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Probably an unpopular opinion: Never. Mozilla is a hollowed out shell, destroyed by monetary needs. Clearly, today's Firefox, let alone Mozilla, is no longer a bastion of the free web, but an example of how late stage capitalism can destroy such wonderful projects.

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They spend money on social causes, advocacy, and not purely on engineering. It has a product in a niche the overwhelming majority of people don’t want to pay for.

As free-to-play games have demonstrated, you don't need an overwhelming majority of people to pay. There are even ways to find out if it is going to work, such as say a crowd source campaign to pay for n years of browser maintenance and development with various levels of branded merchandise so people can signal their allegiance at conferences. So far I've just seen a donation link for the foundation, which gets a lot of hate because it funds all the stuff lots of potential donors want Mozilla to stop doing.

>As free-to-play games have demonstrated, you don't need an overwhelming majority of people to pay.

Are free-to-play games really the best example here?

Also, a lot of those are funded by ads...

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