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I'd add that fundraising has worked well for the Wikimedia Foundation. They're taking in around $175M/year via donations. That isn't the nearly $500M/year that Mozilla gets from Google, but it's still a ton of money.

I don't know if people will donate for their browser like they donate for Wikipedia, but if it's able to bring joy to people, it could be pretty sustainable. Even Mozilla takes in $10M/year in contributions.

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I'm not sure Mozilla is a good case for a lean software project.

If they didn't give their CEO $7M per year, spent money acquiring businesses like Pocket, gave up their braindead attempts at monetizing user data while simultaneously running bizarre tone-deaf "free internet" studies, and just focused on the browser and improving the development experience (is there a worse open source project than Moz??), they might fare better.

$7m!? Jesus

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