Unless I'm mistaken, Wikipedia doesn't ringfence their donations either, so by donating to the Wikimedia foundation [0] you're not just paying for wikipedia either.

[0] https://donate.wikimedia.org/w/index.php

If you donate to Mozilla, you don't pay for Firefox at all.

Conversely, AFAIK, Wikimedia doesn't accept money for merchandising their users. At least not in any official, straightforward way.

While I philosophically agree with you, I can’t help but think:

- Developing Firefox looks way more expensive than running Wikipedia servers. - It looks like there’s at least 10x less Firefox users than Wikipedia users.

It might still be possible (Firefox users might me more willing to pay and to pay more than Wikipedia users). It still looks really hard.

I wish they didn’t try to match the startup/VC/pivot/diversify frenzy but, in the end, I’m really happy that they exist.

From what I understand doing donations and stipulating that it’s for a specific purpose can hurt a nonprofit more than help, because then vital logistics get underfunded and fuck up the competency of the organization. (Eg. Everyone wants to fund nonprofits cancer research or whatever, but what if they actually desperately need to fund remote work infrastructure because a global pandemic has forced them all to work remotely on short notice?)

Of course if you don’t like what an organization broadly does with the money given to it, don’t give it money. Maybe issue some feedback that you think the organization should do x or y, and the fact it’s doing p and q makes you hesitant to donate.

I bet some mozilla devs have their own Github Sponsors or Patreon.