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Comment by kevlarr | Hacker News Reader

Donations go to Mozilla "the non-profit organization" rather than Mozilla "the corporation".

Mozilla (the corporation) has the typical/bad corporate structures and ridiculous executive compensations. Mozilla (the corporation) had the layoffs. Mozilla (the corporation) bought Pocket with money that comes from deals with search engines.

That being said, though...

> Donate to smaller developers of software you use, it'll go a lot further, and they'll probably put it to better use!

... is still a great point.

(Updated this because "Mozilla, Org" and "Mozilla, Inc" were inaccurate)

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I think the Mozilla Foundation is starting to look a lot like a sinecure employer for friends of friends in the non-profit biz.

Here are a few seemingly similar titles listed on their leadership page[0]:

  VP, Advocacy
  Director, Digital Engagement
  Director, Communications

  VP, Global Programs
  Director, Partnerships

  Director, Events and Training
  Interim Director, Leadership Programs

[0]https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/about/leadership/

The Mozilla Foundation controls and owns the Mozilla Corporation, and the executive structure looks more or less the same. Baker's compensation has been inversely tied with performance, and she runs both.

> Baker's compensation has been inversely tied with performance

You've mentioned this twice in the thread now. "Inversely tied" is quite a strong and unusual claim for compensation. Care to prove it?

https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1217517703914643456

Their salary has gone up, and firefox market share has gone down, its neither is a controversial statement

Happily!

2.5 million, 2018:

https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2018/mozilla-2018-fo...

2.3 million, 2017:

https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2017/mozilla-2017-fo...

1 million, 2016:

https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2016/2016_Mozilla_Fo...

<1 million, 2015:

https://static.mozilla.com/moco/en-US/pdf/2015_Mozilla_Found...

Firefox market share has been in decline (30% to <5%) for over a decade now:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/61/StatCoun...

That's not "tied", which would imply a contractual relationship...

That's malarkey. Tied is not exclusively used to imply a "contractual relationship," and that's (if anything) a minority-usage of the idiom of tied to/with.

I think you probably should have used 'associated with' instead of 'tied to' as when discussing remuneration contractual ties is not a minority usage of the idiom.

I'm not Kick, but while you're correct that "associated with" would've been better for clarity, no reasonable person would assume that "inversely tied" describes a contractually mandated drop in performance for an increase in pay (my other comment here links to dictionary.com and thesaurus.com, both good references for this discussion). Couple that with the generally accepted usage of 'tied' and the usage by Kick was correct, if perhaps ambiguous to a narrow population.

Kick's usage is correct except within the business world and especially financial and executive populations, which, while admittedly narrow, are what we were discussing. When you say that an executive's pay is tied to the company's performance, within these communities it's generally understood that this is a contractual relationship.

ex. "John's salary is tied to performance - if the company is valued at over 100 billion, he'll get another 5% stock" etc.

or "bonuses are tied to performance milestones"

If you are simply observing that an executives pay rises while performance falls, associated is a clearer term.

inverse correlation between executive pay and browser market share, if semantics are necessary.

'Tied' in relational contexts is generally used to describe a correlation, relation, connection, or a consistency between events in the English language. It can—but does not have to—describe a contractual relationship, and it does not generally describe one except in very specific and obvious cases, e.g. what one would expect to be true: "bonuses are tied to performance milestones."

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/tied?s=ts

https://www.thesaurus.com/browse/correlated?s=t

But in this context:

> Baker's compensation has been inversely tied with performance

No reasonable person would assume that a person's comp structure from Company would be contractually bound to increase as Company's performance decreases. At which point, the interpretation of "tied" would swing towards generally accepted usage, i.e. "there's a potential relationship between these two things."

ameister14 suggested "associated with" would've worked better, and that's true. But "tied" isn't technically wrong.

Owns, yes. That is radically different from "funds", though.

Not going to dispute anything about executive structure or Baker's compensation and (mis)management, but a lot of people here are acting like donations either go directly to the corporation or funnel to it through the actual recipient of the donations, but there isn't really any evidence being presented.

That still doesn't answer why should I donate to Mozilla the non-profit? What do they do with my donations? According to another post they don't use them to fund Firefox or presumably any project run by the corporation side.

As I see it if I wanted my donations to go to political or other activism there's more direct and better organizations to donate to with less middle management involved.

> According to another post

Respectfully, HN comments aren't a great primary source. Here are some places to start your research:

https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/faq/

https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/about/public-records/

https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2018/mozilla-fdn-201...

https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/

According to https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/ the donations go to:

* supporting a diverse group of fellows working on key internet issues [looking at them they all focus on advocacy and social issues rather than working on things like Firefox]

* connecting open Internet leaders at events like MozFest

* publishing critical research in the Internet Health Report

* rallying citizens around advocacy issues that connect the wellbeing of the Internet directly to everyday life.

Or in other words, exactly as the HN comment said, none of it goes to corporation projects but rather privacy and social advocacy.

edit: I'm guessing the Foundation actually takes money from the Corporation to fund itself since the financial statement seems to cover both, anyone know if that's the case?

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