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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.

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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.

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

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