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

63 points pabs3 | 7 comments | 12 Mar 25 09:53 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source | bottom

How much would you and or your company be willing to fund Mozilla should it need to become independent of Google?
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iteratethis ◴[12 Mar 25 15:17 UTC] No.43344171[source]▶
Many people want to donate to Firefox exclusively but you can forget about that. Mozilla will not carve out Firefox because it's the only reason that the mother org gets half a billion of free money from Google.

Carving out Firefox means Mozilla is dissolved as none of their other activities make any money.

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1. ryandrake ◴[12 Mar 25 15:29 UTC] No.43344289[source]▶
Why can't Mozilla just be Firefox? I would donate to a group of open source developers, but I would not donate to a huge org chart tree of CxO's and VP's and non-technical administrators and administrators-of-administrators and assistants-to-administrators-of-administrators.
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2. iteratethis ◴[12 Mar 25 15:37 UTC] No.43344375[source]▶
Well, I just explained you why. Firefox subsidizes the mothership which is doing a lot of non-Firefox activities. When you carve out Firefox, the mothership is gone.
replies(1): >>43344439 #
3. ryandrake ◴[12 Mar 25 15:44 UTC] No.43344439[source]▶
What I'm asking is why can't Mozilla just drop all the non-Firefox side quests?
replies(1): >>43344593 #
4. iteratethis ◴[12 Mar 25 15:58 UTC] No.43344593{3}[source]▶
I'm guessing because they don't want to. Their "mission" is much larger than Firefox.
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5. octopoc ◴[12 Mar 25 16:14 UTC] No.43344777{4}[source]▶
Everything they do has approximately zero value add to the community compared with the value add of having a legitimate alternative browser.

It’s like saying, yeah I solved cancer, but my vision is so much bigger than that! I also invented an Excel formula that allows shoe stores to advertise 2% less expensively to dogs.

We really need an alternative browser. We have one. But the people running it want to use your donations to do other things that are 100x less important.

replies(1): >>43347542 #
6. iteratethis ◴[12 Mar 25 20:52 UTC] No.43347542{5}[source]▶
I totally agree with you. I'm just explaining Mozilla's motivation.
7. curtisblaine ◴[15 Mar 25 09:53 UTC] No.43371376{4}[source]▶
But why Mozilla has this "mission"? Activists?