The Foundation also gets paid by the Corporation for the right to use the Firefox brand.

You can't donate to the Corporation to fund Firefox development, and even if you could, any 'excess' profits the Corporation made would get siphoned out to the Foundation anyway.

Cool story but Mozilla Corporation is a wholly owned subsidiary of Mozilla Foundation. Mitchell Baker is Chair of both. For-profit Mozilla Corporation exists to wash revenue that can't go directly to the non-profit Foundation. c.f. Hollywood accounting.

The distinction matters, it's not just a 'cool story'. Money donated to the Mozilla Foundation legally cannot go to the Mozilla Corporation, and therefore cannot fund Firefox development.

Is that really true? I thought the foundation bought things from the corporation, like the right to use the Mozilla brand, and did so using donation dollars.

It's the other way around; Mozilla Foundation owns the trademark and Mozilla Corporation pays the Foundation to use it. From their 2020 financial statement (https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2020/mozilla-fdn-202...):

> The Corporation and MZLA pay license fees per trademark license agreements with the Foundation. In January 2020, the trademark license agreement was amended between the Corporation and the Foundation, whereby, the Corporation will pay the Foundation a royalty payment based on the Corporation’s annual revenue. The amount of royalties owed are calculated using a tiered rate structure, but at no time will the royalty payment go below the lesser of $11.0 million or six (6)% of search revenue. The Corporation incurred $16.3 million and $15.9 million in license fees to the Foundation in 2020 and 2019, respectively.

> The trademark license agreement between MZLA and the Foundation stipulates that MZLA will pay the Foundation a royalty payment based upon the revenue generated from certain products. MZLA paid $63,787 and $0 in license fees to the Foundation in 2020 and 2019, respectively.