them up unsolicited for things such as "privacy preserving ads" and such?
  - glenstein 11mo ago
    Where did you get the impression that I endorsed merch sales as a major diversification of revenue? I think it is a rounding error. I was replying to someone seemingly claiming $50 keychains were the key to solving all their revenue issues as if it presented a new and untested idea. Meanwhile, practically everyone claiming Mozilla should just start collecting donations seems like they are suggesting that it's a revenue panacea that can take the place of search. So that's the key difference. Also, if you're following what I'm saying I'm other posts, you should note I explicitly said I have nothing against donations. I said they were likely to be a modest side hustle rather than a replacement. Imagine what it's like from my perspective to go out of my way to say I have nothing against donations to have an internet rando claim I'm contradicting myself by not acknowledging their usefulness on the margins.
    - abawany 11mo ago

glenstein 11mo ago

>I really wish Mozilla would rely less on these shady backroom deals and open up to direct user funding. I have nothing against this, but at best it would be a modest side hustle. The major comparables in online user fundraising are Wikipedia, which AFAIK is the largest annual online fundraising drive in the world and it raises less than 50% of what search licensing gets. Tor is another one, but off the top of my head, I think it's maybe 1/20th of what Wikipedia raises. If Firefox stood up a donation drive for the first time I would guess Tor-level revenue and maybe it might crawl upward from there depending on how things go. Also, my understanding is their organizational structure is what legally enables them to do the search licensing which is their biggest revenue stream. But it means that their browser development is done to generate commercial revenue. If they moved the core browser development under the Foundation, it would unravel the ability to do search licensing deals to support development, which are much stronger than whatever their prospect for user donations would be. I'm a bit out of my depth here but I believe it's all about the search licensing.

gldrk 11mo ago
>The major comparables in online user fundraising are Wikipedia, which AFAIK is the largest annual online fundraising drive in the world and it raises less than 50% of what search licensing gets. All this shows is that Mozilla is even less efficient than Wikimedia! There are projects such as Rust and LLVM that rival Firefox in complexity with 1/10 the combined expenses. Of course Rust has a selling point and Firefox doesn’t, but whose fault is that really?
- glenstein 11mo ago
  Firefox replaces more code in a month than Rusts' entire codebase even contains. Rusts' expenses are massively subsidized by donated staff time from over a dozen major tech companies. Wikipedia is a fundamentally different beast serving static content with practically zero of the engineering overhead associated with Rust let alone with Firefox.
  - gldrk 11mo ago

tracker1 11mo ago

It's probably too late now... but IMO, what should have been Mozilla's most natural progression towards financial security would have been with Thunderbird. Basically, they were in a position to offer what Outlook/Office365 email does a couple decades ago. Integrate better calendar and contact management, then create a best of class commercial email service platform, and commercial hosted services around that. I thought it would have been a great option long before Gmail was even a thought. Even today, they could work with or create a service like Protonmail or another system to offer these services. 10m users at $4/mo/user is $480m/year and that wouldn't be an unreasonable expectation just for the US market in 3-5 years given where they were in 2008. Of course, I had similar thoughts about Blackberry when iOS and Android hit the market... since they were already entrenched in corporate email at a lot of places, they could have created a best in breed mobile client for their integrated usage ahead of MS playing catch up. But with Mozilla, it would have been a natural extension as a commercial offering without disrupting the good will behind Firefox and Thunderbird as they were...