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Comment by strombofulous | Hacker News Reader

Good news, you can! https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/

This is a donation to Mozilla which as they clearly don't give a fuck about Firefox's success has a snowballs chance in hell at funding Firefox development.

> Contributions go to the Mozilla Foundation, a 501(c)(3) organization based in San Francisco, California, to be used in its discretion for its charitable purposes. They are tax-deductible in the U.S. to the fullest extent permitted by law.

Under US tax law, they cannot legally spend tax-exempt donated funds on the development of a for-profit product.

Can workers in a building (or cloud, as things currently are) really be so clearly binned?

Yes, but that does not prevent them from spending it on some other 'priority', pet project, administration or whatever else might cross their mind other than Firefox Development.

IDK what are their actual intentions, and they might be 100% focused on FF dev, but nothing in the tax law keeps them on that focus.

Note, that's Mozilla Foundation which is not the entity that develops Firefox. Money donated via this form would be "used in its discretion for its charitable purposes".

It is somewhat hard to find out what exactly this means, but US form 990 provides an overview (PDF): https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2019/mozilla-2019-fo... , see page 3 and 9

$926K "Agenda Setting" -- published a report

$4,853K "Movement Building" -- urged Facebook, Snapchat, Apple and others to address issues

$10,387K "Leadeship Development" -- Fellowships and awards for technologists and researchers

$1,374K "Compensation of Officers" etc..

There is no way to donate to fund Firefox development. Here's where your donation to Mozilla goes towards:

https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/what-we-do/

https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/what-we-fund/

In addition to what other commenters have said, I also don't think that they do a good job at promoting the fact that it's possible to donate.

If there were the option to donate directly to the Firefox program, and that they placed a "donate now" button here or there within Firefox and on their website, I'd happily donate as I have with Signal.

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