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Comment by lakechfoma | Hacker News Reader

Anger abound regarding advertising etc but question: what's the alternative for Mozilla to be a viable company without depending on money from advertising either in the form of Pocket and new tab or via search engines paying for default?

We can all pay a subscription to use Firefox instead. But of course Firefox is open source so...

I mean I'd love for something like Facebook to cost $10 a year, I think that could work. But I don't see any other business model for Mozilla besides charitable donations.

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By law, Mozilla can't use charitable donations to fund browser development. The rules around what charities can spend their donations on is pretty specific. Mozilla's charity funds are used for web-related education and outreach. Of course, Mozilla could use non-charitable (i.e. not tax-deductible) donations to fund browser dev.

Ah I guess I meant non-charitable then! I'm pretty clueless on how the money aspect in a non-profit works.

By law in which jurisdiction?

In what jurisdiction can't you use donations to pay for programming effort?

The U.S. but not just the U.S. It's not programming per se; if the United Way wants some DB code done, that could be charitable since the effort isn't to build infrastructure but is part of, say, helping kids in hospital.

I hope this rule/ruling goes away for BSD type open source, but it's real.

You can use donations of course, but they won’t qualify as charitable for tax purposes.

I'd be very happy to pay $20 a year to use Firefox, however I don't think enough people would do this for them to ha e enough revenue.

Someone tries to make this plea in every thread, but it's bunk and shows an ignorance of history, an ignorance of the concrete figures actually at play, and it helps perpetuate the image of a frail non-profit that Mozilla really rides hard, piggybacking on the circumstances and accumulated goodwill from an era that no longer matches reality today.

Mozilla in 2018 brings in 10 times as much revenue as it did in 2008, but is 1/10th as effective and doing 1/10th as much good work.

0307ea7a0f89f4c893e89e6a4992b82b1a812c22e9510410f9e4279a52368d04

What's "0307ea7a0f89f4c893e89e6a4992b82b1a812c22e9510410f9e4279a52368d04"..? A checksum of your comment?

It's a commitment hash. He wants to be noted as saying something without saying it right now. When he does say it, you can verify that he had the comment ready now by checking the hash. Its for predictions you only want to reveal after they happen.

No way, that is so cool..!

Thanks for explaining.

No problem!

And again, your comment is just anger and not an actual answer of what alternatives there are. What is your point? Do you care to actually answer my curiosity on what business models besides advertising are available to fund the continuing development of Firefox?

> your comment is just anger

As the author of the comment, I don't think so. (And I think my interpretation has more weight.)

> What is your point? Do you care to actually answer my curiosity on what business models besides advertising are available to fund the continuing development of Firefox?

I made it very clear in my original comment. A sustainable model existed 10 years ago—when Firefox was consequently an effective instrument for actually advancing the mission, and the way the project was managed was an example of the right way to run a project. And that model still exists. Since then, though, Mozilla has thrown the mission and principles half out the window while simultaneously asserting a defense that they need to make money.

Hearing this plea after what Mozilla has done is like going to a burger joint you really like and being told that they had to raise prices because all burgers now come with a special ingredient, and the special ingredient is spit.

Your point is not at all obvious, you're just saying "they used to be better, now they're spitting in my food gahh"

When you read my comments, are you ignoring every fourth sentence or something?

Mozilla is not in a downward spiral due to money. We are not in a situation where Mozilla leadership must decide to jump and hope to survive, or don't jump and be burned alive. Mozilla is in a better financial position than it was 10 years ago; its year-over-year expenses vs support is stable, while in absolute terms they're bringing in much more and have half a billion USD in assets.

>1/10th as effective and doing 1/10th as much good work. [citation needed]

Let's suppose there is no published source to corroborate the statement I wrote. Is the statement ipso facto untrue?

Alternatively, let's say there's a source, but I don't provide it. Does that effect whether my statement is true or not true?

Thirdly, now let's suppose there's a source available, they've measured it, found a result that agrees with what I wrote, and I offer it up. Now what happens? Does that change anything for you? Do you say, "Oh, when I wrote [citation needed] before, what I really meant is that I disagreed with you and was trying to express that through a sideways remark. I've considered the information in the source you provided, though, and have now adjusted my mental model accordingly."

I just want your answers before I invest any significant effort into trawling through data and putting work into a response. Otherwise, it would just be a massive waste of time on my part, right?

For future reference, you could save everyone some time and just say that you made up the numbers.

Without evidence there is no way to evaluate the credibility of the claim.

The general tone of your two comments is that I've been disingenuous, when the real disservice to the conversation is the zero-effort, thread-derailing snark.

Here's a more verbose way to say exactly the same point I was making, but possibly (hopefully) less susceptible to zero-effort dismissals from the kinds of people who like scoring easy points by taking potshots against auxiliary details instead of taking the main thrust of the argument into consideration:

"Mozilla in 2018 brings in 10 times as much revenue as it did in 2008. Is it 10 times as effective and doing 10 times as much good work? The same as before? Or is it closer to 1/10 for both?"

I'm sorry if asking for evidence to back up claims is thread-derailing snark.

1. You're sorry? No you're not. Now that is disingenuous.

2. When responding to a comment about your inability to engage rather than writing out snarky one-liners, choosing to rebut it by replying in the form of a snarky one-liner doesn't do anything to help your case.

3. Respond to the content of my message or fuck off.

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