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Comment by leejoramo | Hacker News Reader

In the United States, a non-profit does not earn money for owners or investors. NP's do make money via donations and services provided. While many NP's make very little money or mostly distribute donated funds, other NP's can make large amounts of money. Money retained in excess of expenses, must be used to further a NP's mission.

A NP Hospital uses its excess funds to provide free services to those who cannot afford healthcare and does community outreach and eduction.

Mozilla uses its money to supports other OSS projects, advocates for OSS.

(This is a very simple explanation with many details of how NP's operate ignored, or the various legal types of NP's.)

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Can a co-op be a non-profit? Because the owners would be the paid workers, not outside investors.

But the profits in a co-op still go to the owners, hence it's not a NP. I'm sure a NP could be structured like a co-op though, where workers get input into decision making.

I'm on the board for a co-op (housing co-op, not worker co-op) that's incorporated as a non-profit. I know we've talked about how we could have incorporated as a cooperative instead, and I think we could have been a cooperative non-profit....we just weren't.

Co-op is about ownership (and the seven principles, but legally I think chiefly about ownership), whereas I don't think non-profit status is, for the most part.

So is this just Mozilla being forced to make donations?

More like their raison d'etre.

They could have hired more developers, returned the money to doners, increase the salary of their employees and what not. The only thing they can not do is give the money as dividend to the owners the way for-profit companies do all the time.

I am sure if they had chosen the second option the heirs of Hacı İskender would be very happy.

Not really. They always have the option to save the money or invest it in their own products and services just like any other business.

Well they chose this structure. They could be a for-profit (and pay more taxes) if they want to keep the money.

Mitchell Baker has spoken many times publicly about why she chose the NPO structure for Mozilla. It was due to the Browser Wars of the 90s (when she was counsel at Netscape) and not wanting to go through that again.

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