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Comment by neiman | Hacker News Reader

I see a problem, though I have no alternative to offer, with the current model of organizations.

It seems you are either for-profit, and then you have no ethics and do everything you can to centralize the world around you with no concern for users or their benefits. Or you're a not-for-profit foundation or the Internet Archive, where you do good things but are destined to be "poor".

Are there are any "shades" between those two organization models?

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If you don't plan to be poor, then you need many paying customers.

For a browser, the customers could be either end users, corporations with many end users, or marketers who want to sell to the end users.

The latter case is Chrome, which works through a long chain of Google services.

The corporate case used to be IE, geared towards deep windows integration.

The case of the paying end users used to be the original Netscape. It did not work well for a number of reasons. Paying for a product when free-as-beer alternatives are available takes understanding, which is sorely lacking outside some segments of tech circles.

I personally buy Mozilla a figurative pizza by a yearly donation. I do it because I understand their importance and feel grateful for their products. If more people did that it would help, but most people who are to benefit from Mozilla's efforts are not technical.

> Or you're a not-for-profit foundation or the Internet Archive, where you do good things but are destined to be "poor".

Not necessarily. Wikipedia is actually pretty damn rich with a large war chest.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fundraising_statisti...

Wikipedia is the single greatest website on the Internet. That's what it takes for donations to keep you afloat. $100MM revenue? Google makes that in a day.

That aside, it's not entirely clear that Wikipedia can live off donations forever.[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...

The article you link to points out that only a small part of what Wikipedia spends is directly used to keep the website up. Spending in 2008 was less than 5% of today, and the website was just fine.

Interestingly I was thinking about that article when I posted my comment. One takeaway is that Wikipedia shouldn't even be spending as much as they are.

> $100MM revenue? Google makes that in a day.

Almost as if one of them wants to squeeze out every penny they can, while the other one is... I don't know, a non-profit that wants to make something good for the world?

What amount of money do you expect a non-profit to make in a year in order for you to consider it as a successful non-profit?

Profit or non-profit doesn't really have anything to do with it. The issue is market power. Chrome has 70-80% market share according to this article. That's monopoly levels of market power and it's maintained through Android, which also has 80% market share.

It's up to regulators to restore some semblance of balance to the market. If the browser market were less concentrated and there was more equal distribution, it wouldn't really matter whether you were a non-profit or not. In fact the web would be better off with competing interests jockeying over each other.

There are many legal constructs that provide shades of gray. Mozilla itself is such an example, it's a for-profit corporation owned by a non-profit.

Additional examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-benefit_corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_purpose_corporation

this -- but, the categories lack detail.. a real systems diagram would quickly show a hundred influences and variables affecting both models. Without enumerating and advocating the position, rather skip to the important results .. there must be ENFORCEMENT on the Corporate, and SUSTINANCE for the not-for-Profit, to hope for any balanced future.

Co-ops.

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