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Comment by glenstein | Hacker News Reader

There is no precedent for donations on the scale of what Mozilla gets from search licensing. The best online fundraising drive on the planet is Wikipedia with orders of magnitude more users and they don't raise half of what Mozilla spends on keeping up with Google.

It's not the panacea people keep assuming it is, it's just one of many accusations that gets flung at the wall.

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Except Thunderbird now does run on donations (though is looking a relevant additional funding sources, e.g. providing hosted email: https://www.tb.pro/en-US/). This is not to say Mozilla can't seek out other sources of money, or develop appropriate ancillary services, but the absence of an option to just give money for Firefox (and Firefox only) is noticeable.

I really want you to stop and think about what you're saying for a second. I just made the point that the strongest online fundraising operation in the world, Wikipedia, gets less than half of what it takes to fund Firefox. Your counterpoint to that is to point to Thunderbird, which raises significantly less money than Wikipedia, which is already not enough to fun Firefox, in order to prove that it's plausible that the full operations of Firefox could be funded.

This would be the point where Logan Roy says you're not serious people.

Wikipedia gets way more than they actually need to run the site, and this is even with tons of self-inflicted drama of their own.

No, that is not what I said, and you repeatedly misreading what people write is noticeable.

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