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> I cannot understand this way of thinking.

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 think you left out an absolutely huge question that dwarfs all of those in importance.

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.

> I cannot understand this way of thinking.

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.

> I want Mozilla to build a browser and a mail program. Nothing else. It's easy as that.

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.

Donate restricted fund and restricted funds only.

Problem with restricted fund is that the organization is forced to put it in a place where it may not be needed and they cannot use it elsewhere, even in the case of emergency.

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.

Those are made up reasons. If you have a solid definition of what is needed and what not, this is no problem at all.

Except for every large non-profit charity that employs entire teams to navigating restricted funds.

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.

See my reply from above. Just state that up to X% of the restricted funds are used for marketing purposes and I'm fine with that.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

Please tell me, how is server dying, need immediate replacement "made up"? How is a flood disaster in organizational building "made up"? Sure, I made them up on a whim, but they're based on real scenarios that restricted funding may not cover.

Not my monkey, not my circus.

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.

Considering Mozilla created a browser designed to do its best to not track people, and private companies don't do this, I can't see your point other than being bad faith.

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.

That was before. Now Mozilla is not even committed to ensuring that ad blockers work. Sort of like long time ago Google was "don't be evil" company that made web better.

Plus, there's nothing that prevents others from donating their money without restrictions for the "good of Mozilla"

Sorry if I was misunderstandable.

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.

According to 501c3 law, the funding must be restricted to whatever the donor suggests or rejected. I mean if you suggest adding every single condition to your donation, you're not really helping the organization at all.

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.

So? There's nothing that prevents people who think like you from donating to the Mozilla general funds.

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?

> Then buy Mozilla, the company, or buy FF/mail server devs to do it.

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.

"No need to make me feel guilty."

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.

FWIW people do buy Pocket.

https://getpocket.com/premium?ep=1

Mozilla is not a democracy.

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.

Quite from the top down your comment, but okay.

> 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

>> 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.

So would you think it’s a good idea to allow people to only donate to certain parts of the stuff they do, then?

Henry Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience" is about not being able to send money to an organization without funding projects he doesn't want to fund, therefore not sending money at all.

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).