mozilla burnt my shake and fucked my wife
Tell Mozilla: it's time to ditch Google
441–450 of 469 posts
Re: Tell Mozilla: it's time to ditch Google
#442Earlier quoted context omitted.
>I wish my miserable failures brought in $65 million annually. HN users complain about that $65 million constantly. Mozilla is stuck in a spot where the same angry nerds that want them to diversify away from Google won't actually let them spin up diverse sources of revenue.
I wonder how many of this angry crowd donate. Mozilla do accept donations. Or maybe the idea is that employees/developers don't need to eat, which is incredibly ironic given who HN users typically are. There isn't a single line in this petition dedicated to how Mozilla should raise funds instead. Maybe signing the petition should be behind a paywall, I would be very interested to see how many votes that would gather.
> I wonder how many of this angry crowd donate. Mozilla do accept donations.
This is what Mozilla have to say about it:
> How will my donation be used?
> Our grassroots donations, from supporters like you, are our most flexible source of funding. These funds directly support advocacy campaigns (i.e. asking big tech companies to protect your privacy), research and publications like the *Privacy Not Included buyer's guide and Internet Health Report, and covers a portion of our annual MozFest gathering.
— https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/donate/help/#frequently-as...
This quite conspicuously does not include Firefox, nor does it include any kind of revenue stream diversification.
Re: Tell Mozilla: it's time to ditch Google
#443Earlier quoted context omitted.
If it does go the foundation model as I’ve suggested (purely paying bills on the interest earned by the endowment and by donations) then perhaps it can’t afford to pay for 350+ engineers. That’s just the facts.
They’ve made $37.5M from investment income in 2023. [1] (That’s where I’m getting the 350 engineers figure from: $37.5M / $100k = 375.) I’m not sure how risky their investments are. Also, I’m excluding donations altogether. If you can help prepare a more realistic model I’d be happy to share it! [1]: https://wiki.rossmanngroup.com/wiki/File:501c3_2023_990_Mozi...
So it was doable. They could have done it themselves. But in reality they don’t care about the browser
Re: Tell Mozilla: it's time to ditch Google
#444Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just a few days ago, they updated their android application info and stated they're going to share location data with third parties for "Advertising or Marketing" purposes...[1] They also removed a promise to "never sell your data" in their FAQ[2] 2 weeks ago. [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43326230 [2] - https://github.com/mozilla/bedrock/commit/d459addab846d8144b...
Sure, but my point is that Firefox has been funded by Google since 2006, and by having it as the default search engine, Firefox has been sending suggestion queries and searches to Google. Of course, the nuance here is that this was part of a user action, i.e., the user probably wants to search, so they expect data to be sent to Google (although the address bar suggestions are a gray area IMO). However, what hasn't be…
As I understand, these "data safety" sections are what Google gives app owners to comply with "right to be informed". If they say "we're sharing location data with third parties for Advertising purposes" I'm believing it.
I agree that they should really be asking for consent as well, but they don't seem to be doing that. We've got no way to use legitimate location related functionality and deny advertising related usecases. Remember, consent must be specific and granular.
It'll be a while, until enforcement catches up. It's taken ~6 years for cookie banners to get a "reject" button and those are really easy to review and enforce.
It'll happen though, enforcement is just slow. GDPR is a fairly well written regulation, as far as corner cases and catching workarounds goes. So unless the laws change, enforcement will catch up eventually.
Re: Tell Mozilla: it's time to ditch Google
#445We need to be honest about what value Firefox really has left. Commercially, it's completely irrelevant. On big websites it doesn't even show up in the top 10 browsers and it's almost entirely absent on mobile. Site owners can readily ignore Firefox. Firefox is no longer a developer default. I'm sure some of us in our bubble have strong personal preferences but the entire dev ecosystem is chrome-based. Very advanced…
It's true that Apple has the only independent browser engine that has enough users to make developers cater to it. But it's also true that Mozilla has seats on the relevant standards bodies, and on privacy-related issues, their presence helps act as a counterweight along with Apple.
Re: Tell Mozilla: it's time to ditch Google
#446Earlier quoted context omitted.
They’ve made $37.5M from investment income in 2023. [1] (That’s where I’m getting the 350 engineers figure from: $37.5M / $100k = 375.) I’m not sure how risky their investments are. Also, I’m excluding donations altogether. If you can help prepare a more realistic model I’d be happy to share it! [1]: https://wiki.rossmanngroup.com/wiki/File:501c3_2023_990_Mozi...
So it was doable. They could have done it themselves. But in reality they don’t care about the browser
It was doable, and it is doable, and they are doing it.
Like any other organization, Mozilla consists of people. Some of them might not care about the browser and are just here for the money – of course they want Google’s money, too! But I believe most want to do the right thing – the problem is, the focus has been lost for quite a while now.
Re: Tell Mozilla: it's time to ditch Google
#447Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right. The money would be a gift to a foundation where he couldn’t control it. A no strings attached 100% tax deductible gift to the foundation with the only strings that they focus on the browser and survive on the interest, and lay off unnecessary management (10-20 dedicated web engineers and a PM and an HR person what else do you need). But do you also want the browser beholden to the parent company of its direct…
He couldn't control the foundation, but he could say "integrate a crypto wallet or I'm not donating any more".
As long as expenses are less than the interest growth of the endowment then it won’t matter.
Re: Tell Mozilla: it's time to ditch Google
#448Hypothetically speaking, can we estimate how long Firefox can survive once Google pulls the funding? A year? Two?
Mozilla has money. Not an awful lot, but they will survive – they just need to bite the bullet.
(Or maybe they won’t, depending on how fast they can go from burning through $300M a year to a mere $30M. That’s up to the management, though.)
Re: Tell Mozilla: it's time to ditch Google
#449> Now is the time for Mozilla to take bold steps to reinforce its identity as a privacy-centric nonprofit Mozilla gave up that identity when it became an ad-tech company whose business model was to sell reports about the internet browsing habits of firefox users to advertisers. The problem was never Mozilla's dependence Google. The problem is their dependence on the surveillance of internet users. As far as I know Mo…
Regarding the Anonym acquisition, every adtech acquisition is a reverse-acquisition. Google didn't really go evil until they got reverse-acquired by DoubleClick.
Re: Tell Mozilla: it's time to ditch Google
#450Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Corrupt" is too strong. Just unfocused. You can say it is disqualifying for making donations personally, and I think that is a pretty reasonable take. Many people have exactly the same quibble with Wikimedia.
Leadership focusing on their own agenda instead of the mission of the nonprofit is a form of corruption.
No, not in general. Only if done dishonestly or for corrupt purpose (e.g. self-enrichment). It also is not totally clear that these activities are actually outside the scope of the nonprofit's mission.