Comment by greatgib | Hacker News Reader

Comment by greatgib | Hacker News Reader

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I just had a look at the financial documents for Mozilla, and I have to say that, for an organisation that promote transparency, their financial info are quite opaque, minimally detailed, and secretive.

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

Conveniently for them and curiously, they are only publishing the "consolidated" statements for the Moz Foundation.

But, for example, it looks like that the individual statements for the Mozilla Corp are never published or disclosed. That is very annoying as it is the main "entity" of the organization.

There is also no details about the split of costs and revenues associated with each main projects / services products / groups that are worked on for a given year.

So, for example, no one can have a clear idea of how much money is spent on dev, marketing or administration of Firefox versus Pocket versus VPN versus charities versus fellowships, etc...

If you look at the content of the limited financial documents, you can even have the impression that the foundation has no interest for the development of Firefox itself, and that they are just interested by it as a cash cow that generates (with the search deals) huge funds to give to whatever charities that Mozilla leaders are interested in.

You can't get at how much is spent on development for each product, but you do get some information: (below all 2018 figures)

They took in ~$430M from, primarily, the search deals, plus a couple million each from some other sources like subscriptions is in there as income too.

They spent ~$280M on software development, $52M on marketing, $86M on administration and "general." With 1,000 (okay, 750) employees you're going to have some administrative costs. So it's mostly going to software development writ large, though you don't have reported the breakout of what's being spent on what projects.

As for the charitable stuff: the foundation took in $13M in contributions, and also about $13M from the corporation paying the foundation for the use of the trademarks (the foundation owns them). The foundation spent $18M on its charitable programs. Presumably this $18M is part of the $33M total consolidated spending on "other program services."

There's truth in the statement that a portion of Firefox's revenue is paying for some of Mozilla's charitable programs, but it's a very small amount relative to the amounts spent on development.

Your analysis is the only one that we can do currently.

But it is really too limited because even if you know the overall 'spendings' for software dev, you don't know how much is used for Firefox, Thunderbird, pocket, random side projects, by dev for the foundation activities, by dev for charities on the Corp side.

And how the split is evolving years after years.

Also, you can't compare the administrative and marketing costs of the 2 structures to see if they are adequate.

And even the 'Foundation' budget might not be so much relevant as there is no assurance that the 'Corporation' is not funding some charities or fellowships requested by the 'Foundation'.

There are repeated comments in HN threads who purport to be Mozilla employees or ex-employees and lament that the organization(s) have become little more then a vessel to inflate the fame of those in the exec and advocacy portions of the mess.

That... Seems plausible given what departments were and weren't cut, and how opaque their spending is.

In some ways Mozilla reminds me of the "Public Interest Registry (PIR)" that controls .org. While it may symbolise some high integrity, non-commercial ideals to many people, unbeknownst to them, the people who are actually running the organisation have very different ideas of their own. Money on their minds and minds on their money.

This is why I've switched to Chromium Edge on Macos and Windows 10.

With Edge, I'm under no illusions with regard to what I'm getting myself into.

Seems like you're jumping out of the frying pan into the fire, no? Mozilla might be obscuring their financial details, but on balance they are one of the most ethical entities on the internet.

Google and Microsoft both have the corporate predator instinct in their DNA.

I'm already running Windows on three of the PCs I run, so I'm fucked there anyway.

You aren't being serious.

Edge has more aggressive and persistent tracking identifiers then Google Chrome

If you want Chromium and care about ad-blocking and privacy, Brave might be preferable. It lets you disable the crypto features entirely if you don't care for that side of it.

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