zlacker

This topic keeps coming up. Mozilla is viewed as a bloated entity whose only legitimate activity is maintaining Firefox. No-one cares about the other initiatives they spend money and resources on, and they especially don't want their donations going toward Mozilla's overpaid leadership.

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

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24129794

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24129926

>>MaxBar+(OP)
Mozilla Foundation can't accept Firefox specific donations because the Mozilla Foundation does not develop Firefox. The Mozilla Corporation does and the foundation cannot give money to the corporation (only the other way around). So you'd need to redo a whole lot of things for this to be possible.

>>marcin+U8
They can change that though, by having the foundation directly employ Firefox contributors

>>GoOnTh+Rc
Or at least not funnel millions of donation dollars to Mitchell Baker.

>>freshs+0f
Mitchell Baker is paid by the Mozilla Corporation which in turn is paid by it's search deals. She is paid $0 by the Mozilla Foundation and it's donations. Feel free to checkout the foundation financial statement from 2018 (it's on page 7):

https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2018/mozilla-2018-fo...

>>freshs+0f
You might like this chart:

https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1217512049716035584

>>marcin+Ng
And if she were paid less, Mozilla Corporation could spend that money on its mission.

>>MaxBar+zi
Which in the context of how Mozilla deals with donations is a separate and unrelated discussion.

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.

>>marcin+qj
Sure, you were right to point out that freshsqueeze was incorrect in saying they funnel donations to their overpaid CEO, but the fungibility point is an important one.

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]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24142097

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24131981

>>GoOnTh+Rc
That's true but as MaxBarraclough points out in this discussion the Mozilla Corporation could simply remove an equal number of it's engineers from Firefox development. Thus your donation provides no net gain. There'd also probably be some overhead from managing those new Foundation engineers as they probably, legally, cannot be directly managed by the Corporation.

So as long as the Mozilla mission is not aligned with the "Firefox mission" there is no winning.

>>marcin+U8
> Mozilla Foundation can't accept Firefox specific donations because the Mozilla Foundation does not develop Firefox. The Mozilla Corporation does and the foundation cannot give money to the corporation (only the other way around).

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?

>>weinzi+co
As GoOnThenDoTell pointed out, they could probably independently pay for Firefox developers but it'd probably be a messy approach.

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.

>>marcin+U8
Why the need for the corporation? The foundation could hire employees, coordinate development, etc. right?

>>wirrbe+Bp
They'd need to probably do it all independently of the corporation's development efforts which would be rather inefficient. Might still make some IRS agents twitch since it could look like trying to get around tax laws by the corporation.

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.

>>marcin+6s
They are going to do that anyway as Firefox keeps loosing market share the search revenues is going to diminish .

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 .

>>marcin+U8
That's not true, if the lawyers wanted to set up a pathway for that then it could happen via various legal entities and hoops. Mozilla doesn't want the community to have that much say and they don't want to lose that much control and be dependent on users. The problem is they keep losing share of the market. I'm not sure how they can fix that since google is always a little bit ahead because they essentially dictate which way internet technology goes these days because they control 80% of the browsers out there via chrome.

>>manque+xC
>TBH it is hard to make a recurring revenue of $ 400M even from scratch

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.

>>MaxBar+Dl
> overpaid CEO

Overpaid relative to what? Other CEOs of similar sized non-profits? Do you have evidence to support that claim?

>>wirrbe+Bp
> Why the need for the corporation?

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.

>>coldpi+IV
Relative to performance.