If other shelved or high risk Mozilla projects such as MDN , servo , thunderbird setup similarly it would enable us to directly contribute to the projects instead of the foundation or not at all.
The only project the corporation would never let go is Firefox as it their revenue source , however other projects could perhaps be salvaged
Which is probably true; Google is unlikely to spend half a billion a year on Mozilla's advocacy efforts.
Mozilla will never let their golden goose Firefox become a separate Foundation.
People would like to donate directly to Firefox, but as things stand, this isn't an option. This isn't because Firefox falls under the Mozilla brand, it's because Mozilla choose not to accept Firefox-specific donations.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24141852
AFAIK, Google's money goes to the Mozilla Corporation, while the donations go to the Mozilla Foundation. So the advocacy is already separated, isn't it?
> It also handles relationships with businesses, many of which generate income. Unlike the Mozilla Foundation, the Mozilla Corporation is a tax-paying entity, which gives it much greater freedom in the revenue and business activities it can pursue. From 2004 to 2014, the majority of revenue came from a deal with Google, which was the default search engine in the Firefox web browser.
https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2018/mozilla-2018-fo...
edit: More broadly, pointing out someone as making a false statement does not mean you agree with the opposite view, simply that you don't like people spreading false statements.
> In CY 2018, Mozilla Corporation generated $435.702 million from royalties, subscriptions and advertising revenue compared to $542 million in CY 2017. 2017 was an outlier, due in part to changes in the search revenue deal that was negotiated that year. Despite the year-over-year change, Mozilla remains in a strong financial position with cash reserves to support continued innovation, partnerships and diversification of the Firefox product lines to fuel its organizational mission.
However, as noted earlier, the corp does pay for the foundation's advocacy:
> A portion of search revenue combined with grants and donations is used to fuel the advocacy and movement building work of the Mozilla Foundation and its broad network of supporters of Mozilla’s mission.
A related point on fungibility turned up in earlier discussions: donating directly to Firefox might not count for much if Mozilla balance it out by redirecting the same sum of their general fund away from Firefox. [0][1]
NPOs and NGOs should not have to depend on people willing to exploit themselves for the cause, not on the leadership level and not on the base level (where this is even more common).
The problem is rather that CxO payment in general has gone through the roof over the last 60 years, with the problem becoming ever worse since the fall of the USSR. The ratio of CxO to average worker pay was 20-to-1 in 1965, 58-to-1 in 1989 - and in 2018 it hit 278-to-1!
So as long as the Mozilla mission is not aligned with the "Firefox mission" there is no winning.
Does that mean that not only it is impossible to make Firefox specific donations but also that it is guaranteed that none of the money donated to Mozilla can ever end up being used for Firefox development?
Keep in mind that the Mozilla foundation gets something like $10 million in donations per year while the Corporation gets $500 million per year from Firefox search deals. So donations are a drop in the bucket compared to the existing revenue streams.
Realistically, the corporation makes so much more money from Firefox search deals versus foundation donations that this shouldn't be necessary. But as long as the Mozilla leadership wants to screw Firefox they will find a way. For example, by removing an equal number of engineers from Firefox development on the corporation side as the foundation hires.
It is, because money is not infinite so those resources spend on high level execs could be spend way effectively elsewhere.
> interest in attracting (and retaining!) high quality staff.
I know ton of high quality people (researchers) and they aren’t pay millions of dollars. A C-level desk warmer could do its job as effectively if paid a high, yet decent (in comparison to the average wage) amount.
The problem is you won't even find a desk warmer, at least none with actual experience in leading a ~750 employees organization, without taking part in the wage racket.
The only ones you'll end up hiring are either newbies wanting to use your organization as a "career trampoline" (which is bad because you want stability, not a change of course every other year) or failures that don't have a chance anywhere else.
The system must be fixed, and the system is absurd CxO pay. Relying on individuals sacrificing themselves/their orgs won't work.
They have been unable to find alternative revenue streams.
TBH it is hard to make a recurring revenue of $ 400M even from scratch , Mozilla has an existing culture that is not simply geared towards this kind of product building . I would be skeptical of even competent board and management doing this .
True but they also didn't need to had they made decisions geared around long term sustainability. They could have kept Firefox running with a budget of under $150 million a year (~500 employees) and invested the rest. That'd be a nest egg of probably $4 billion by now including growth. That's enough for them to keep going for decades with no external revenue.
Instead they kept spending money on moonshot projects to become an independent megacorp. Failing every time. Now they don't have many options remaining.
Overpaid relative to what? Other CEOs of similar sized non-profits? Do you have evidence to support that claim?
Plus, if people were donating towards Firefox specifically, how many of them would be upset that Mozilla was spending "their" money on developing a whole new programming language? "This is a waste of my money, just use C++ or something instead of reinventing the wheel".
The corporation basically exists to make the Google Search Deal possible. And considering that the search deal pays more than donations to the Apache Foundation and the Mozilla Foundation combined, it looks like it was a smart move.
* Total yearly income for the Apache foundation according to https://www.apache.org/foundation/docs/FY2020AnnualReport.pd... was 2.2M
* Total yearly income for the Mozilla Foundation according to https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2018/mozilla-2018-fo... was $27M, about half from "program service revenue" (which means it came from the Corporation).
* According to https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2018/ (different document, but notice that both are for year 2018), the Mozilla Corporation got $435M from royalties, subscriptions, and advertising. In other words, while the Foundation is not technically allowed to give the Corporation money, that doesn't seem to be a problem.
I wouldn't ask why the need for the corporation. I'd ask why the need for the foundation. Though I'm pretty sure I know the answer: the foundation exists to limit the exploitative behaviour of the corporation. Remember: Benefit Corporations didn't exist at the time.
To quote their original documentation at https://www-archive.mozilla.org/reorganization/#q2
> By forming a commercial subsidiary, the revenue-generating activities of the new entity can provide funds to support development, testing, and productization of the various Mozilla open source technologies. This benefits both end-users of Firefox and Thunderbird, and developers and others who want to use the Mozilla open source code in various ways. Having the Mozilla Corporation handle revenue-generating activities associated with these products also allows the Mozilla Foundation to achieve its goals while still itself remaining a tax-exempt organization.
This is a much harder way to donate than simply by paying money, though.
CEO doesn't want to take even a small pay cut