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Comment by swiftcoder | Hacker News Reader

> For what it's worth because legal names are confusingly similar, this is a legal subsidiary of Mozilla that is specific to Thunderbird

Right, I get that, but why is it for-profit? Fund raising is hard enough for nonprofits, convincing people to donate their hard-earned cash to a for-profit is on a whole different level.

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I'm definitely not involved with any of them to know for sure, but my guess would be that's because non-profits come with a lot more regulatory overhead in comparison to for-profits of a similar scale. Not saying that's bad in any way, but for a team that just wants to build the damn thing, for-profits are absolutely less of a hassle.

Sure but if they want people to donate they better be ready to explain their decisions. All that extra overhead is there to ensure that the nonprofit is actually a nonprofit doing what it says it's doing after all.

One thing that's important to note (which holds for the Mozilla Corporation too) is that the for-profit thing is a legal status, but the Foundation (an official non-profit) is the only shareholder, i.e. the only entity that "profit" can flow to. So you're not lining some billionaire's pockets.

(Though of course, employees of either entity can be paid whatever, which also holds for every other non-profit.)

My understanding is the for-profit structure was necessary in order to be able to do the search licensing deals finance Firefox.

That’s a separate for-profit. This one is narrowly scoped to operate thunderbird

No, MZLA is another subsidiary. You're talking about Mozilla Corporation.

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