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Comment by usr1106 | Hacker News Reader

Classic open source user. They take the free (as in beer) software and complain that nobody works for them.

Mozilla makes money hand over fist and they squander it. This is unrelated to their finances or the source model of the product.

Mozilla takes donations, so it isn't necessarely free. Also Mozilla is wondering why no one wants to use their software, this is one of the reasons why.

>Mozilla takes donations, so it isn't necessarely free.

This is a wild take. Taking donations doesn't invalidate the fact that it is available to everyone for free. By definition donations are voluntary. No part of Thunderbird is behind paywalls of any sort.

Wonder why they didn't think about feature funding. As in, letting people donate to specific features.

Donations are a small part of their income.

Hmm. Maybe they have already experimented with "Donate to this specific feature if you really like it" style focused donation campaigns.

Donations to Mozilla which go to Firefox may be a small part of Firefox's income.

Donations directed to Thunderbird go to Thunderbird, and are 99% of Thunderbird's income.

The income streams are not mixed.

It's a reasonable request though. Something that definitely shouldn't cost them much to fix.

Hard to know! Composing emails in tabs seemed easy without internal knowledge, but the code turned out to be a trainwreck, to the point that even a funded attempt failed. I doubt it will ever be fixed.

They didn’t do that, though.

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