Mozilla says it's finally done with Onerep
krebsonsecurity.com
krebsonsecurity.com
> Firefox is maintained by the Mozilla Corporation, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation. While Firefox does produce revenue — chiefly through search partnerships — this earned income is largely reinvested back into the Corporation. The Mozilla Foundation’s education and advocacy efforts, which span several continents and reach millions of people, are supported by philanthropic donations.[1]
[1]: https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/donate/help/#frequently...
Yes, charitable donations go to charitable causes, not development of a browser which produces profits for a for-profit entity. There's no legal way to channel charitable donations back into a business. To do otherwise would be tax fraud.
This is not a "gotcha", this is a persistent misunderstanding of what is and is not possible in tax law.
* Make the browser development the charitable work, or
* accept funding to non-charitable company
However Mozilla earns "enough" from Google, so they don't have to try to make either work.
From the Corp’s Wikipedia page [0]:
> As a non-profit, the Mozilla Foundation is limited in terms of the types and amounts of revenue it can have.
Is this an oblique way of saying they couldn’t take Google bucks that way?
So, they could still take Google's payment and they would still have to pay taxes on it?
They probably cannot do this. The IRS generally does not consider writing open source software to meet the requirements of a 501c3, for example [1]. They aren't super consistent about it so some groups have gotten 501c3 exemption in the past, but for the most part there is a reason that 501c3 open source foundations focus on support activities, conferences, and not software development.
> accept funding to non-charitable company
They could do this, just like they did for Thunderbird, and I wish they would.
[1] https://www.mill.law/blog/more-501c3-rejections-open-source-...
To bring in tax revenue to pay for things we actually need.
> Why would they be unable to do this without making a deal with people who want open source software development to be designated a charitable purpose? How would making a deal with people who want open source software development fix this?
Because my comment is this thing we call a joke, it was meant to highlight the absurdity of the fact that some obviously charitable work gets taxed, while toys for billionaires are tax exempt because...reasons?
I don't think there's a legal way to fund development form the profitable venture and also accept charitable donations.
I'm sure if donations were more a better bet than search licensing they might go that way, but as I said in a different comment, the biggest annual donor drive in the world is probably Wikipedia, probably a best case scenario for that kind of drive, and it brings in less than half of what their search licensing gets.
Feel free to subscribe to them to give money directly to the Mozilla Corporation, the future you're looking for is already here.
Meanwhile, practically everyone claiming Mozilla should just start collecting donations seems like they are suggesting that it's a revenue panacea that can take the place of search. So that's the key difference.
Also, if you're following what I'm saying I'm other posts, you should note I explicitly said I have nothing against donations. I said they were likely to be a modest side hustle rather than a replacement.
Imagine what it's like from my perspective to go out of my way to say I have nothing against donations to have an internet rando claim I'm contradicting myself by not acknowledging their usefulness on the margins.
I have nothing against this, but at best it would be a modest side hustle. The major comparables in online user fundraising are Wikipedia, which AFAIK is the largest annual online fundraising drive in the world and it raises less than 50% of what search licensing gets. Tor is another one, but off the top of my head, I think it's maybe 1/20th of what Wikipedia raises.
If Firefox stood up a donation drive for the first time I would guess Tor-level revenue and maybe it might crawl upward from there depending on how things go.
Also, my understanding is their organizational structure is what legally enables them to do the search licensing which is their biggest revenue stream. But it means that their browser development is done to generate commercial revenue. If they moved the core browser development under the Foundation, it would unravel the ability to do search licensing deals to support development, which are much stronger than whatever their prospect for user donations would be.
I'm a bit out of my depth here but I believe it's all about the search licensing.
All this shows is that Mozilla is even less efficient than Wikimedia! There are projects such as Rust and LLVM that rival Firefox in complexity with 1/10 the combined expenses. Of course Rust has a selling point and Firefox doesn’t, but whose fault is that really?
Wikipedia is a fundamentally different beast serving static content with practically zero of the engineering overhead associated with Rust let alone with Firefox.
Point taken. Rust + LLVM is almost half of Firefox though, and probably at least equivalent in terms of necessary skill. It is also not clear how much of that code could be removed without much loss of functionality.
>Rusts' expenses are massively subsidized by donated staff time from over a dozen major tech companies.
This is called having a selling point. If Firefox offered anything besides not being Chromium, people would work on it without getting paid by Mozilla.
You could argue LLVM is technically of a similar level of complexity, but operating a browser requires far more actual business than developing a compiler.
More to the point, those organisations get enormous amounts of "free" labour in the form of contributions from large corporations that benefit from them, in a way that Firefox absolutely does not.
Integrate better calendar and contact management, then create a best of class commercial email service platform, and commercial hosted services around that.
I thought it would have been a great option long before Gmail was even a thought. Even today, they could work with or create a service like Protonmail or another system to offer these services. 10m users at $4/mo/user is $480m/year and that wouldn't be an unreasonable expectation just for the US market in 3-5 years given where they were in 2008.
Of course, I had similar thoughts about Blackberry when iOS and Android hit the market... since they were already entrenched in corporate email at a lot of places, they could have created a best in breed mobile client for their integrated usage ahead of MS playing catch up.
But with Mozilla, it would have been a natural extension as a commercial offering without disrupting the good will behind Firefox and Thunderbird as they were...
Why would anyone give Mozilla any money after this, even for a product that wasn't privacy-oriented (like a VPN)? Also:
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2024/03/ceo-of-data-privacy-comp...
> But a review of Onerep’s domain registration records and that of its founder reveal a different side to this company. Onerep.com says its founder and CEO is Dimitri Shelest from Minsk, Belarus, as does Shelest’s profile on LinkedIn. Historic registration records indexed by DomainTools.com say Mr. Shelest was a registrant of onerep.com who used the email address dmitrcox2@gmail.com.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/dimitri-shelest
> McLean, Virginia, United States
An immigrant who makes money aggregating and selling Americans' personal information. Is there some way he can be deported?
As in, you don't want a law to make it illegal in general, you only want to ban immigrants from being data brokers?
I personally spend hundreds a month on charitable donations - to political advocacy groups, social outreach organizations, and to open-source software that provides me immense value. I think this is one of the most direct ways I can influence the world around me.
And for what it's worth - subscribing to services is not really the same. For one thing, it puts a cap on how much I can (reasonably) provide.
Did someone say it was?
> And for what it's worth - subscribing to services is not really the same. For one thing, it puts a cap on how much I can (reasonably) provide.
What percentage of Mozilla Corporation's revenue could you provide if they solicited donations?
I sure as hell wouldn't give them money these days. Pretty pissed at the direction they've been heading.
You can donate to Mozilla Foundation (parent entity of Mozilla Corporation), which is a non-profit. But you can't expressly state that the money go towards browser development.
And thus I guess Foundation has to do a good amount of conventional non-profitty stuff like “education and advocacy,” otherwise it would just be a flimsy facade for what’s substantially a for-profit endeavor?
Why is the browser arm organized as a for-profit at all?
This idea that Mozilla doesn't have enough money to fund Firefox is just wrong, Firefox development is perfectly sustainable, it earns more money than it spends. If you want to give money to the Mozilla Corporation instead of the foundation, you do the same thing as with any company: you purchase products from them (such as their VPN or MDN Plus, both of which are owned by the corporation).
> Why is the browser arm organized as a for-profit at all?
So that they can make business deals with the likes of Google, which they wouldn't be able to do as a non-profit.
Edit: I really wish there was a single thread about Mozilla here that doesn't devolve into this being like 80% of the comments. Maybe one day.
Anyone can give Mozilla Corporation money by purchasing services.
I think that Firefox needs an exclusive non-profit foundation, but I don't think Mozilla Corporation/Foundation would allow it, so a fork with a new name (marketing problem) sounds necessary (although splitting the forces may not be a good idea?), I wonder if the current Firefox's forked communities could join forces to create such non-profit foundation, and start from there, making grow the developers under such non-profit foundation, the new main tree.
how do mozilla keep being fooled by these things?
How in the world was this not considered fraud, or in the very least - breach of contract?
breach of contract: unless it was in the contract that he warranted that he didn't/wouldn't do this, it's not a breach of contract?
It does showcase extremely poor due diligence from Mozilla.
Still not fixed
Are there any actual services like this that work properly? I've noticed whenever it indicated that a service has removed my data, that same service would come back online as having my data a few weeks later.
No
>I've noticed whenever it indicated that a service has removed my data, that same service would come back online as having my data a few weeks later
That's literally their business model. Or it pops up on another site from the same people.
However, the specific issue Krebs highlights with Mozilla/OneRep is trust. It turns out OneRep’s founder was actually running active people-search sites (like Nuwber) on the side. It's hard to trust a removal service that has a financial stake in the very industry it's supposed to be fighting.
For an alternative without that conflict, take a look at Optery (YC W22). We've been flagging the OneRep situation for years. Full disclosure, I'm on the team at Optery. Optery launched on HN in 2021.
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2024/03/mozilla-drops-onerep-aft...