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Comment by MaxBarraclough | Hacker News Reader

It would be possible for Mozilla to accept donations with strings attached that specify what the funds are to be spent on. Currently, they probably don't accept such donations (as far as I can tell), but that's on Mozilla.

We discussed this yesterday at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24129794

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Money is the ultimate fungible asset, any restricted funds going to development frees up money that would have gone to development otherwise to go to something else instead. The only way this works is if the restricted fund donations exceed what the dev investment would have been otherwise, then it starts making a difference.

"This idea works better the more people do it" it the most milquetoast criticism ever.

It doesn’t work at all until a lot of people do it. Below a certain, fairly high threshold all the contributions achieve essentially nothing.

As a donor I don’t like this method because unless all donations were like this, since funds are fungible, budgets would still shift around.

For example, consider two features: AwesomeFeature - budget has $100 DumdumFeature - budget has $200

They currently receive $300 in donations, $50 of which have no strings attached. So there’s donation stream A with strings and $250, and donation stream B with no strings and $50.

Allocation looks like this: AwesomeFeature - budget has $100, funded with A$75, B$25 DumdumFeature - budget has $200, funded with A$175, B$25.

If I donate $25 and say “this can only go to awesome feature” the budgets after my donation end up as.

AwesomeFeature - budget has $100, funded with A$100 DumdumFeature - budget has $225, funded with A$175, B$50.

What you are saying as you don't want to fund your future because you are mad that other people fund their features.

In the case of Mozilla, it's more than the money can go to one of two places: Firefox development, or the black-hole of Mozilla's other projects and expenditures, including their overpaid leadership.

What I’m saying is that there are lots of charities working toward a future I think is really good. I’d rather donate there.

I’m not mad at anyone, I just want my donations to do as much good as I think they can do.

Technically yes, they could shift spending like that, but it would look bad enough, I think at least some would help where you want. Either way, asking for them not to shift funding as appropriate would be asking to control other finances not your own.

If they allowed targeted donations to firefox/quantum/rust/MDN I would donate, as I'm sure many other will. As it is, I don't and won't even if firefox were to fail.

> It would be possible for Mozilla to accept donations with strings attached that specify what the funds are to be spent on.

Best Practical, the company that does most of the work on the open source RT ticketing system, allows for sponsoring specific features or fixes:

* https://rt.bestpractical.com/NoAuth/Featured

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