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Comment by yoasif_ | Hacker News Reader

>Charitable foundations aren't supposed to be corporations. If we've got an entity like Mozilla running a healthy balance sheet it should be a public corporation that we can all be shareholders in. So yes, I am upset by that too although that wasn't the point I was trying to make.

>They've set up a situation where they are going to be corrupted. A billion dollars in assets attracts charlatans and they won't have sufficient defences to stop the money being siphoned off into pet projects and general shenanigans. There will probably turn out to be fraud involved sooner or later.

It is very confusing what you want - you want Mozilla to be publicly traded so that you can share in its success (and open itself up to being corrupted), yet have an issue with it not being publicly traded?

Do you just want to be upset?

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I don't want anything in particular, I walked away from Firefox a while ago so the failures of the Mozilla corporation don't affect me. Most former Firefox users are in the same boat if the stats are accurate. They could wind the whole foundation up and almost nobody would need to notice.

But I don't think you can dispute the basic point here - there is a huge honeypot here to attract people with bad intentions, and they have failed to use it to promote any useful aims given the magnitude of the amount involved.

> Do you just want to be upset?

You've got me, I was bluffing. I'm not really upset. I just think it is bad form, philosophically. The foundation is failing at its goals, they shouldn't be trying to make a profit. If they want to make money they should start a normal company and have shareholders.

> But I don't think you can dispute the basic point here - there is a huge honeypot here to attract people with bad intentions, and they have failed to use it to promote any useful aims given the magnitude of the amount involved.

They may attract people with good intentions as well - or do you have to be starving to be pure of heart?

PS: I don't see how they haven't promoted "any useful aims" - Firefox continues to exist, Rust exists, Let's Encrypt exists, and they are healthy. Those seem like promotions of useful aims.

>The foundation is failing at its goals, they shouldn't be trying to make a profit.

Profit is just what is left over after what needs to be paid for is spent. Would you rather they have no money left at the end of every day? How do you imagine that that works?

That's exactly what the government wants a charity to do not create reserves. It would make sense to spend that money on increasing market share through advertising.

Do you have any guidance on this?

The UK seems to disagree, for example: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/charities-and-res...

You'll notice that that document has a concept of reserves that are 'too high' - see for example section 4.2 the heading "Where a charity’s reserves appear to be too high ".

I looked up Let's Encrypt on Wikipedia by the way because I didn't remember that being a Mozilla thing - they don't appear to come under the umbrella of the Mozilla Foundation financially and their budget is $3.6 million according to the sidebar, and a literal rounding error if we stick to integer percentage points of Mozilla's revenue.

> They may attract people with good intentions as well - or do you have to be starving to be pure of heart?

In the open source world? If they needed a billion dollars to get people doing good work the whole thing would have collapsed in the 90s. That is the theme I'm going with - order of magnitude 3 OSS projects for a billion dollars is such a bad project/$ ratio that there is no way the Mozilla Foundation will turn out to be competent and honest. If you go to the wiki page [0] you can see a somewhat limp list of second rate projects that nobody uses. They are lousy stewards. They started with an impressive product.

Firefox with 30% market share and enough money was much more effective at getting useful results than the Mozilla Foundation with a billion dollars. People with good intentions will be trying to copy that old project that worked, not the modern Foundation that is floundering. It is unlikely they are attracting competent well-intentioned people or we'd be seeing better results. Their management is no good.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Mozilla_products

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