zlacker

Tangential:

I'd love to donate to Mozilla, but I'm concerned my money could just end up in some C-suite pockets if I do. Is there a way to donate specifically to Firefox core(-ish) team, and maybe also MDN?

>>notpus+(OP)
That wouldn't make any sense from them. What good would donations for Firefox be if they can't pay the cleaning staff of their office or it's rent or the HR and accounting and legal people that keep the "Firefox core-ish team, and maybe also MDN" employed and running? Even the CEO, even if ridiculously overpaid (one can make an argument that to get a quality CEO in the US you need to pay them a lot, which I don't buy, surely there are people capable of being CEOs out there that aren't greedy as fuck and would be willing to accept a low salary of a 1-2 million $ per year) is necessary for the company, and a bad CEO can ruin them (see: GE, Enron, Boeing, Twitter, etc.).

For a "fun" example of how strict budget destination restrictions fail, take a look at Atlanta's MARTA, that used to have a fixed 50/50 budget split between OPEX and CAPEX by it's funding law, and therefore had brand new trains but everything else falling apart.

>>sofixa+02
That totally makes sense, yeah! But giving donors just a bit more control would still be nice IMO.

>>notpus+(OP)
Company finance income streams are rarely ringfenced like that.

>>notpus+(OP)
Do you do this same analysis for every purchase you make? Maybe the sandwich shop you bought lunch at used your money to buy a pizza for the owner & her wife, neither of whom worked at the store that day and made your lunch. Does that upset you? It's a business. Money comes in, money goes out, product gets made. Either pay them for the product you like, or don't. It's up to them how they use the money they get.

>>notpus+(OP)
The closest thing right now is to pay for one of the products. Pocket Premium, Firefox Relay, Mozilla VPN.

>>notpus+(OP)
You can make a restricted donation to the Mozilla Foundation, and if they accept it, they're bound to the restriction unless you consent.

However, dollars are fungible. If you donate $500 to support MDN, that may replace $500 for MDN coming from revenue, which frees up $500 to go into something else, like a C-Suite's pocket, or Pocket or whatever. So while your dollars go where you said, it still enables whatever you didn't like. OTOH, if you donate $50B to support MDN, that's a bit different; it certainly frees up whatever money was going to support MDN before, but there wasn't $50B of MDN expense, so the excess beyond the needs of MDN doesn't go anywhere.

>>notpus+(OP)
It's not a co-operative, just a non-profit. The devs are employees of the corporation just like for any other company. Honestly, I think the company makes good revenue and don't rely too much on donations. Using their products and being their customer is probably more valuable to them and their manifesto.

>>notpus+O3
A lot of charities allow restrictions for donations but often those aren't transparent to the donor.