Here’s a take by a Mozilla employee :

Mozilla has been ad funded since 2005
Browser development is not sustainable by just donations
Transparency is most important

https://fosstodon.org/@gabrielesvelto/112779506156690032

Mozilla has been ad funded since 2005

It was funded through a deal with an ad company. It did not become an ad company itself until much more recently. jwz had a succinct and memorable response to the the absurd idea that really it’s been ad-funded all along and that this makes things okay:

You are just another of those so-predictable people saying, “The animal shelter has always had a kitten-meat deli, why are you surprised?”

Yes, Mozilla started making absolutely horrific funding and management decisions many years ago. Today, they have taken this subtext and turned it into the actual text.

That’s certainly a quote that will stick with me.

Browser development might not be sustainable with user donations, but it sure as hell is sustainable when you get 400 million bucks by Google every year.

« Ad funded » ? Don’t they mean « Google funded » ?

Firefox has never tried to run on donations though.

You’re actually wrong. They did when they started.

I know because I donated

The funny thing is that the people who complain most about stuff like this, tend to be the people who contribute the least.

If you don’t like them making money to support development, you’re more than welcome to work full time on developing it for free

You’re not supporting development, you’re supporting a rich guy getting richer:

Interesting to note that the Mozilla CEO earned nearly as much ($5.6 M) as Mozilla received in donations ($7 M).

https://lunduke.locals.com/post/4387539/firefox-money-investigating-the-bizarre-finances-of-mozilla

I could be mistaken, but I’m pretty sure all donations go to The Mozilla Foundation. I believe the foundation is the decision-making power for the corporation.

Either way, yes, Mozilla sold their soul to Google (specifically, giving preference to Google Search) in exchange for sustainability (read: survival). Rather difficult to compete in a market where Google and Apple collectively hold upwards of 85% market share for something they provide “free.”

https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share

Rich guy?

Presumably that is about Mitchell Baker… A woman… who was there since the beginning when the company was failing…

The new CEO is also a woman and a temp CEO, who I’m guessing will again be replaced by an existing employee. Which guy are you referring to?

What browser projects are you assisting with or donating to?

Are you assisting with any open source projects at all?

The biggest problem with the oss community is that as a developer, you need to accept always that you’ll get treated like absolute dirt by the community.

One of my projects went FrontPage on many major Linux sites, and I ended up dropping it because I got tired of the abuse.

You’ll get plenty of people contributing nothing to your project or competing ones, but they’ll tell you the 50 different ways you suck

I donated back when Firefox was in beta. They were a dying company back then.

Are you saying open source developers shouldn’t be rewarded at all?

Donations are a tiny fraction of Mozilla’s income. Firefox and related projects are their money earners for their actually charitable projects, pulling in at least half a billion or so a year.

Not saying that the CEO pay is adequate or something, but your take is literally ignoring the article you yourself quoted.

Non-profits of the scale that Mozilla is need good talent to continue to exist. Good talent needs to be paid close to market rates to work for non-profits, and retaining good talent requires even better pay and benefits than just what will get good talent in the door

No matter how much or how little the talent at a nonprofit is paid people will go “why are they paying the CEO a $1 million dollar salary? They could hire 6-8 developers for that much!” “Why are they paying developers 100k/year? Can’t they accept 80k for the privilege of working for such an important bastion of the open internet?”

15 million a year is a lot but it’s also 1/3 the median CEO pay rate. They have to pay the CEO at least semi-competitively to retain them

The funny thing is that the people who complain most about stuff like this, tend to be the people who contribute the least.

Why would I donate to them if they are going to advertise at me either way?

Ah interesting. I didn’t know. I started using Firefox as a kid around version 2.

I totally want Firefox to make money, but I wonder if donations couldn’t be a significant part of that pie today. It seems a lot more people would prefer to donate to Firefox than Mozilla.

Yeah. Maybe I’m just old (I’m 40).

I would be happy to donate. But, the reality is… donations don’t work in my experience. One of my projects went FrontPage on all the major tech sites (and even was mentioned in Linux format magazine).

I got $300 in donations.

$250 was from a person I knew…

Backend projects often get screwed more, and I guess you probably need to hope you get supported by companies like Redhat ultimately. This may be why in my case. But backend projects always have people dissing them (frontend projects just need to look good and markety)

I think what’s more important is that it’s open source to be honest. We’re actually lucky we still have Mozilla honestly.

In Mozilla browser days (after Netscape), id imagine it would have been a struggle to get a good pay. The people still there I suspect took a massive risk, and could have moved to lots of other companies like Google instead quite easily

I think they deserve to get rewarded…

I feel like Mozilla could have been what NextCloud is today. Totally free, open source, and offering a vast offering of office apps, with paid hosted versions. It could be all neatly integrated into Firefox, and you would pay a premium to use them without self hosting. The only thing they did was create Firefox VPN, and the only reason most people use VPNs is because of scammy marketing.

Yes… Similarly, there are lots of browsers that failed too… KHTML for instance is what Chrome and safari was based off…

They have a huge number of projects they tried… Including their own mobile phone OS which they were actively shipping (it’s a pity it didn’t survive, would have been nice to have a 3rd OS)

It’s really a risk / time payoff here. The reality is, when you see projects like this, there are 20 more which fail.

When you have limited resources, things like Firefox VPN actually make sense, because its low risk (there’s a lot of competitors, but its fast to implement).

An office suite takes a huge amount of resources, and is a lot of work.

VPN’s do have their uses. But, I agree… 99% of it is scum marketing

Totally free, open source, and offering a vast offering of office apps, with paid hosted versions.

When Mozilla was founded the idea of hosted webapps didn’t exist. Quite the frankly web standards didn’t yet exist to allow such a thing to exist. Those were the days when you’d use Flash, Shockwave or Silverlight just to view media content on the web.

But I do agree, they could be investing right now into feature rich hosted services, but they’ve only half-assed any paid services they’ve tried to integrate and then dropped them because they couldn’t get enough users to make it worth continuing the effort (mostly due to the half-assed effort they put in to start with)

Yeah. I want to donate directly towards the development of FF, but I can’t. I know several other people who of a similar disposition.

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