also completely baffled by this. i'd have happily paid $100/yr if it went directly to firefox dev, not their other marketing shenanigns.
they fired so much talent to focus on junk to drive revenue, that it's not something i can do anymore. very sad.
they fired so much talent to focus on junk to drive revenue, that it's not something i can do anymore. very sad.
Mozilla has buckets of money, between the Corporation and the Foundation. They are separate, for good-ish reasons? But they are separate. If they start allowing customers or businesses to pay for Firefox, then they will have to provide an entirely different level of support. They will need a billing and support team that is beholden to those paying customers.
It will shift the focus that Firefox has on attracting and retaining users to attracting and retaining paying users.
It will mean they need to meet various warranty and regulatory requirements around the world, and potentially introduce new business risks and liabilities related to those requirements (e.g. non-compliance with specific regional legislation).
What you are asking for is to pay Mozilla for Firefox, and to get there you need a radical shift in the organization that supports and ships Firefox.
Or, you could do what the rest of folks who want to support Firefox do, and make a donation in the way that Mozilla is signalling is the best way to support Mozilla's mission and Firefox development.
If that isn't good enough for you, track down an OSS contributor to Firefox, and give them money. Direct action for the win!
That's the rub here. Mozilla's mission is a much larger scope than just Firefox. Some people want to support Firefox, but don't want to donate to Mozilla's mission. One such reason is because it's important to have more than one browser implementation. There's no way to support that without Mozilla allocating some portion of your donation to some unrelated part of their mission.
(Maybe you can? I haven't donated to them...)
9HZZRfNlpR is right. Not only do you get to say this, you have no other choice but to say this. Buying a laptop sends the strongest possible message that you're giving your money to the laptop division, and not to the tablet division. If you wanted to support the tablet division, you would have bought a tablet. And Lenovo will keep very careful track of this. They may choose to cross-subsidize, but your message will be received loud and clear.