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It's not an either/or situation. For many years now people have been begging Mozilla to allow them to give money to help fund firefox (and only firefox) but Moz
by autoexec 1mo ago
It's not an either/or situation. For many years now people have been begging Mozilla to allow them to give money to help fund firefox (and only firefox) but Mozilla has refused. I can't promise that allowing it would provide all the funds they need, but certainly every little bit helps. People could continue to contribute code to the project, but that requires a lot more time, effort, and no small amount of skill compared to the time it takes to enter your credit card number and submit and an online form. Contributing code to Firefox is still a good thing, but it's a process (https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/contributing/contribution_quickref.html https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/contributing/contrib...) that won't be for everyone.
- glenstein 1mo agoThere is no precedent for donations on the scale of what Mozilla gets from search licensing. The best online fundraising drive on the planet is Wikipedia with orders of magnitude more users and they don't raise half of what Mozilla spends on keeping up with Google. It's not the panacea people keep assuming it is, it's just one of many accusations that gets flung at the wall.
- aragilar 1mo agoExcept Thunderbird now does run on donations (though is looking a relevant additional funding sources, e.g. providing hosted email: https://www.tb.pro/en-US/ https://www.tb.pro/en-US/). This is not to say Mozilla can't seek out other sources of money, or develop appropriate ancillary services, but the absence of an option to just give money for Firefox (and Firefox only) is noticeable.
- glenstein 1mo agoI really want you to stop and think about what you're saying for a second. I just made the point that the strongest online fundraising operation in the world, Wikipedia, gets less than half of what it takes to fund Firefox. Your counterpoint to that is to point to Thunderbird, which raises significantly less money than Wikipedia, which is already not enough to fun Firefox, in order to prove that it's plausible that the full operations of Firefox could be funded. This would be the point where Logan Roy says you're not serious people.