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Comment by netule | Hacker News Reader

Good. I really wish Mozilla would rely less on these shady backroom deals and open up to direct user funding. The Mozilla Foundation accepts donations, but they don't go toward funding Firefox; instead, they fund advocacy campaigns.

> 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...

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>I really wish Mozilla would rely less on these shady backroom deals and open up to direct user funding.

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.

>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.

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?

Firefox replaces more code in a month than Rusts' entire codebase even contains. Rusts' expenses are massively subsidized by donated staff time from over a dozen major tech companies.

Wikipedia is a fundamentally different beast serving static content with practically zero of the engineering overhead associated with Rust let alone with Firefox.

>Firefox replaces more code in a month than Rusts' entire codebase even contains.

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.

There's no such thing as a developer tooling subsidy for a web browser.

Okay. KDE is absolutely comparable to Firefox according to https://openhub.net/p/kde. Tiny fraction of the expenditure. I’m not even sure what their selling point is, but it’s a lot better than Mozilla’s.

> Rust and LLVM that rival Firefox in complexity with 1/10 the combined expenses

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.

>Good. I really wish Mozilla would rely less on these shady backroom deals and open up to direct user funding. The Mozilla Foundation accepts donations, but they don't go toward funding Firefox; instead, they fund advocacy campaigns.

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.

Is there not a difference between a charity and a non-profit?

But then it would be possible to fund firefox development directly, just not get the tax break for it right ?

There are however two options available:

* 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.

Why isn’t the browser development organized as charitable 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?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation

Yes. https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/unrelated-business...

> Even though an organization is recognized as tax exempt, it still may be liable for tax on its unrelated business income.

So, they could still take Google's payment and they would still have to pay taxes on it?

Then they wouldn't be able to pay their CEO $7 million a year...

Search revenue minus the cost of a CEO (slightly more than 1% of that goes to the CEO) is still an amazing deal, dramatically more than what's likely on offer in terms of charitable giving. They would basically have to execute the largest donation drive in the history of the internet and replicate it on a yearly basis to replace search licensing.

Frankly, they probably could. That's a pretty middle-of-the-road salary for a CEO of a significant nonprofit.

Frankly, that level of pay is disgusting and I would prefer the Mozilla Foundation just fold. Firefox can move over to ASF or OSI. They'll do a better job.

> Make the browser development the charitable work

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-...

Maybe we can make a deal with the government. In exchange for making the development of open source software a tax exempt charitable work, we remove private jets from the list of purchases that can be deducted from income taxes. Seems like a win-win.

Why would the government wish to remove private jets from the list of purchases that can be deducted from income taxes? 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?

> Why would the government wish to remove private jets from the list of purchases that can be deducted from income taxes?

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?

The Bevy game is an example on an organisation that has gotten 501c

>Make the browser development the charitable work

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.

You can make donations to a for-profit business. You just can't deduct it from your taxable income.

I don't have any input on direct user funding for Firefox, but Thunderbird is also developed by a for-profit entity and accepts direct user funding with no charitable tax deductions as well. [0] https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/donate/

[0] https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/donate/

Exactly, and to my knowledge the receiving party needs to pay profit tax on them. It's called a donation, but technically more of a pay-what-you-want model. Several businesses do that.

sell $50 keychains. done.

The corporation already sells user-facing products: Mozilla VPN, MDN Plus, Firefox Relay, Pocket (previously).

Feel free to subscribe to them to give money directly to the Mozilla Corporation, the future you're looking for is already here.

They sell T-shirts, totes, and backpacks:

https://mozilla-na.myspreadshop.com/

It's probably too late now... but IMO, what should have been Mozilla's most natural progression towards financial security would have been with Thunderbird. Basically, they were in a position to offer what Outlook/Office365 email does a couple decades ago.

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...

it's particularly strange to see Mozilla engage in these silly machinations when the Thunderbird team has moved on to the model of direct user funding.

Thunderbird gets $3 million and search licensing gets between $500-600 million.

In one of your other posts, you talk about their merch sales and others also talk about their bundling of services such as vpn and etc., which all also sound like small potatoes. Does that not sound contradictory? Why bother with any of this if search licensing covers their costs many times over? And if merch and mozilla branded bundles work, then why not also let the users fund them like Thunderbird allows instead of enraging these users by signing them up unsolicited for things such as "privacy preserving ads" and such?

Where did you get the impression that I endorsed merch sales as a major diversification of revenue? I think it is a rounding error. I was replying to someone seemingly claiming $50 keychains were the key to solving all their revenue issues as if it presented a new and untested idea.

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 never said you endorsed the donations, just that it seems to me to pointless to mention, as a response to my original post, given the ad/search revenue. My question remains why Mozilla (not you) seems against taking direct donations when they engage in other donation collection activities. I don't think we are taking opposing points here - I would like Mozilla to take donations to provide a clean browser to its fans (including me). Further, it just seems strange that the ad/search revenue number seems to be some line in stone - can't they operate a browser without the hundreds of millions of ad/search deals?

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