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Comment by c3534l | Hacker News Reader

> revenue seeking

Then what the hell did I donate money to them for? I thought their whole thing was they were for "people, not profit." I don't want my technology to make money off of me in any way I'm not aware of.

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Mozilla Foundation employee here! You probably donated through https://donate.mozilla.org, so I thank you earnestly for that! With that donation you're supporting our work to protect the health of the internet, fueling the movement to keep the web decentralized, open and free. Some of the projects we've worked on include http://privacynotincluded.org/ and our advocacy campaigns like https://advocacy.mozilla.org/en-US/net-neutrality. We also sponsor a whole host of fellows doing deeper dives on things like the dangers of Aadhaar in India and Tech Policy in Washington D.C. (https://foundation.mozilla.org/opportunity/2017-tech-policy-...). You can learn more at https://foundation.mozilla.org/about/

Besides, it looks like the amount of cash that Mozilla got for stuff like Pocket or Mr Robot is tiny compared to their other sources of revenue. It doesn't seem something worth to taint their brandname and ethos for.

If you rule out Firefox, there's hardly any viable option for a modern, feature-complete and freedom-respecting browser. Chromium is OK, but those suspicious blobs don't look very appealing.

For me the most shocking part is that the FSF has a Firefox ESR fork, IceCat, which is hardly maintained and goes 2 versions behind mainline. They don't even bother patching CVEs...

For the record, Mozilla didn't get any money for the Mr. Robot tie-in: it was supposed to be part of a mutual cross-promotion campaign. I don't think the original Pocket integration was paid, either, though my memory there is hazy. Either way Mozilla now owns Pocket anyway.

Mozilla never directly received money for the Pocket placement, however they did get a piece of any premium sign-ups made via the Firefox integration.

Thanks for the clarification.

You probably donated money to the Mozilla Foundation, which owns the Mozilla Corporation. The Corporation is not a nonprofit, in the sense that it's taxed, although that is not the same thing as saying their goal is profit.

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