Please keep in mind that this is not a personal attack as I don't know you and I don't find it particularly constructive to engage in this kind of attacks, so please only focus on my argument:
I cannot understand this way of thinking.
On one hand we have the option to give Mozilla some money to use them however they see fit.
This means that from the sum of the donations they can use whatever percentage they see fit to fund different products/aspects, e.g. the engineering department so that they can keep working on Firefox, the marketing department to increase the awareness and drive adoption, the user researchers to better understand their user needs etc.
On the other hand we have the "default" stance where we don't support what Mozilla is doing.
This means that the development of Firefox, the marketing to raise awareness etc, are depended on Google and on Pocket which is something that we want to get away from.
I think it mostly boils down to some simple questions and how we feel about the answers:
- Do I prefer to know that all my money go to hire more engineers and improve Firefox? Probably (tbh personally I would focus a bit more on user research, it's the everyday people that they should be after, not us)
- Do I prefer to allow Mozilla to be depended on Google? Definitely not.
- Can my donations be used to make the current situation worse (i.e. tie them tighter on Google's business)? No.
So for me, although I don't control where my money goes, I think that they can only be used to improve things.
If you ask me, it’s because most of us work very hard for our money and don’t have a lot to spare.
If we are going to make the sacrifice of donating, we want to make sure the sacrifice is worth it.
If my hard earned money is going to be used for something like the moz://@ nonsense, it’s not worth the sacrifice.
If it’s going to be used to support development of privacy features in the browser, then it is.
I want Mozilla to build a browser and a mail program. Nothing else. It's easy as that.
And if I have to "fear" that they will use my money to build something else, I will not donate to them.
Think of them as a company with several products. People would buy Firefox, they would buy Thunderbird, but probably nobody would buy the aforementioned "moz://" product or Pocket.
In a traditional company this would lead to a production stop of the later two and to a better focus on the first two products.
With Mozilla, and other donation-based "companies" it will not work that way. There will be other stuff that gets allocated lots of money, because "the money is there" and needs to be used.
Then buy Mozilla, the company, or buy FF/mail server devs to do it. By donating to mozilla you are actually supporting at least one effort Mozilla is participating in. If their revenue goes down after pursuing Pocket, then Mozilla will understand in general their donors don’t approve of pocket. On another coin, by not donating to Mozilla one also is fine with not funding FF/Mail because money just might go to things one doesn’t approve of.
So lets say you donated specifically for development of module X. What if a server died and it was in desperate need of repair? What if they need to hire Y person that had good talent for module X? People could construe the funding for interviews for that talent as not being specifically for development.
In short, a lot of people don't understand the bureaucracy of the company enough to make targeted donations for specific use. And it often hampers the organization when you do it.
I guess it's a case if you want Mozilla as an organization to exist as a whole since much of its parts are probably needed to get the product out the door, or caring about one specific piece of code which, in that case, you might as well just fork it and work on it yourself.
Not made up example: nobody wants their donation to go to marketing. It’s not very sexy. But (to a point) money spent on marketing has a non-zero return. Basically every charity pays for their marketing out of their general fund and it’s always strained because it feels like pure overhead but it actually fuels their growth.
Talk to anyone who works in development and they’ll tell you that unrestricted donations have the largest impact.
For Mozilla their diversity campaigns are the same way. They’re banking on bootstrapping a large undervalued talent pool as a long-term growth strategy and social good.
> For Mozilla their diversity campaigns are the same way. They’re banking on bootstrapping a large undervalued talent pool as a long-term growth strategy and social good.
I would prefer not to see tech companies trying to fix our society. We have seen numerous examples where this went really wrong and maybe we should stop that right now.
This is laughable. Nearly every single technological advancement affected society in some manner. Just because you have some narrow view of examples where they did something wrong, doesn't mean you should be militant in your view and try an weasel funding out of an organization that does 95% good. Much better than any private corporation in my opinion.
And restricted funding is based on donor request. You can't say restricted funds are used for X unless donor said for X.
Exactly! Donor in question does not want his or her money to be spent on Mozilla fixing diversity. There's nothing that prevents Mozilla from courting Zuck or Musk or Gates or whoever else that according to their positions think diversity is more important than the ad blocking.
Here's a way to avoid having to deal with restrictions on the funds raised from people: become a regular company that sells a product.
Yeah, have Mozilla become a private company, beholden to shareholders and profit. Look how that turned out for companies that supposedly coined the "Don't be evil" motto.
Plus, there's nothing that prevents others from donating their money without restrictions for the "good of Mozilla"
What I mean is that those limitations are made up. You just have to clearly state what you want to do with the money and that will fix those problems. Obviously restricted funds are nothing that is set up in 5 minutes, but I would expect that somebody really thinks about that.
And if you state that up to 10% of the restricted funds might also be used for any other projects of Mozilla, that might be okay.
Something like "your fund will be used for maintaining the infrastructure necessary to provide downloads of the latest binaries" would also be totally fine for me in terms of "buy a new server for this whenever you need it", be it a flooding or just the old server dying. But that obviously does not cover putting money into whatever shiny project is prioritized right now and might die in a year or less.
Otherwise you'll have a cash cow project that finances everything else. While that might be nice for one side, the other side would love to know that their funds are used to improve the already good product.
Otherwise you'll have a cash cow project that finances everything else. While that might be nice for one side, the other side would love to know that their funds are used to improve the already good product.
It's a holistic endeavor. Improving the product includes getting it in the hands of a lot of people, making decisions during conflicting ideas, writing better code, etc.
Restricted funding only hampers this on the perceived notion that the organization is stupid and will waste it all. There's no indication Mozilla will do this.
People who do not think like you should be taught to donate to restricted funds.
Why make people who would like to support development of the privacy first browser support decision of Mozilla to lease class A office space in a slew of expensive cities?
Stupid argumentation. If you don't like the new Apple MBP keyboards, you don't buy Apple itself, but just another notebook from another vendor. Same thing applies here, just that I don't need to "not buy" something but can just decide not to donate.
> On another coin, by not donating to Mozilla one also is fine with not funding FF/Mail because money just might go to things one doesn’t approve of.
No need to make me feel guilty. Simply decouple those projects cleanly from each other and everything is fine. If I could donate for a specific purpose, that would be okay, too. But just like Wikimedia, it's not about keeping the servers running but cross-financing other "projects" (broad term for really anything here) that I do not want to support.
There's no guilt here. It's strictly true. Not donating to Mozilla because they might use the funds in a way the donator doesn't like is also saying the risk of the funds being used for other initiatives is not worth participating in the funding of things they do like.
Donations with conditions lessen the good that the nonprofit could do with them, because then they cannot use those funds to keep the nonprofit alive, much less use those funds to fund the things they do.
You donate towards their mission and you are probably not informed enough about the back-stage politics of their foundation.
I like Pocket because it provides features I don’t find in other browsers. I would happily pay for it especially knowing that this is the money that may also be used for the development of the browser engine.
It’s like donating to Wikipedia, but only donating toward articles about Biology. The issue is that you are donating towards infrastructure, not the actual articles written by someone.
> Mozilla is not a democracy.
Obviously not, no. But as a user and a society we can still democratically decide how to handle companies and how they do business. And we can express our opinions just like I did and some people seem to have the same opinion, that's nice.
> You donate towards their mission and you are probably not informed enough about the back-stage politics of their foundation.
What is this? Some kind of "Our savior knows better than you, so keep your mouth shut, sheep!" didactics? From what little I can see from the front, I really don't want to get to know their back-stage politics.
And why back-stage politics after all? What's wrong about a clear "let's build the best, privacy-focused browser and best mail program" as a company mission? Actually that would be a great mission in this day and age. No need for back-stage politics and a more complicated mission.
> It’s like donating to Wikipedia [...] The issue is that you are donating towards infrastructure [...]
Especially this is not correct for Wikipedia/Wikimedia. They are doing _lots of_ stuff with that money that has absolutely nothing to do with keeping Wikipedia up and running. See [0] or [1] for lots of examples.
[0] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/12/20/cash_rich_wikipedia... [1] https://www.wikimedia.de/de/themen
So would you think it’s a good idea to allow people to only donate to certain parts of the stuff they do, then?
What other good can I do with my dollars?
That donating to Mozilla wont make it worse is such a low bar when there are kids that need malaria nets or deworming or whatnot.
If you think about the opportunity cost of donating to an organisation thats doing some things you think are really important as well as some things that you think are only kinda sorta important, when there are organisations that focus 100% on things you think are really important, then that should clear things up for you.
Many consider it an important work, including myself.
It's short, with several free versions linked to from the Wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Disobedience_(Thoreau).