Ask HN: Would you fund Mozilla to become independent of Google?

The only way I would donate to Mozilla is if the corporation is shuttered and the non-profit is disentangled from it.

Any donations you send to Mozilla today go to the corporation and are not spent on the browser. They are spent on things that have nothing to do with the core mission of the maintaining the browser.

Nobody is allowed to fund Mozilla to maintain the browser, which is the actual question you're asking.

This and I would pay between 10 and 20 USD a year for it.

Much like Wikipedia, my donations depend on being able to donate to the actual engineers, and not to unrelated political advocacy.

I think you're getting it mixed.

The corporation funds almost exclusively the browser.

The non-profit doesn't fund the browser.

Jimmy Wales should really push for a Wikipedia fork of Firefox. People trust Wikimedia Foundation and the entire thing is in line with the goals of Wikimedia who also 'get' web development.

Mozilla are doing other things that a browser, yes. And this is good. Browsers are special and don't make money by themselves, and Firefox in particular is entirely dependent on Google's money. Having alternative projects that can bring revenue (e.g. Pocket) helps them remove that singular dependency and ensure they can survive long term.

And having a specific "donate to Firefox only" would probably end in disaster. They might end up in a situation where they're forced to waste money on Firefox because that's what the donations are for while not having enough money to keep the lights on in offices. For a fun example of what happens when you have fixed budgets that don't have any flexibility, Atlanta's MARTA was founded with an agreement providing public funding, with a fixed 50/50 split between capex and opex. So they found themselves with brand new trains because there's capex budget to spend, but falling apart infrastructure because 50% wasn't enough for opex.

But you just described what Mozilla is doing right now! 0% of what anyone donates goes to the browser, and its a disaster!

A fork? Getting any momentum behind this might be really hard.

Why do you think it's 0%? I doubt it, it's not like the money goes into separate buckets and engineering salaries for Firefox only come from the Google bucket, and donations get spent on lobster and champagne parties for the C-levels.

You state that the non-Firefox activities of Mozilla are good, as if an established fact.

I'd reason that there's no consensus on this at all. Some things might be perceived as good, some neutral or bad, and many might be perceived as well intended but ineffective.

> You state that the non-Firefox activities of Mozilla are good, as if an established fact.

No, I'm stating that it's good that Mozilla has non-Firefox activities and is trying to diversify. I've only used Pocket from them and it's good, but don't have an opinion on any of their other activities.

I think there are lots of people in this thread saying (directly or indirectly): "There is nothing that Mozilla does that I would want to fund, besides Firefox!"

> Much like Wikipedia, my donations depend on being able to donate to the actual engineers, and not to unrelated political advocacy.

Yep. I even agree with most of the unrelated political advocacy, but I want to be able to donate for that to a different organization.

Why do they need to diversify? In case they need to pull the plug on Firefox? There is simply no way they could offer anything else as useful as Firefox.

They have enough money that they could throw it all in the S&P 500 and maintain Firefox indefinitely off the growth. That’s what they should do.

It does go in separate buckets.

The money flow between the for-profit that develops Firefox and the non-profit foundation is one-way: From for-profit to non-profit. This is because it is illegal for the non-profit to give money to the for-profit.

Any donations you make go to the non-profit. They are not used and cannot legally be used for Firefox development.

Edit to add: Mozilla chose this legal structure. Mozilla chooses to disallow donations or payments directly to the for-profit. For example, nothing prevents using a shareware model, where Firefox is free but you can choose to pay for it. And Mozilla chooses to avoid mentioning this structure when accepting donations from you.

Aren't the Cooperation and Foundation exactly those separate buckets?

It's the opposite. It's the Mozillq Corporation that develops the browser. The nonprofit Mozilla Foundation, which owns the corp, does not. You can donate to the nonprofit, but you can't donate to the corporation. Furthermore, what a lot of people dislike is that the foundation's money doesn't go towards Firefox development. Instead, Firefox revenue (almost entirely royalties from Google) are passed by the corp to the foundation.

Firefox private donations amount to 8 million usd from the last published data. Their CEO makes 9 million a year. 0 of Mozilla donations directly make it to Firefox developers or activities.

Dumping computer generated text without even bothering to make a point or conclusion does not add anything to the conversaton.

"I can't be bothered to do my own thinking, here's what a computer said"

We know the development get 0% because it pays profit back to the nonprofit to fund more of the non firefox activities, not the other way around.

Why not $21? Or $30? Or $100? Genuinely curious.

I figure it's either worth $0, or hundreds of $. I mean, sooo much whining about privacy and telemetry and ad-blocking but ultimately it's worth the same as a couple cups of coffee?

That seems to me to be a root question here. How much is privacy actually worth? The average number in this post seems about $20. So in real terms, nothing at all.

And yes, all of this is moot given that you can't donate to Firefox in the first place.

Still, for those starting a business, this is a excellent lesson- don't confuse volume with willingness to pay. Just because lots of people shout loudly about the size of their pain, don't just assume they'll pay real money to make it go away.