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Comment by freshsqueeze | Hacker News Reader

maybe cost of $10000s (or even $100K+) to build. this is where your donations go towards!

As opposed to... firefox? It's frequently pointed out in firefox/mozilla threads that donations to mozilla foundation does not go toward firefox development, since that's done by mozilla corporation (the for-profit subsidiary of mozilla foundation).

There are frequently comments on such threads from people discovering this fact for the first time, so it does seem to be a point worth repeating.

This is the sort of thing I find myself frequently forgetting, too. After all, it stands to reason that the open source browser would be funded by the non-profit Mozilla entity, not the for-profit Mozilla entity.

Honestly, short of going and looking it up, I haven't got a clue what the for-profit mozilla entity does other than the browser. Sign deals exchanging money for the default search engine position?

> After all, it stands to reason that the open source browser would be funded by the non-profit Mozilla entity, not the for-profit Mozilla entity.

Why would that stand to reason? Firefox makes Mozilla money (through search provider sponsorship), and therefore needs to be a company to receive that revenue. Nothing else Mozilla does makes them money, and therefore nothing else they do needs to be a company. What would you imagine the Mozilla Corporation exists to do, if not to make money from Firefox (and then plow that money back into Firefox development)?

After a year or two, Mozilla realized that the foundation would not make a third of it's revenue from donations, so they needed to create a taxable corporation.

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