Disgusting. I hope that Mozilla can re-focus on their original mission, and align their finances with building the best browser possible rather than wasting it on political activism.
What is their original mission?
Firefox Money: Investigating the Finances of Mozilla
41–50 of 69 posts
Re: Firefox Money: Investigating the Finances of Mozilla
#42From the report: During 2021, Mozilla paid $387 Thousand dollars to a Mckensie Mack Group whose LinkedIn page describes itself as “Black-led and nonbinary-led, MMG is a global social justice organization”. And another $100K to an "Action research collaborative" that sounds like another social justice org? WTF? This sounds like money laundering. I just want a good browser. I'm now regretful that I was donating regular…
100% looks like money laundering. They paid six figure amounts to businesses that don't even have a website and are impossible to find any information on: - "What, exactly, is “Action Research Collaborative”? That is a surprisingly difficult question to find an answer to, as they have no website whatsoever. One of the few references to it is in a Cornell newsletter from earlier this year..." - "$30,000 to “MC Technic…
"Where does Mozilla spend those donated dollars?"
should really read
"Where does the Mozilla Foundation spend those donated dollars?"
Because although the author conflates Foundation and Corporation they are in fact separate entities and money does not go into a single bank account.
If you want to know where the Mozilla Foundation spends your donated dollars then you can read their financial report. There are many dozens of line items that list where money goes.
Re: Firefox Money: Investigating the Finances of Mozilla
#43The reason why there is a foundation that owns two for profit corporations, is so the corporations can pay taxes. It is the opposite of shady.
Re: Firefox Money: Investigating the Finances of Mozilla
#44From the report: During 2021, Mozilla paid $387 Thousand dollars to a Mckensie Mack Group whose LinkedIn page describes itself as “Black-led and nonbinary-led, MMG is a global social justice organization”. And another $100K to an "Action research collaborative" that sounds like another social justice org? WTF? This sounds like money laundering. I just want a good browser. I'm now regretful that I was donating regular…
100% looks like money laundering. They paid six figure amounts to businesses that don't even have a website and are impossible to find any information on: - "What, exactly, is “Action Research Collaborative”? That is a surprisingly difficult question to find an answer to, as they have no website whatsoever. One of the few references to it is in a Cornell newsletter from earlier this year..." - "$30,000 to “MC Technic…
"Why do some of the recipients of Mozilla money appear to be nothing more than empty shells of companies — not even having a simple website?"
This is exactly how many readers here at hacker news also run their business: you need an official entity to receive money.
And if you are doing something interesting that the Mozilla Foundation would like to support with a grand for example then you will need to have that "empty shell" because if you receive funding for a project personally you will be taxed the shit out of it and lose many benefits. There is literally nothing special about this.
Re: Firefox Money: Investigating the Finances of Mozilla
#45From the report: During 2021, Mozilla paid $387 Thousand dollars to a Mckensie Mack Group whose LinkedIn page describes itself as “Black-led and nonbinary-led, MMG is a global social justice organization”. And another $100K to an "Action research collaborative" that sounds like another social justice org? WTF? This sounds like money laundering. I just want a good browser. I'm now regretful that I was donating regular…
100% looks like money laundering. They paid six figure amounts to businesses that don't even have a website and are impossible to find any information on: - "What, exactly, is “Action Research Collaborative”? That is a surprisingly difficult question to find an answer to, as they have no website whatsoever. One of the few references to it is in a Cornell newsletter from earlier this year..." - "$30,000 to “MC Technic…
"Why does Mozilla continue to take donations if it doesn’t need them?"
Because raising money is literally what non profits do as their primary means of income. They cannot just "take" money from the "cash cow", the Corporation which is a separate entity.
Re: Firefox Money: Investigating the Finances of Mozilla
#46From the report: During 2021, Mozilla paid $387 Thousand dollars to a Mckensie Mack Group whose LinkedIn page describes itself as “Black-led and nonbinary-led, MMG is a global social justice organization”. And another $100K to an "Action research collaborative" that sounds like another social justice org? WTF? This sounds like money laundering. I just want a good browser. I'm now regretful that I was donating regular…
100% looks like money laundering. They paid six figure amounts to businesses that don't even have a website and are impossible to find any information on: - "What, exactly, is “Action Research Collaborative”? That is a surprisingly difficult question to find an answer to, as they have no website whatsoever. One of the few references to it is in a Cornell newsletter from earlier this year..." - "$30,000 to “MC Technic…
"$30,000 to “MC Technical Inc.” in 2021. Who are they? Well, they don’t have a website, that’s for sure. The business registry listing is about the only thing of the company that seems to exist. The listed address is someone’s house."
It is a nice round number so it is probably someone who did some work for them and sent them an invoice. There is nothing special about that. Unless you have an agenda to make it sound like something bad. Which I think the author does.
Many hacker news readers have their own incorporated with weird names that are registered to their home addresses. Because when you provide services to a company you ideally need a legal entity. Having an address is a legal requirement. And having a website is not.
It is that simple. The Mozilla Foundation probably has many contractors that do work for them.
Similar to "Why do some of the recipients of Mozilla money appear to be nothing more than empty shells of companies — not even having a simple website?" - it just shows the author has no idea how small non-profit / 501(c) world works. It is easy to make it sound like a headline but in reality it is probably just small non profits struggling to get funding to do interesting things.
Re: Firefox Money: Investigating the Finances of Mozilla
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 l…
Their revenue is 800 million. It sounds like a lot of money for a browser Over the last 10 years their revenue would?? say 5 billion. That is a lot
What the hell is this? Has HackerNews now turned into a site where ACTUALLY GENERATING GREAT REVENUE WITH YOUR PRODUCT IS FROWNED UPON!?
I don't understand this comment at all. Is making money a bad thing now? I thought that was the whole point of being a hacker and starting a bsiness and then getting funding and doing hard work and then boooom .. revenue, money, profit! Success!
No? Not anymore? Or is Mozilla special and are they not allowed?
(Sarcasm - please do not respond)
Re: Firefox Money: Investigating the Finances of Mozilla
#48Obviously 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 co…
Wait what? "spare money lying around?" that is a complete misunderstanding of how this works. You make it sound as if that money is some kind of "donation". THat Google is doing Mozilla a _favour_ here. But nothing could be further from the truth: instead this is a business deal where everyone wins. (Read: generates a stupid amount of revenue)
Google probably makes at least 3x of what it pays Mozilla in search royalties. At least. Who knows what Google makes with what it does after Firefox has done its small part.
This is a hugely profitable business for Google. That has _nothing_ to do with "spare money lying around". This is a cash cow for Google. Specially since they do the same with other players like Apple. Many many billions of dollars are at stake.
Re: Firefox Money: Investigating the Finances of Mozilla
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 co…
Wait what? "spare money lying around?" that is a complete misunderstanding of how this works. You make it sound as if that money is some kind of "donation". THat Google is doing Mozilla a _favour_ here. But nothing could be further from the truth: instead this is a business deal where everyone wins. (Read: generates a stupid amount of revenue) Google probably makes at least 3x of what it pays Mozilla in search royalt…
Realistically Google is doing Mozilla a favor and the money is a donation.
Firstly, Firefox's remaining userbase is pretty technical. They aren't the sort of people to blindly use defaults because they don't know how to change them. Even if Google cut Mozilla off entirely, tomorrow, 90% of Firefox users would continue to search on Google by default.
Secondly, what would Firefox switch to? Bing? What if MS don't care about paying Mozilla either, or only are willing to pay a fraction of what Google pays? What's Mozilla going to do? They'd have to go with Bing anyway because it's that or nothing. There are no other search engines willing and able to pay lots of money for browser traffic.
So Mozilla would be in a double bind: even if MS paid them to replace the Google deal, (a) most of their users would change the default back again, so they'd refer very little traffic and (b) Microsoft could cut them a very bad deal and they'd have to take it anyway. They'd still suffer a huge drop in income overnight.
No matter what Mozilla does, they will be depending on one of two companies BOTH of which make competing browsers and frankly, both of which would be quite happy if Mozilla just went away and died, given that from their perspective Mozilla's primary contribution to the web is telling the Chrome/Edge teams they can't do things.
I don't get the anti-trust angle. There is browser competition: Chrome, Edge, Safari, Brave, Vivaldi, etc. If Mozilla tried to claim that Google ending their deal was anti-competitive, they'd just immediately lose in court.
My guess is that Google continue to be Mozilla's sugar daddy for legacy reasons. They've done it for a long time, cutting Mozilla off would upset a lot of techies and the money is irrelevant to Google. But one day that calculus will change.
What might cause the calculus to change? Most obviously, if Google decides that Mozilla is no longer actually developing their browser properly, or if Mozilla's management just upsets the relevant point-person at Google badly enough. Baker obviously stopped caring about web browsers years ago, if she ever did at all, and is now treating the Google deal as a piggybank for pushing her political ideology. All it takes is for the person responsible for the Mozilla deal to be replaced by someone who hates anti-white wokeness and they've got all the ammo they need to just defund Mozilla completely. A less sympathetic organization is hard to imagine.
Re: Firefox Money: Investigating the Finances of Mozilla
#50As 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…
They have one billion dollars and they're cutting back on Firefox software development. If anything they don't get hated on enough.