There is nothing to defend there. They could have easily: * Made the donations go directly to funding the browser development. Right now I don't know if it even possible to donate purely just to browser development * They could have easily opened a services/consultancy arm, similar to igalia. A great and easy way to fund browser development. (How igalia has funded servo development in the past) * Create a for-pay enterprise support. In the past a lot of government organizations wouldn't use Chrome due to how the Chrome updates worked. They could have made a killing in government contracts just around that

And these are just a few simple income directions that are pretty common in other OSS projects. Instead they did braindead ideas like being a VPN reseller, giving away Pocket, and other things no one wanted or asked for.