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Comment by ta8645 | Hacker News Reader

The fact that the Mozilla CEO makes over $6,000,000.00 per year is a complete betrayal of what Firefox was. How could anyone justify donating to Firefox knowing that so much of their money would be going to this one person?

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You can't donate to Firefox anyway—you can only donate to the Mozilla Foundation, which isn't alowed to work on Firefox. The Mozilla Corporation owns Firefox, and money can only flow from the Corporation to the Foundation.

So every donation that has ever been made to "Firefox" has actually gone to whatever random stuff the Foundation is working on this week and, yes, to the Foundation's CEO.

This structure sounds completely broken. So the people who work on it answer only to the people who hold the purse, but not the people (the Foundation). Do I get that right?

The Foundation owns the Corporation, so technically the Corporation answers to the Foundation, but because the Foundation is a non-profit it can't actually transfer resources to its for-profit arm, only the other way around.

Usually the theory with this kind of setup is that the Corporation is profitable and forwards funds to the Foundation so that the foundation can accomplish its work. But putting Firefox in the Foundation implies that someone somewhere thought that Firefox would be profitable rather than being the core mission that needs subsidization. I believe this was someone related to the Google deal, but it's definitely been a major problem ever since.

Let me get this straight, NOT A SINGLE DOLLAR of donations are used to fund development for Firefox!?

How many are under the false impression of "helping Firefox" when in reality their donations are used to fund advocacy campaigns [0] and managerial bloat [1]?

[0] https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/donate/help/#frequently-as...

[1] https://lunduke.locals.com/post/4387539/firefox-money-invest...

Wait until you hear how many Wikipedia editors and servers are paid from the many millions of donations they aggressively beg for every year..

To the best of my knowledge that is correct, yes. The way that they've structured it they can't legally do otherwise.

To be fair, Mozilla has come out with a lot of new services that have dramatically decreased their dependency on Google. They went from over 95% of their revenue being google royalties to less than 70% just in the past half decade

Still though. 70% is a lot to be dependent on Google for. And the way Google operates these days, I'm honestly surprised that their interest in Firefox remains.

Google wants Firefox to remain viable (or at least one other browser) so that they can avoid monopoly issues with Chrome. If they pay Firefox to keep Google as default search engine, they keep 80% of the money they’d get by having those users use Chrome, and they keep the other browser alive, but not enough to really keep up with Chrome’s feature set.

That’s the most likely bet they are making, similar to Apple/Android or Safari/Chrome. Spending a minor fraction of your revenue to avoid anti-trust probably makes sense for them.

That's progress, but also: why is this the structure? It makes no sense to not send donations to the thing they think they're donating to, and I really can't believe that there's no way they could have structured it to make that work.

> fact that the Mozilla CEO makes over $6,000,000.00 per year is a complete betrayal of what Firefox was

Mozilla’s donations are roughly equal to their CEO’s compensation [1][2].

(I’ve donated to Mozilla before and recently brought in friends who gave 6+ figures. I’ve been encouraging them to, and they’ve been successful so far in, charging back for those donations.)

[1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2024/a... ”$7.8M in donations from the public, grants from foundations, and government funding” in 2023

[2] https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2022/mozilla-fdn-990... $6.9mm in 2022, page 7

Donation go to the foundation, not to Mozilla Corporation which does all the browser engineering work. If you donate you give money to the team that does open web advocacy and related programs.

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