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Comment by jsty | Hacker News Reader

Their news operations are subsidised to the tune of ~£30m/yr by the charitable trust that owns them. Not in and of itself problematic, but accumulating a sizeable enough endowment to sufficiently fund operations isn't an option for most orgs.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2019/aug/07/guardian-broke...

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> ...accumulating a sizeable enough endowment to sufficiently fund operations isn't an option for most orgs.

And one of the claims / complaints of TFA is that Mozilla had a massive income for many years, and could have built up an endowment; but instead chose to live "hand-to-mouth", spending their income on useless failed projects that have nothing to do with Firefox. (And CEO pay of course.)

> that have nothing to do with Firefox

Not arguing against the overall point but Thunderbird has nothing to do with Firefox either and is still a thing Mozilla's reason for existing is not just their browser.

I get the point you're putting across, but you chose a terrible example. Mozilla cut thunderbird loose years ago, after neglecting it (Thunderbird remained XUL-based long after Mozilla decided that XUL was a technological dead-end). Yes, Mozilla's mission to to make the internet better for all users - not just the web. But I think they forgot what their mission is sometime back.

Mozilla corporation is owned by a non profit. Having a sizeable endowment is hard, but that sweet sweet google money has totaled over a billion dollars so its not like they didn't have the opportunity.

Yes, that totals a couple billion dollars at this point. Mozilla's mismanagement of that money is really unfortunate. Up until 2012 Mozilla ran just fine on about 100MM a year. Why they didn't care to save any significant portion of the Google dollars is beyond me. If they had simply been a somewhat leaner organization they would be in a far better place right now.

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