Obviously relying on Google for money is fraught, but it isn't exactly clear where they'd get an equivalent source of income. Otherwise the subtext seems to be "I don't like their politics" which suggests maybe the author shouldn't donate any money to them. Personally I would be sad if Firefox was neglected, but that doesn't seem to be happening, as far as I can see.
Firefox Money: Investigating the Finances of Mozilla
11–20 of 69 posts
Re: Firefox Money: Investigating the Finances of Mozilla
#12As with Wikipedia, what I assumed how the organization operated and how it does is vastly different. Basically everything here seems biazarre and makes trusting Mozilla very hard. Does anybody believe that they can stand up against Google, when Google, at any point they want to, could crash their whole operation? I think it is quite likely that Google is keeping Mozilla afloat to avoid anti-trust allegations. Mozilla…
HN loves to simultaneously criticize Mozilla for
1) being financially dependent on Google
2) spending resources on literally anything except Firefox
3) doing anything that smells like monetizing Firefox, no matter how innocuous
Spoiler alert: They have essentially no hope of avoiding 1 without doing at least a little bit of 2 or 3. Unlike Google, Apple, and Microsoft, they don't have billions of dollars coming through the backdoor from other business units.
As for "whether they can stand up to them", they can and do, all the time. Including _literally this week_ with Google's Web integrity bullshit. Whether it accomplishes much is a different matter, but it's not for lack of an attempt on their part.
Re: Firefox Money: Investigating the Finances of Mozilla
#13Re: Firefox Money: Investigating the Finances of Mozilla
#14As with Wikipedia, what I assumed how the organization operated and how it does is vastly different. Basically everything here seems biazarre and makes trusting Mozilla very hard. Does anybody believe that they can stand up against Google, when Google, at any point they want to, could crash their whole operation? I think it is quite likely that Google is keeping Mozilla afloat to avoid anti-trust allegations. Mozilla…
HN loves to simultaneously criticize Mozilla for 1) being financially dependent on Google 2) spending resources on literally anything except Firefox 3) doing anything that smells like monetizing Firefox, no matter how innocuous Spoiler alert: They have essentially no hope of avoiding 1 without doing at least a little bit of 2 or 3. Unlike Google, Apple, and Microsoft, they don't have billions of dollars coming throug…
I do get that they aren't in a position where they have easy choices, but what they are currently doing is wrong. They need to be a much smaller and focused organization, which can generate funds from various sources and use them to do effective development. You don't need 200M to develop firefox.
In their current position they exist to give Google some protection against anti-trust allegations. That is about the worst spot for their organization to be in.
>As for "whether they can stand up to them", they can and do, all the time.
You are right. Google likely knows that they can completly ignore them, so they can say whatever they want.
Re: Firefox Money: Investigating the Finances of Mozilla
#15Obviously relying on Google for money is fraught, but it isn't exactly clear where they'd get an equivalent source of income. Otherwise the subtext seems to be "I don't like their politics" which suggests maybe the author shouldn't donate any money to them. Personally I would be sad if Firefox was neglected, but that doesn't seem to be happening, as far as I can see.
I suppose Microsoft might be willing to broker a deal to have Bing as the default search, although that would probably attract similar levels of criticism from the same people.
DuckDuckGo would be the "obvious" choice, but I doubt they can come up with the same kind of numbers.
Brave Search might be an option, but unlike Google and Microsoft the browser is Brave's main product so they might not want to deal with a competitor, they probably have a lot less cash lying around, and they have some history with Mozilla.
Yahoo! Search is still around, maybe some others? I don't think anyone other than Microsoft and Google have a spare ~$500 million lying around for this though.
Re: Firefox Money: Investigating the Finances of Mozilla
#16Re: Firefox Money: Investigating the Finances of Mozilla
#17As with Wikipedia, what I assumed how the organization operated and how it does is vastly different. Basically everything here seems biazarre and makes trusting Mozilla very hard. Does anybody believe that they can stand up against Google, when Google, at any point they want to, could crash their whole operation? I think it is quite likely that Google is keeping Mozilla afloat to avoid anti-trust allegations. Mozilla…
[deleted]
Re: Firefox Money: Investigating the Finances of Mozilla
#18I sort of understand that Mozilla wants to care for the concept of an open internet which requires a lot more than just software development. I don't particularly understand or like the exact things they finance, but politics is a complex game in which you loose if you don't play.
What I absolutely fail to understand though is why they don't have long-term focus on diversifying income? All their alternative revenue sources are neglibile, and their strange attempts to provide paid products seem to be either hobby-projects of someone at mozilla (ex: pocket) or a cheap rebrand of a product (ex: vpn).
Am I wrong to expect more from such a technologically capable organisation?
Re: Firefox Money: Investigating the Finances of Mozilla
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
The worker-owners should democratically decide what to do with their money.
Maybe they should have a try at becomming a bakery?
https://www.mondragon-corporation.com/en/about-us/
"only small companies can be worker owned" is a bit antiquated.
Re: Firefox Money: Investigating the Finances of Mozilla
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
HN loves to simultaneously criticize Mozilla for 1) being financially dependent on Google 2) spending resources on literally anything except Firefox 3) doing anything that smells like monetizing Firefox, no matter how innocuous Spoiler alert: They have essentially no hope of avoiding 1 without doing at least a little bit of 2 or 3. Unlike Google, Apple, and Microsoft, they don't have billions of dollars coming throug…
I do get that they aren't in a position where they have easy choices, but what they are currently doing is wrong . They need to be a much smaller and focused organization, which can generate funds from various sources and use them to do effective development. You don't need 200M to develop firefox. In their current position they exist to give Google some protection against anti-trust allegations. That is about the wo…
> You don't need 200M to develop firefox.
Based on what logic? It's 20+ million lines of code touching half if the "hard" problems of computer programming - graphics, fonts, encodings, localization, JIT engines, hardware acceleration, support for multiple architectures (including aforementioned JIT), support for multiple operating systems, massive parallelism, sandboxing, WASM support, hardware support abstractions like WebUSB and WebMIDI, etc, and a massive swamp of compatiblity hacks, and literally books worth of new standards they have to implement every year.
Much of which has to be as high performance as possible while simultaneously not being ludicrously insecure, because the threat environment is basically as hostile as it gets.
The fastest way to "become a lean organization" would be to just give up and become yet another Chromium clone. Barring that, they have a lot of software to maintain if they want a truly independent browser. A modern browser is comparable in effort to supporting an entire operating system, because that's what browsers kind of are nowadays.
About the only other option is to lay off all their staff in SF and Paris and other HCoL areas and relocate to Central and Eastern Europe.