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Comment by Aeolun | Hacker News Reader

> "I can't trust Mozilla, they get too much of their income from Google"

God forbid they’d just make us pay for it…

Give me a $10/month Firefox subscription and I’d pay it in a heartbeat. But I don’t want it to be a $10/month ‘other bizarre Mozilla projects’ subscription. Right now it’s hard to trust that any money I give them would go to a better browser.

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You know you can donate to it, right? And Mozilla gets 2% of their revenue from donation. People just don't pay for software when free alternative is available. Also if other mozilla products are profitable, then that money will go to firefox as mozilla is non profit company.

Edit: Leared that you could only donate to mozilla foundation which is not the same.

You can donate to the Mozilla Foundation, but not to Mozilla Corporation. The foundation owns the corp 100%.

Gecko/Firefox developers on payroll are employed by Mozilla Corporation, which pays taxes etc. like any company.

Actually you can't. You can donate to the not-for-profit Mozilla Foundation. But Firefox is owned by the for-profit Mozilla Corporation (which itself is wholly owned by the foundation). The Foundation does "other stuff" in addition to directing the Corporation to develop firefox (what exactly? it's not clear to me). It's managed like a single entity, but the org is broken up like this for some #bigcorp reason (taxes, control how profits are allocated, or some such). Not to drag on it, do business however you want, but my point is that you can't directly donate to firefox development because you have no say on how the Foundation allocates its funds.

It's a bit complicated so I drew up a little diagram:

    1. Mozilla Foundation (not for profit)   <- Donations accepted here
    ├── 2. Mozilla Corporation (for profit, wholly owned by the foundation so all profit goes to the foundation)   X- No donations
    │   └── 3. Firefox   X- No donations
    └── 4. Other social causes (??? it's not clear)

At least, that's how I understand it. Honestly I'm super curious about what the benefits of this kind of org structure are, and what objectives they optimize for. This org structure is clearly not an accident...

Maybe it's something around them charging Google to be the default search engine. If that kind of activity would endanger the non-profit status I could see them creating a wholly owned "for-profit" subsidiary to protect the tax status of the rest of the organization.

  pkill Mozilla

sadly apt in that nothing can adopt

> Right now it’s hard to trust that any money I give them would go to a better browser.

What can't Firefox do that the better browser can? Mozilla improves Firefox all of the time.

Do you think "none" is the amount of a donation that will go towards a better browser? If so, donate $0 of your $10. Is it 10%? If so, donate $1.

* https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/

I'd like a precise breakdown, too, but I'm not an accountant, and donating a few dollars is within my means.

* https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/who-we-are/public-records/

* https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2021/mozilla-fdn-202...

* https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2021/mozilla-fdn-990...

* https://frankhecker.com/2020/08/15/how-mozilla-makes-money-a...

I’m sure this was brought up before, but I followed your link and here is what I saw:

> How will my donation be used? At Mozilla, our mission is to keep the Internet healthy, open, and accessible for all. To learn how your donation is put to use, click here.

It links to foundation’s website, which has the following things listed as “Our areas of focus”: Rally Citizens, Connect Leaders and Shape the Agenda. Firefox is mentioned 0 times on that page.

OK, but Firefox is also all over the domain, too. They're obviously funding a browser; you can download it and install it.

But, sure, I'd like more information about funding Firefox in particular, too.

Seconded. I'd absolutely sponsor Firefox specifically if there were a guarantee that my money were going entirely to Firefox, especially if doing so opened up access to official "low noise" builds that had all monetization, A/B testing, etc disabled.

Which would be the nail in the coffin for any relevance Firefox has. If you worry about their lack of sway in standards bodies as a browser with 3-4% marketshare, they will be completely and utterly irrelevant with <1% marketshare, which is what being a paid browser would result in.

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