MDN Plus

I always wonder at the thought process behind these questions.

Yes, Mozilla (.org) is a non-profit, and Mozilla (.com) is a regular corporation. Yes, Mozilla has commitments about transparency. Yes, exec salaries are insane.

Do folks who ask this question scrutinize every purchase or business they make to this degree? In the laundry list of entertainment, learning, and professional subscriptions, what portion of spotify, github, or other popular subs end up contributing to just the feature or service you like as opposed to the entire organization and other initiatives that the organization supports?

It's idealism. We still hope, despite the evidence, that Mozilla can be unadulteratedly good, as long as we only look at the open source side of it.

We already know that Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook and Oracle are evil.

I'm really unhappy with how much money Spotify is pumping into podcasts because I really want them to give that money to musicians instead (I don't listen to podcasts)

It's not just the classic "evil" companies though. When you buy a jar of peanut butter, do you demand every cent to be going to production of the jar without overhead? Do you check the peanut butter company's CEO's salary to ensure it's not too high? I sure don't.

> Do folks who ask this question scrutinize every purchase or business they make to this degree?

If you are giving charitable donation to the Mozilla Foundation, it is entirely reasonable to ask what they use that money for.

But we have a lot of control over the software we use on a daily basis, and there are several capable browsers. I want to use a browser that has a commitment to privacy, is still functional, etc. and Firefox fits the bill for many. If it doesn't, they want to know so they can change it. Food is a little more complicated in that regard. For instance, if you find the "better" brand tastes terrible...well, it's not really a choice.

> Do folks who ask this question scrutinize every purchase or business they make to this degree?

Yes. When you are paying for something, you should have an idea of where that money is actually going. That is why it comes up here. There isn't anything exceptional about this case with Mozilla.

The difference with other services is that what people want when they subscribe to Spotify is access to music. What (at least some) people want when they subscribe to MDN Plus is ensure that Firefox and other open Web projects stay relevant. If people paid for Spotify merely so that Spotify stayed relevant, they would probably care in similar measure how Spotify spends its money.

I think these questions come from the idea baked into charitable giving. When you purchase a good, the thing you're getting is obvious, it is what you're purchasing.

However, when you're giving to charity, what are you getting? You probably want to know.

If charities are smart, I bet they could take advantage of this by creating classic ladders which encourage more contributions if people get a say of where a "portion of their donation" goes.

They’re not podcasts if they’re behind a paywall. They’re commercial shows that happen to benefit from the conflation. They are broadcasts and you are right to be concerned when a company supposedly selling commercial-free access to music starts providing anything beyond music.

I don't see how claiming that Mozilla is insane helps this cause.

I'd assumed these were concern trolls just trying to attack people they've been trained to hate for no reason by propaganda.

If these commenters genuinely think they're helping the open web with these comments then that makes both my brain and heart hurt.

>Do folks who ask this question scrutinize every purchase or business they make to this degree?

If they did, the donations to some charity type orgs would probably drop to 0. Lots of unhappy people about the pink "awareness" org and others that spend as much money doing the events and paying for staff than doing anything else. Yes, we're "aware" of breast cancer.

For this to be an accurate comparison, there should be two free sources of peanut butter, one that I want to donate to because it helps keep the peanut butter playing field level, while the other has a massive majority of the peanut butter market and uses that to do various anticompetitive things. But the one I want to support doesn't accept donations, only the parent conglomerate does.

If they said you could donate on top of the jar price to help the poor third world peanut farmers, and you did so, and then found that money went to the CEO's salary and a rebranded PeanutVPN product, and then the Peanut Butter CEO justified it by saing that Mark Zuckerberg and Satya Nadella get paid a lot so it's not fair if they don't, would none of that that annoy you?

Criticism is not always respectful and it stings more often than not but it’s important to long-term success. What would help the open web even more would be to address issues instead of asking that no one brings up. (You’re also very much allowed to be tired of reading it over and over without it being invalid.)

It’s completely fair game to criticize the overhead costs of charities: it’s one of the most common things to criticize about charities, in fact.

I feel like you might be missing the point I'm (and GGP's) trying to make. If you're considering whether to give your money, why would you focus on exec salaries rather than results? So the comparison is: if you're buying a jar of peanut butter, why would you focus on what their execs are paid, rather than the peanut butter it will get you?

(And to pre-empt that: I'm not saying you can't criticise results. I'm saying that focusing on exec pay rather than on results feels misdirected.)

Like I anwered to a sibling comment of yours, I'm not making a point about whether Firefox fits the bill; I'm trying to say that focusing on exec pay, rather than on whether it does fit the bill, is probably focusing on the wrong things.

> So the comparison is: if you're buying a jar of peanut butter, why would you focus on what their execs are paid, rather than the peanut butter it will get you?

I think we both agree on this. What they pay their execs is irrelevant. What I'm saying is, I'm not buying peanut butter, it's available for free. I am considering donating money for the peanut butter I already get for free, but the grocery conglomerate that accepts donations on behalf has already fired half the peanut farmers, and discontinued the Crunchy variety that I really liked.

I usually bring this point up when discussing donating to charities, so I'd say: you're not buying access to MDN for yourself, you're buying it being available for free to the world.