Ok, that makes sense. Not ideal, but captchas need to be written somehow.

I would too, but clearly most people wouldn't, otherwise advertisement wouldn't be such a popular way to monetize apps and websites (and Google wouldn't be the behemoth that it is today). Actually I would also gladly pay for a decent search engine but even DuckDuckGo decided to monetize using ads, which IMO means that sooner or later if they're successful enough they'll become just as bad as the rest.

Besides paying for a product doesn't mean that it becomes privacy-friendly, look at how Spotify still tracks your every actions even when you're a paying customer for instance.

They have a monthly subscription for donations[0]. You can't expect them to switch over until they meet a certain threshold.

[0] https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/?utm_source=foundation.mozi...

Well if HN users do want to try to lessen that percentage here's the donation page: https://donate.mozilla.org/

> Firefox has ~250M users as of about 9 months ago and $562M revenue for 2017

I think nearly everyone would be willing to pay the ~$2/year to use Firefox if all browsers weren't free.

At that price, the main reason not to pay is the hassle rather than just downloading.

Thanks for the context about the revenue of Firefox. I had never given it any though.

250M users, you would not have a problem with $2 a month. Don't expect the rest of these users to follow. Donations are voluntary, people are unaware, but most importantly: that $2 of yours is of different value elsewhere in the world. All the people who live in poverty (according to my standards) should not feel obligated to pay American price for software. Which is a small quibble I have with proprietary software.

How would that be different from what you can already configure Firefox to do by enabling resist fingerprinting options, turning off Pocket's sponsored articles, turning off telemetry, etc.? It seems like you'd be paying $2/month for keeping a set of preferences up to date.

A subscription model of some sort would probably make sense, but I don't think you'd want to gate those kinds of features on it.

Isn't that brave?

> all your decisions are centred around the happiness of the person you once hated

You’re essentially talking about the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect. (The government sets a bounty on snakes? Bounty hunters realize that the cheapest way to get snakes to turn in to the government, is by breeding them themselves. Now you’ve got more live snakes, not fewer.) When greed or need-for-money is an incentive (such as in a for-profit corporation), you’ll be driven to do whatever perpetuates the income stream; and, if someone is paying you to do something, it’s cheaper to just do that thing because you get to continue working with them in the future (so your marketing costs for finding new work are zero.)

But, importantly, the Cobra effect doesn’t apply if your goal (as a person, or as an organization) isn’t to make money, but rather to use up money (i.e. to bankrupt your ‘patron.’) If you’re not a bounty hunter, but simply someone who hates snakes, you won’t ever bother to breed them. You’re not in it for the money. You’re in it for there being fewer cobras.

There are, of course, organizations which are not for-profit corporations. Mozilla itself is a non-profit, despite there also existing a Mozilla Corporation.

As well, even with a for-profit corporation, the income of such an organization can be completely divorced from how it deals with an arbitrary stream of money. Banks, for example, despite being for-profit corporations, do not spend the money you deposit with them. Your money is not an asset on their balance sheet; in fact, it’s a liability.

Mozilla Corporation could, for example, just donate all the money it receives from unsavoury sources over to Mozilla-the-nonprofit, and keep none for itself. This would remove its profit motive vis. this income source.

Analogies:

Police confiscate stuff from criminals, and then sell that stuff at auction. They aren’t driven to confiscate as much stuff as possible, because they don’t directly see the proceeds from those auctions (it goes into the city budget, which does eventually fund them back, but in some inscrutable, non-motivating way.) Instead, the police department usually just has a mandate to take the stuff and sell it. (There is a broken incentive around police confiscation of drugs and cash, because these are so hard to trace that police can and do directly profit from these confiscations. But money wired between corporations as a result of an invoice is not untraceable like cash, so the confiscation of cash isn’t really analogous. A closer analogy is the confiscation of pimped-out cars—the police do not, and cannot, make personal use of these. So they don’t really care how many they find.)

Oil-and-gas engineers aren’t driven to flare as much natural gas out of oil fields as possible, because there’s no useful purpose to flaring natural gas (for now); they’re just trying to use it up and get it out of the way of the stuff they do want.

Building renovation contractors aren’t driven to collect as much asbestos as possible. They only collect and remove it because they can’t certify the building until it’s all gone. (Imagine an alternative world where you could turn in asbestos to the government for a reward. We’d get a Cobra effect so fast.)

In all these cases, you’re not driven by your need to collect the thing; and there’s no element of greed driving you to collect the thing; it’s just part of your job to collect the thing. As you diminish the number of illegal weapons out there, or amount of natural gas in the oil field, or the amount of asbestos left in buildings... you can simply do less sequestering. Nobody is put out when criminals run out of guns, not even the police. The oil-and-gas engineers who did the burn-offs are done their work at that oil field, sure, but they just move on to another oil field. The renovators have plenty of other jobs to do, and the people who specifically handle asbestos removal will just retrain to remove the next thing people want gone from buildings, toxic mould or what-have-you.

——

What we’re essentially talking about, here, is a ‘parasitic’ nonprofit—the organizational equivalent of a mosquito, something that wanders around sucking its ‘hosts’ dry, but which doesn’t expect (or attempt) to subsist indefinitely on a single ‘host’. It expects to either kill its host; be killed by its host; or be “swatted away” by its host, at which point it can find a new host.

And, because a parasitic organization serves no useful purpose to its host—it offers no attempt at symbiosis—the host will eventually become aware of its nature, though how fast this happens can vary dramatically, depending on how bureaucratic the host is, and the time-scale of the deal the host and parasite originally made. (Imagine how long it would take the US government to figure out that a weapons subcontractor is a foreign-government led operation with the aim of “siphoning money out of the US defense budget while avoiding actually satisfying the demand for a given weapon”, purely through the regular business-side interactions between the government and the contractor, without the assistance of the government’s background-checking process. Unlike governments, private companies do not generally do background checks on their contractors’ employees, so an IBM, or a GE, is not safe from this attack.)

Of course, unlike in the animal realm where every animal at some point deals with a parasite from a state of complete ignorance, parasitic organizations can get reputations that precede them everywhere. This is what I’d call the host “killing” the parasite nonprofit.

But, well, the same people can form as many organizations as they want... and perhaps even use successive organizational vehicles to drain the same host companies repeatedly, if they just ensure to put a different face (different figurehead CEOs, etc.) on the parasite each time.

These are the same proven strategies that “fake” charities use every day to line their own pockets! Just turned to a purpose other than selfishness.

And that's why everyone who works for Google or Facebook should quit, too, but in the real world there are an insane amount of jobs that ultimately do really bad things, and we need work. So find somewhere that your particular skillset makes a net positive contribution instead of going homeless because almost every single big company is responsible for suffering in the world. The defense contract I worked for also has a strong civil presence and makes things like turn stiles, card readers, and emergency alert systems, and those directly benefit people rather than help murder folks. The idea that "my work directly benefits the part of the company that murders people", given how budgets actually work in large companies, is arguably far more delusional here.

This is how OpenBSD lost their DARPA funding. [1]

[1] https://lwn.net/Articles/29937/

Given that they were a 60k employee company: yeah, some parts of them probably were.

Also true.