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Comment by raincole | Hacker News Reader

So who are going to fund them?

Sorry for being cynical, but this "petition" sounds like telling depressed people to "just be more positive." Sure, just find more revenue streams. Just be sustainable. It's so easy!

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Agreed. A world where Mozilla ceases to exist due to lack of funding is arguably worse than the current state.

Time to wake up and smell the coffee.

With less than 3% marketshare, Mozilla doesn't exist now for most people --- mainly just for Google.

Regardless of whether people know it exists, the world where it exists is much better than a world where it doesn't and there is only one option.

So open source doesn't work?

Alternative browsers are available based on Firefox source code. The same is true with Chromium.

Sure, but they would all cease to exist if Firefox or Chrome ceased to exist or even ceased to be worked on because they don't have the labour to keep their project going without the parent projects doing most of the work.

Agreed. Mozilla has problems, but bleeding funds from Google to fund their competition has a satisfaction factor. I'd rather sign a petition to keep the Google daddy fund going until the very end.

This seems like a weird time to be making noise about this. Mozilla has been trying to become less Google-dependent for a long time. In this past half decade especially they've made huge strides with less and less of their total revenue coming from Google royalties:

  2023: 75.8% of revenues from Google royalties
  2022: 86.0%
  2021: 87.8
  2020: 88.8
  2019: [^a]
  2018: 95.3
  2017: 95.9

This data is based on their independent auditors reports.

[^a]: this was a weird year where their "other" income got a massive one-time boost. I'm not sure what happened. Did they get a $338m grant? If you take that number out (which is normally at or near zero) the percentage is around 91%

And every time they try to get an alternate revenue stream, someone on HN will then shout "just focus on the browser!!". Mozilla can't please the crowd no matter what they do.

They could try just focussing on the browser.

The petition should instead be asking Mozilla to allow people to directly donate to Firefox development.

This is a good idea. I don’t think I should change the petition now that it’s signed by a significant number of people, but I agree targeted donations could help somewhat (although mainly I think we need to urge Mozilla to direct its other income into Firefox development, too).

This is a good idea on paper. But it turns out that having a for-profit corporation (as Mozilla Corporation is) accept donations, especially donations earmarked for certain purposes, is understandably tricky from a regulatory and tax standpoint. You can do it, but it comes with lots of rules and restrictions, and constrains the company in weird ways that kind of make sense, since it's kind of similar to money laundering. (And I'm not talking about tax deductible donations, which are a no go for obvious reasons. "Don't pay us $50 for our product, donate $50 and we'll give you the product for free, and you'll lower your taxes!")

The Mozilla Foundation is what you can donate to, and you can do it because it's a non-profit. But it doesn't make Firefox. It owns Mozilla Corporation, which does. And it can't just dump donated money into Mozilla Corp either; regulators are not naive.

No idea about earmarked donations, but I don’t think Corp would have any problem with donations in general. Designate it as “sponsorship fee” if you must.

But yeah, part of the problem is probably the fact that the Mozilla Foundation isn’t the one employing Firefox devs.

You can donate to MZLA Technologies Corporation for Thunderbird development however. If it works for Thunderbird, why can't it work for Firefox?

There’s nothing to prevent them from allowing people to donate without a tax deduction AFAIK, but they don’t allow it. In the US, most donations no longer actually get deducted from taxes anyway due to the greatly increased standard deduction since 2017. I think something like 85-90% of people now just use that and don’t itemize.

It sounds like the goal is the same search contract just not with Google.

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