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Comment by s3p | Hacker News Reader

But they have to make money. Else they go away. I don't understand how people think Mozilla can just exist and be permanently solvent forever

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Then let me pay for Firefox. I don't need a resold Mullvad (which incidentally took forever to come to my country) or an AI chatbot (which seemingly are the options Mozilla provides to give them money), and donations to Mozilla don't go to Firefox. It took them ~20 years to work out that was the solution for Thunderbird, they shouldn't spend another 20 years flailing about for Firefox.

Mozilla's not exactly short on funds. They take in at least $500,000,000 every year.

And it probably costs something like 80% of that to build and maintain a browser and they probably spend less than Google.

AFAIK, from reading the annual reports years ago, this nice sum of money belongs to Mozilla Foundation, the non-profit that works on making a better web. Mozilla Corporation, the for-profit entity that makes Firefox, doesn’t seem to have as much as it needs. Hence MDN Plus, Mozilla VPN, and other services.

That's their choice, nobody forced them to implement that corporate structure and they can decide to deconstruct it any time.

Google pays Mozilla for default search engine selection in Firefox, no other product. If Mozilla then redirect that money to other non-Firefox ventures then maybe they should explain why.

They specifically implemented that structure to be eligible for search licensing revenue that they might not otherwise have gotten and that's been the lifeline that's kept them able to compete with Google.

The non Firefox ventures are things like lobbying and building a community of support for principles of the open web, which seem pretty defensible to me. It's not like the CEO of WeWork paying himself from his own company's money to turn his private property into a revenue stream. Which I know might disappoint people looking for things to accuse Mozilla of.

This is a gross misunderstanding of the situation surrounding Mozilla revenue and Firefox development expenses.

That's self-inflicted though; they could just thesaurize that money and live on the interests to fund Firefox forever.

That they decide to burn through it by paying 7 figures salaries for their C-suites, buying luxury offices at the heart of Paris and launching plethoras of feel-good initiatives left-and-right is their own choice.

They already do have an endowment fund and they do get annual revenue from it but it's something on the order of 10% of the cost of developing the browser.

Most of their money is spent on software development, they seem to pay at market rates and CEO spending is something like 1.5% of their overall budget and consistent with industry norms. I don't personally love it, but I also don't think it's a conspiracy or enough to legitimize theory that they're supposedly wasting money. If anything, mozilla stands alone as the most successful pure full stack browser company in the history of the tech industry precisely owing to their intelligent handling of revenue streams and long-term financial planning. Got to go back to the drawing board and find a new accusation.

> I also don't think it's a conspiracy

I don't think it's a conspiracy, it's a simple application of the purse theorem: if there is money to be spent, it will be spent, regardless of whether it makes sense to do so.

_E.g._ OpenSSL, PostgreSQL, or Wayland make do with a dozen contributors and maybe a couple hundred grands per year, but because Mozilla drowns in Google money, they feel the need to spend it fast.

> CEO spending is something like 1.5% of their overall budget

That's... huge? If I donate $100 to Mozilla, it's not to give $1.5 to an already multi-millionaire CEO.

https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/ability-to-donate-money...

Look how they spend money, plenty of articles on it, and it makes me hesitate to donate

They need funds but they don't have to make money in the same way as a for profit corporation.

Linus manages.

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