But they're happy to pay via google's search and tracking. Mozilla doesn't have a lot of options open to them.
I'd honestly pay $2 per month (12 times "my share") for a Firefox that completely disavows the ad model and produces a truly user-centric experience sans ads, fingerprinting, etc. However, given that over 95% of their revenue comes from Royalties, I don't see that turning around any time soon.
Besides paying for a product doesn't mean that it becomes privacy-friendly, look at how Spotify still tracks your every actions even when you're a paying customer for instance.
After all there was a time where most of us trusted Google and their "Do No Evil" motto. And then eventually in morphed into "Do More Profit" and we have the corporation that we know today.
DDG may change how they do things, but I expect that if they do there will be someone else that shows up to make money by providing a value-added anonymizing wrapper on top of search performed by a larger company - and it may not even be on top of the duopoly as it exists right now (are there actual search providers in the US not wrapping Google or Bing?). This may particularly happen if a new company grows in India or China then its able to start spreading coverage to other parts of the world.
A lot of people here also have huge double standards regarding Mozilla.
I’m not affiliated with them. Just a happy user.
[0] https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/?utm_source=foundation.mozi...
Although the Foundation wholly owns the Corporation (we call them MoFo and MoCo internally), money donated to MoFo does not go towards paying MoCo employee salaries as far as I am aware.
i would even pay a whole $3/month for that! =D
To have a premium product, you need to have a non-premium product, and given that most users would use the non-premium product, firefox would quickly become associated with a browser that has the actually desirable features turned off...
Which would probably be even worse than their low market take up at the moment (and I am typing this on firefox).
The people who would pay for a subscription are surely some of the most valuable for advertising to, and FF in its current form exists because of advertising.
So donation money goes to outreach and similar. Which is useful but doesn't fund Firefox.
Someone please correct me if this is wrong.
Tax-exempt charities (which must by definition be non-profit, but not all non-profits are charities, and not all charities are tax exempt!) must spend money in a way that's aligned with their mission, and there are rules on how much they can spend outside that. (The really big no-no has to do with political lobbying and the endorsement of candidates for public office -- a relic of a more civilized age when apparently we thought that should be left up to individuals. But I digress.)
The Mozilla Foundation is a California corporation with tax-exempt status under US Internal Revenue Code 501(c)(3), which covers "public charities, private foundations or private operating foundations". There are slightly different rules for each category.
I'm not sure what category Mozilla Foundation is; my suspicion is they are either a public charity or a private operating foundation. In either case, there's nothing that would prohibit them from funding software development, as long as it doesn't unfairly benefit someone involved in the organization's governance.
Their 2016 financial statements (I couldn't find anything newer) are available:
https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2016/2016_Mozilla_Au...
tl;dr: In 2016 they spent over $250k on software development as a line-item, out of about $500k in revenue total. It's by far their biggest budget item.
> https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2016/2016_Mozilla_Au....
> tl;dr: In 2016 they spent over $250k on software development as a line-item, out of about $500k in revenue total. It's by far their biggest budget item.
The numbers are actually $250 million and $500 million. All the tables this report (as well as a newer one I have to search the link for) list the figures in thousands.
the donations are still useful though because if there were none mozilla foundation would die, and in turn, mozilla corporation would also die or be sold as its fully owned by the foundation
I think nearly everyone would be willing to pay the ~$2/year to use Firefox if all browsers weren't free.
At that price, the main reason not to pay is the hassle rather than just downloading.
Thanks for the context about the revenue of Firefox. I had never given it any though.
Don't forget $2 in USA buys you different things than in Russia, China, India, or Africa.
A subscription model of some sort would probably make sense, but I don't think you'd want to gate those kinds of features on it.
I believe those backfired since all their marketing has been propped on morality. When they claim ads and tracking are evil, it bit them whenever they ventured anywhere near that stuff. Give many startups here an initial audience of 200M+ engaged users and they'll figure a way!
The real irony imo of FF being considered the alternative browser, but not actually competing against Chrome where it could have a serious edge only entrenches the pro commercial anti user status quo.
If someone you hate offers you a billion dollars, you should take it—because in doing so you’ve made someone you hate a billion dollars poorer! It’s like stealing the money from them, with less work!
Imagine, analogously: a lottery whose proceeds go to a charity supporting statistics education.
If you keep taking their money you're morally complicit in their actions too.
You’re essentially talking about the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect. (The government sets a bounty on snakes? Bounty hunters realize that the cheapest way to get snakes to turn in to the government, is by breeding them themselves. Now you’ve got more live snakes, not fewer.) When greed or need-for-money is an incentive (such as in a for-profit corporation), you’ll be driven to do whatever perpetuates the income stream; and, if someone is paying you to do something, it’s cheaper to just do that thing because you get to continue working with them in the future (so your marketing costs for finding new work are zero.)
But, importantly, the Cobra effect doesn’t apply if your goal (as a person, or as an organization) isn’t to make money, but rather to use up money (i.e. to bankrupt your ‘patron.’) If you’re not a bounty hunter, but simply someone who hates snakes, you won’t ever bother to breed them. You’re not in it for the money. You’re in it for there being fewer cobras.
There are, of course, organizations which are not for-profit corporations. Mozilla itself is a non-profit, despite there also existing a Mozilla Corporation.
As well, even with a for-profit corporation, the income of such an organization can be completely divorced from how it deals with an arbitrary stream of money. Banks, for example, despite being for-profit corporations, do not spend the money you deposit with them. Your money is not an asset on their balance sheet; in fact, it’s a liability.
Mozilla Corporation could, for example, just donate all the money it receives from unsavoury sources over to Mozilla-the-nonprofit, and keep none for itself. This would remove its profit motive vis. this income source.
Analogies:
Police confiscate stuff from criminals, and then sell that stuff at auction. They aren’t driven to confiscate as much stuff as possible, because they don’t directly see the proceeds from those auctions (it goes into the city budget, which does eventually fund them back, but in some inscrutable, non-motivating way.) Instead, the police department usually just has a mandate to take the stuff and sell it. (There is a broken incentive around police confiscation of drugs and cash, because these are so hard to trace that police can and do directly profit from these confiscations. But money wired between corporations as a result of an invoice is not untraceable like cash, so the confiscation of cash isn’t really analogous. A closer analogy is the confiscation of pimped-out cars—the police do not, and cannot, make personal use of these. So they don’t really care how many they find.)
Oil-and-gas engineers aren’t driven to flare as much natural gas out of oil fields as possible, because there’s no useful purpose to flaring natural gas (for now); they’re just trying to use it up and get it out of the way of the stuff they do want.
Building renovation contractors aren’t driven to collect as much asbestos as possible. They only collect and remove it because they can’t certify the building until it’s all gone. (Imagine an alternative world where you could turn in asbestos to the government for a reward. We’d get a Cobra effect so fast.)
In all these cases, you’re not driven by your need to collect the thing; and there’s no element of greed driving you to collect the thing; it’s just part of your job to collect the thing. As you diminish the number of illegal weapons out there, or amount of natural gas in the oil field, or the amount of asbestos left in buildings... you can simply do less sequestering. Nobody is put out when criminals run out of guns, not even the police. The oil-and-gas engineers who did the burn-offs are done their work at that oil field, sure, but they just move on to another oil field. The renovators have plenty of other jobs to do, and the people who specifically handle asbestos removal will just retrain to remove the next thing people want gone from buildings, toxic mould or what-have-you.
——
What we’re essentially talking about, here, is a ‘parasitic’ nonprofit—the organizational equivalent of a mosquito, something that wanders around sucking its ‘hosts’ dry, but which doesn’t expect (or attempt) to subsist indefinitely on a single ‘host’. It expects to either kill its host; be killed by its host; or be “swatted away” by its host, at which point it can find a new host.
And, because a parasitic organization serves no useful purpose to its host—it offers no attempt at symbiosis—the host will eventually become aware of its nature, though how fast this happens can vary dramatically, depending on how bureaucratic the host is, and the time-scale of the deal the host and parasite originally made. (Imagine how long it would take the US government to figure out that a weapons subcontractor is a foreign-government led operation with the aim of “siphoning money out of the US defense budget while avoiding actually satisfying the demand for a given weapon”, purely through the regular business-side interactions between the government and the contractor, without the assistance of the government’s background-checking process. Unlike governments, private companies do not generally do background checks on their contractors’ employees, so an IBM, or a GE, is not safe from this attack.)
Of course, unlike in the animal realm where every animal at some point deals with a parasite from a state of complete ignorance, parasitic organizations can get reputations that precede them everywhere. This is what I’d call the host “killing” the parasite nonprofit.
But, well, the same people can form as many organizations as they want... and perhaps even use successive organizational vehicles to drain the same host companies repeatedly, if they just ensure to put a different face (different figurehead CEOs, etc.) on the parasite each time.
These are the same proven strategies that “fake” charities use every day to line their own pockets! Just turned to a purpose other than selfishness.
You might consider the positive aspects of your use of the money out with the negative aspects of your aiding murder, say, but that's not quite what you outlined.
I've also been giving through Flattr as an alternative to ads for micro-funding on the Web - anyone knows why their plugin/extension/addon isn't listed on addons.mozilla.org anymore ? (You can still install it from their official website.) Might it be due to a conflict of interest between Google and Eyeo ?