7 ms·

Donate mozilla

161 points by swcoders 11y ago

FooBarWidget 11y ago
Their FAQ (https://wiki.mozilla.org/Donate#Don.27t_Mozilla_products.2C_like_Firefox.2C_earn_income.3F https://wiki.mozilla.org/Donate#Don.27t_Mozilla_products.2C_...) contains pretty important information. In particular, it answers why one should donate when Mozilla Corp makes money through corporate deals (e.g. Google and Yahoo search commissions). The answer is that all the money Mozilla Corp makes is reinvested back into Mozilla Corp (salaries etc). The Mozilla Foundation -- a non-profit which wholly owns Mozilla Corp -- is not funded by Mozilla Corp, but relies entirely on donations. Mozilla Foundations is responsible for philantropic education and awareness campaigns. So this link is not about donating to Mozilla Corp, where the bulk of Firefox development happens. It's about donating to Mozilla Foundation.
- melling 11y ago
  Less than a week ago Mozilla said they don't need the millions from Google. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10630996 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10630996
  - richardboegli 11y ago
    You just beat me to this :)
  - amooiman 11y ago
    As @FooBarWidget says, this is about donating to the Mozilla Foundation, not the Corporation (which builds Firefox products). I'm an employee at the Foundation, and these donations help us keep running and working towards our mission, backed by these principles: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/
    - melling 11y ago
      All sounds warm and fuzzy to me. The Foundation should try to be more concrete in explaining what they do, and are currently accomplishing. Maybe this is already explained somewhere but I have no idea, and I'm a regular reader of HN, for example. Most people will spend even less time looking into it. The Mozilla Foundation/Corporation thing will only confuse people. Anyway, I'm donating kharma by explaining all of this. I'm done for now.
      - FooBarWidget 11y ago
        So what you're saying is that you have a negative/cynic view about Mozilla Corp/Foundation, but couldn't be bothered to read the rest of their website to find out whether your view is correct, and won't change your viewpoint until someone makes it easy for you?
        dhemmerling 11y ago
        I think they're saying it's not the best way to go about asking someone for a gift of money. It's not all that cynical to be skeptical of vaguely defined goals.
- amooiman 11y ago
  This is exactly right. I'm an engineer at the non-profit Mozilla Foundation, and these donations keep us working towards our mission (found at https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/details/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/details/).
  - J_Darnley 11y ago
    Would that be your mission to copy Chrome as much as possible?
  - hack_edu 11y ago
    Now if only it all wasn't spent on the current massive expansion of the Marketing team and their new executive's salaries. The new CMO has a very checkered history with questionable results. Very much the nepotist who manages to pack his team with former colleagues. Its a big and divisive internal issue right now. :(
    - orbitur 11y ago
      At Mozilla Foundation? Got any links to discussions?
      - hack_edu 11y ago
        Admittedly, its all off record hearsay as it's not to smart to talk badly about your C-levels in public discussion. Though I must say, as a user its hard to sincerely distinguish the business motives of Firefox from other parts of the org. Especially in the recent push of the browser.
        caseysoftware 11y ago
        > not to smart to talk badly about your C-levels in public discussion For certain things. But for badthink, seek and destroy.
      - zrail 11y ago
        The latest IRS Form 990 for the Mozilla Foundation I can find is here: https://static.mozilla.com/moco/en-US/pdf/2013_Mozilla_Foundation_Fed_990_Public_Disclosure.pdf https://static.mozilla.com/moco/en-US/pdf/2013_Mozilla_Found... It's two years old, but if you go through it you'll see some very large numbers in the officer compensation lines, but it's mostly from "related organizations" and not the foundation itself. I'm not really sure how to parse it, and it may have changed in the last 2 years.
- newhnuser1 11y ago
  I used to donate five dollar per month for different free and open source software or foundations, I've given numerous such five dollars to Mozilla. However, Mozilla project is dead to me now. Firefox is getting objectively worse (XUL removal, Pocket etc.) and the Mozilla project lost when they carve into the bullies when the CEO was forced to resign for some random donations. I don't if you donate to Hitler, it's his personal money, what do you care. Mozilla cannot champion the open web. The open web is dead. Instead donate to OpenBSD or FSF.
  - wwzuk 11y ago
    I was thinking the same, but tried not to post it earlier. Mozilla as a complete entity is too politically progressive for my tastes. It used to be something I looked up to because the technology was portable, configurable and just worked. I am not saying their competitors are any better (as I don't know).
  - PedroBatista 11y ago
    Agree 100%. The whole Brendan Eich debacle ended my relationship with Mozilla, not because it was a "bump in the road" but because it was a manifestation of the insidious mob mentality that took over most of Mozilla. A significant proportion of "Mozillians" are either mercenaries trying to advance their career or SJW collecting the paycheck and using Mozilla as a platform for their own agendas, they couldn't care less about the Web and in the last 2/3 years the product shows it.
- magicalist 11y ago
  > The answer is that all the money Mozilla Corp makes is reinvested back into Mozilla Corp (salaries etc). The Mozilla Foundation -- a non-profit which wholly owns Mozilla Corp -- is not funded by Mozilla Corp, but relies entirely on donations. Mozilla Foundations is responsible for philantropic education and awareness campaigns. Like...what? This answer and the one below from the Foundation employee don't actually give any specifics. That's actually slightly alarming, as it's a guarantee that donations won't be directly supporting the browser (or Rust, or...) but will instead be going to some vaguely described campaigns. I'm all for marketing Firefox and defeating the TPP, but let's confirm that's exactly what we're talking about here (and get some examples of recent work). Mozilla in the name isn't enough when the only Mozilla I know is what this money isn't going to.
  - FooBarWidget 11y ago
    You could just go to their website (www.mozilla.org) and find out.
    - magicalist 11y ago
      There really isn't much information there (or at least I can't find it). I'm not attacking here, just giving my impression as a potential donor, albeit with some skepticism. I was able to find information on the Ford-Mozilla Open Web Fellows program[1] and a list of events[2]. Funding for the first is obvious, for the second it seems like many of the events either aren't run by Mozilla, just recognized by them, or the funding isn't directly called out. It would be great to see broken down what funding actually goes to. mozilla.org, as I said, seems to just be banking mostly on the Mozilla name (the phrase "Donate to Mozilla, the non-profit behind Firefox" doesn't exactly keep things clear). The donate page has no information on the subject, the Donate FAQ is a wiki page with no information on the subject. As an example, the EFF has a great "Our Work" page[3], with a nice overview of a bunch of projects and big icons leading to really in-depth coverage of their work in each of six areas. The page also doubles as a nice portal into the subjects of interest themselves, if you want to know more. [1] https://advocacy.mozilla.org/open-web-fellows/ https://advocacy.mozilla.org/open-web-fellows/ [2] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/contribute/events/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/contribute/events/ [3] https://www.eff.org/issues https://www.eff.org/issues
- simula67 11y ago
  > Mozilla Corp makes money through corporate deals >The Mozilla Foundation -- a non-profit which wholly owns Mozilla Corp -- is not funded by Mozilla Corp Why not ?
  - dragonwriter 11y ago
    Because Mozilla Foundation, which is the sole owner of Mozilla Corp, has decided not to extract money from Mozilla Corp.
  - bzbarsky 11y ago
    The Mozilla Foundation _is_ funded by Mozilla Corp to some extent. As I understand it, the amount to which it can be thus funded, while retaining its nonprofit status, depends on the amount of other donations that it gets. Nonprofits who get too much of their funding from a single source apparently lose their status.
- kentrado 11y ago
  Please don't donate to the Mozilla Foundation or any other software foundation for that matter. Most of the time they are over politicized and the money is used to pay the salaries of open source politicians or to fund campaigns that they will put in their resume so that they can get a big execs job once they get tired of their open source stepping stone. It is not about technology, as they say, it about "people". What you might not know is that the people they are mainly concerned about is themselves. It is very hard to corrupt, defraud, steal and cheat on a project that is just about technology. So they have to make it about something else, something that transcends technology so that they don't have to accountable by any metric. All of this, am sure, may sound a bit harsh for people who are unaware of the inner workings of foundations behind their political, marketing façade. However, it should come to no surprise to anyone who has had any experience with the government in the real world. We would like to think that open source is above all of that corruption and in some ways it is, but I have to repeat my previous point that Foundations aren't about OS, they are about "people". The corruption within Foundations is subtle, but it is present and I would like to argue that it is unavoidable. The reason being is that if tomorrow I get the job of chairman of the Mozilla Foundation, I will do my best to use the funds to promote campaigns that will look good on my resume to that I can use it as leverage when I apply for a big execs job at Intel. I wouldn't give less of a shit, if those campaigns are ineffectual, wasteful or over politicized.
  - RobertoG 11y ago
    It would be very naive to assume that this kind of things, that happens in all the human endeavours, don't happen in organizations that have "foundation" in the name. That doesn't mean that this can't be controlled (to some point) or that the foundation doesn't make any real good. Is it your experience directly about the Mozilla Foundation?
callesgg 11y ago
While i do think mozilla is great, firefox is my main browser and i am following the servo project. Just recently we had this article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10630996 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10630996 edit: @FooBarWidget had a good answer
- richardboegli 11y ago
  OK you beat both melling and myself by an hour....
- icebraining 11y ago
  Sorry, mistakenly downvoted :|
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
SFjulie1 11y ago
well, donating to mozilla and not openSSL, freeBSD does not make a better internet. Nowadays we have strictly NO LTS free/open source portable build chain of decent quality (compiler, linkers). (maybe also because of the norms) When I say LTS compiler, I mean a compiler that can portably and reproducibly build code in C without flags on the CLI to the same exec and without developers having to archive their compiler every time compile to be sure to be able to build it once again with the same results. You think this situation is not yet existing? Hu hu hu hu hu ... Houston, you have a problem. Even though I appreciate LLVM/GCC, LLVM/GCC new major release may imply to patch specifically the C code for the $CC release. And Ox flags may give weird unexpected results per compiler. And you may nowadays need GCC for some platform with specific code, and LLVM for others. So how do we handle this complexity? The C code is less and less idempotent in time and architecture and performance... How do we fully support long time support for reproducible multi platform build ?
- yeukhon 11y ago
  LTS makes sense for an operating system. LTS doesn't make sense for utility. Actually, there is an LTS version of Firefox known as ESR [1]. You typically see this on university computers or some corporate machines. Personally, I don't see the value of ESR, because internal applications should be constantly improving, more and more machines are equipped with Chrome which AFAIK doesn't have ESR, and more and more corporate are giving out machines or allowing workers to tunnel in with VPN from personal workstation, the argument to actually continue to use ESR is diminishing IMO. Anyway, I think you can create a thread to ask people to donate to other causes. That's fine. [1]: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/faq/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/faq/
- admax88q 11y ago
  If C compilers are such a problem then developers should move to better languages. It's not the 70s anymore.
  - SFjulie1 11y ago
    No language other than C and FORTRAN have correct numerical libraries with a decent amount of speed. Would you like the next plane that will make you travel to have the math done in javascript? Would you like your pacemaker to fry 17W/h for a V8 engine and do you need mozilla embedded in it ? Would you feel safe with nuclear plants control on the cloud? Does a space probe rather needs support for an oauth2.0 or correct numerical analysis? Don't you care that banking systems are correctly translating numerical amounts? I mean computer are used for critical purpose too. EDIT PS: numpy in python is binding on fortran libraries to do the job.
tosseraccount 11y ago
Mozilla has become too politicized for me. When the board intervenes to fire the CEO for basic civic engagement which we should generally encourage in citizens, then they don't need my money any more.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- dominotw 11y ago
  This is the reason i stopped donating to them.
- hack_edu 11y ago
  I don't keep up too much, so what basic civic engagement issues have they acted on since the one highly publicized incident? A browser like Mozilla, and its place in the market, is overtly political in itself. It always has been; open source is politics. Heck, dozens of major OSS projects have the "don't donate to us, donate to our sponsored charity" thing going on. Those projects focus on very liberal, social justice issues too though with a more global focus. But, what's happened since the one incident?
  - bad_user 11y ago
    While many open source projects tend to get political, open source is not about politics any more than regular proprietary products are.
    - vdaniuk 11y ago
      >open source is not about politics This is a quite naive point of view that even very smart people hold. Open source software makes and breaks whole industries in software, of course it's political.
      - mason240 11y ago
        You don't think it's a bit silly to say that building a product or tool is the same thing as engaging in government?
janisS 11y ago
Wikipedia and Mozilla are great products so I donate once a year for both projects.
- alex95 11y ago
  Thanks for that. Are you trying to boost your ego or something?
jhpriestley 11y ago
After reading the FAQ entry under "How will my donation be used", I have no idea what a donation would be used for. "In general, resources are dedicated to promoting openness, innovation and opportunity on the Internet in ways that will benefit everyone." Extremely vague.
Kiro 11y ago
OT but what are they using to accept donations? I'm about to set up a donation page on a project I'm running and been looking for solutions. What do people recommend?
- chimeracoder 11y ago
  > OT but what are they using to accept donations? I'm about to set up a donation page on a project I'm running and been looking for solutions. What do people recommend? Previously I worked at two different non-profits which needed to answer this same question. Both times, we chose Stripe, because it ended up being the best combination of simple for us to set up and fast for donators to use[0]. (Disclaimer: I now work at Stripe, but I'm answering your question based on my previous experiences as a Stripe customer, not in any official capacity). [0] https://stripe.com/checkout https://stripe.com/checkout
- davidascher 11y ago
  Check out the code here: https://github.com/mozilla/donate.mozilla.org https://github.com/mozilla/donate.mozilla.org TLDR: stripe for donations, custom software for the forms.
christopherDam 11y ago
I think Mozilla is one of great organization and community. I love them as open source community. They are very polite and always helps and welcome to new bies. I really like the attitude of all the Mozillian. I think Open source world needed more polite and helpful people like Mozillians.
AdmiralAsshat 11y ago
Have they thought about coordinating with Amazon to make Mozilla a SMILE partner? I usually donate through them to the EFF, but it would be cool to throw some of it Mozilla's way.
- valiant_try 11y ago
  Mozilla does have an Amazon Smile account. I believe you start at smile.amazon.com and search for Mozilla.
  - AdmiralAsshat 11y ago
    Oh, sweet! I guess I'll have to alternate between Mozilla and EFF now. Thanks!
parent5446 11y ago
I wish more people considered donating to Mozilla, Wikipedia, and other similar movements. I feel like many non-technical oriented people don't really understand that the software and websites they use are often times built completely with donated money, and cannot survive without it.
- dingaling 11y ago
  Wikipedia is big, stable, midly incremental and dominant[0]. Does it need more money that its current baseload income? If we applied the same traits to the browser market we'd be crying-out for an alternative. I don't know what that alternative is, so it's difficult to donate towards it. But I don't believe that encouraging more donations to Wikipedia is going to move collective human knowledge forward. In contrast, Mozilla is constantly having to chase new technological targets and compete against well-funded corporate alternatives. I can understand why they need to keep expanding their income. [0] deliberately setting-aside all the other subjective complaints about its internal processes.
  - vlehto 11y ago
    Alternative would be encyclopedia Britannica. There every article is mostly behind paywall. Wikipedia is dominant because it's better. They need money to keep servers running. If they don't get funding, they will simply die. There is no guarantee that similar project would ever fly again.
cronjobber 11y ago
This ship sailed when they purged Eich.
- storrgie 11y ago
  Funding perpetually offended folks seems to have less utility than say dumping to eff
- xigency 11y ago
  Wow, purged is right. I don't generally follow tech. politics but reading about this episode is horrendous.
javipas 11y ago
Two donations made. First, the money ($10). Then, the post (http://theunshut.com/2015/11/30/saving-mozilla/ http://theunshut.com/2015/11/30/saving-mozilla/). We'd be in a much different world today if Mozilla never existed. If any contributor/employee at Mozilla here reads this, THANKS.
- mconley 11y ago
  contributor/employee at Mozilla here. Thank _you_.
  - javipas 11y ago
    ;)
newscracker 11y ago
There's a lot of stuff that Mozilla does, but I wish there were a way to donate and say "try your best to allocate my money for project X" within Mozilla (Corporation, which I now understand is not the one supported by donations). While Mozilla Corporation seems to primarily focus on Firefox and Firefox OS, I would like to see more attention and effort devoted on the following: 1. Mozilla Thunderbird to get a lot more attention and a strong roadmap (something like the now defunct Mozilla Messaging initiative). 2. A good high end Firefox OS phone that is widely available and gives a good enough competition to Android and iOS, even though it's quite late and it may not have an apps collection like the other platforms do. 3. Reviving Persona/BrowserID, which many people here and elsewhere have asked for. From recent discussions I do understand this is not easy to do, but we need someone knowledgeable and available to take the lead and have Mozilla's brand pushing this for a wider reach.
- Frondo 11y ago
  You know what I bet'd really pique their interest around reviving Persona? Not a donation, but start talking about it and evangelizing it, and get together with other interested devs to get them to do the same. Mozilla's going to respond a lot better to widespread public developer interest than to a $100 donation.
_lce0 11y ago
just wanted to add that maybe allowing to donate without javascript enabled could make easier for people to donate?
j-pb 11y ago
They are dead to me since they tried to kill WebSQL/WebDB. Mozilla has become to the web what Stallman has become for emacs.

161 points by swcoders 11y ago

Their FAQ (https://wiki.mozilla.org/Donate#Don.27t_Mozilla_products.2C_like_Firefox.2C_earn_income.3F https://wiki.mozilla.org/Donate#Don.27t_Mozilla_products.2C_...) contains pretty important information. In particular, it answers why one should donate when Mozilla Corp makes money through corporate deals (e.g. Google and Yahoo search commissions). The answer is that all the money Mozilla Corp makes is reinvested back into Mozilla Corp (salaries etc). The Mozilla Foundation -- a non-profit which wholly owns Mozilla Corp -- is not funded by Mozilla Corp, but relies entirely on donations. Mozilla Foundations is responsible for philantropic education and awareness campaigns. So this link is not about donating to Mozilla Corp, where the bulk of Firefox development happens. It's about donating to Mozilla Foundation.

melling 11y ago
Less than a week ago Mozilla said they don't need the millions from Google. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10630996 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10630996
- richardboegli 11y ago
  You just beat me to this :)
- amooiman 11y ago
  As @FooBarWidget says, this is about donating to the Mozilla Foundation, not the Corporation (which builds Firefox products). I'm an employee at the Foundation, and these donations help us keep running and working towards our mission, backed by these principles: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/
  - melling 11y ago
    All sounds warm and fuzzy to me. The Foundation should try to be more concrete in explaining what they do, and are currently accomplishing. Maybe this is already explained somewhere but I have no idea, and I'm a regular reader of HN, for example. Most people will spend even less time looking into it. The Mozilla Foundation/Corporation thing will only confuse people. Anyway, I'm donating kharma by explaining all of this. I'm done for now.
    - FooBarWidget 11y ago
      So what you're saying is that you have a negative/cynic view about Mozilla Corp/Foundation, but couldn't be bothered to read the rest of their website to find out whether your view is correct, and won't change your viewpoint until someone makes it easy for you?
      - dhemmerling 11y ago
        I think they're saying it's not the best way to go about asking someone for a gift of money. It's not all that cynical to be skeptical of vaguely defined goals.
amooiman 11y ago
This is exactly right. I'm an engineer at the non-profit Mozilla Foundation, and these donations keep us working towards our mission (found at https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/details/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/details/).
- J_Darnley 11y ago
  Would that be your mission to copy Chrome as much as possible?
- hack_edu 11y ago
  Now if only it all wasn't spent on the current massive expansion of the Marketing team and their new executive's salaries. The new CMO has a very checkered history with questionable results. Very much the nepotist who manages to pack his team with former colleagues. Its a big and divisive internal issue right now. :(
  - orbitur 11y ago
    At Mozilla Foundation? Got any links to discussions?
    - hack_edu 11y ago
      Admittedly, its all off record hearsay as it's not to smart to talk badly about your C-levels in public discussion. Though I must say, as a user its hard to sincerely distinguish the business motives of Firefox from other parts of the org. Especially in the recent push of the browser.
      - caseysoftware 11y ago
        > not to smart to talk badly about your C-levels in public discussion For certain things. But for badthink, seek and destroy.
    - zrail 11y ago
      The latest IRS Form 990 for the Mozilla Foundation I can find is here: https://static.mozilla.com/moco/en-US/pdf/2013_Mozilla_Foundation_Fed_990_Public_Disclosure.pdf https://static.mozilla.com/moco/en-US/pdf/2013_Mozilla_Found... It's two years old, but if you go through it you'll see some very large numbers in the officer compensation lines, but it's mostly from "related organizations" and not the foundation itself. I'm not really sure how to parse it, and it may have changed in the last 2 years.
newhnuser1 11y ago
I used to donate five dollar per month for different free and open source software or foundations, I've given numerous such five dollars to Mozilla. However, Mozilla project is dead to me now. Firefox is getting objectively worse (XUL removal, Pocket etc.) and the Mozilla project lost when they carve into the bullies when the CEO was forced to resign for some random donations. I don't if you donate to Hitler, it's his personal money, what do you care. Mozilla cannot champion the open web. The open web is dead. Instead donate to OpenBSD or FSF.
- wwzuk 11y ago
  I was thinking the same, but tried not to post it earlier. Mozilla as a complete entity is too politically progressive for my tastes. It used to be something I looked up to because the technology was portable, configurable and just worked. I am not saying their competitors are any better (as I don't know).
- PedroBatista 11y ago
  Agree 100%. The whole Brendan Eich debacle ended my relationship with Mozilla, not because it was a "bump in the road" but because it was a manifestation of the insidious mob mentality that took over most of Mozilla. A significant proportion of "Mozillians" are either mercenaries trying to advance their career or SJW collecting the paycheck and using Mozilla as a platform for their own agendas, they couldn't care less about the Web and in the last 2/3 years the product shows it.
magicalist 11y ago
> The answer is that all the money Mozilla Corp makes is reinvested back into Mozilla Corp (salaries etc). The Mozilla Foundation -- a non-profit which wholly owns Mozilla Corp -- is not funded by Mozilla Corp, but relies entirely on donations. Mozilla Foundations is responsible for philantropic education and awareness campaigns. Like...what? This answer and the one below from the Foundation employee don't actually give any specifics. That's actually slightly alarming, as it's a guarantee that donations won't be directly supporting the browser (or Rust, or...) but will instead be going to some vaguely described campaigns. I'm all for marketing Firefox and defeating the TPP, but let's confirm that's exactly what we're talking about here (and get some examples of recent work). Mozilla in the name isn't enough when the only Mozilla I know is what this money isn't going to.
- FooBarWidget 11y ago
  You could just go to their website (www.mozilla.org) and find out.
  - magicalist 11y ago
    There really isn't much information there (or at least I can't find it). I'm not attacking here, just giving my impression as a potential donor, albeit with some skepticism. I was able to find information on the Ford-Mozilla Open Web Fellows program[1] and a list of events[2]. Funding for the first is obvious, for the second it seems like many of the events either aren't run by Mozilla, just recognized by them, or the funding isn't directly called out. It would be great to see broken down what funding actually goes to. mozilla.org, as I said, seems to just be banking mostly on the Mozilla name (the phrase "Donate to Mozilla, the non-profit behind Firefox" doesn't exactly keep things clear). The donate page has no information on the subject, the Donate FAQ is a wiki page with no information on the subject. As an example, the EFF has a great "Our Work" page[3], with a nice overview of a bunch of projects and big icons leading to really in-depth coverage of their work in each of six areas. The page also doubles as a nice portal into the subjects of interest themselves, if you want to know more. [1] https://advocacy.mozilla.org/open-web-fellows/ https://advocacy.mozilla.org/open-web-fellows/ [2] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/contribute/events/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/contribute/events/ [3] https://www.eff.org/issues https://www.eff.org/issues
simula67 11y ago
> Mozilla Corp makes money through corporate deals >The Mozilla Foundation -- a non-profit which wholly owns Mozilla Corp -- is not funded by Mozilla Corp Why not ?
- dragonwriter 11y ago
  Because Mozilla Foundation, which is the sole owner of Mozilla Corp, has decided not to extract money from Mozilla Corp.
- bzbarsky 11y ago
  The Mozilla Foundation _is_ funded by Mozilla Corp to some extent. As I understand it, the amount to which it can be thus funded, while retaining its nonprofit status, depends on the amount of other donations that it gets. Nonprofits who get too much of their funding from a single source apparently lose their status.
kentrado 11y ago
Please don't donate to the Mozilla Foundation or any other software foundation for that matter. Most of the time they are over politicized and the money is used to pay the salaries of open source politicians or to fund campaigns that they will put in their resume so that they can get a big execs job once they get tired of their open source stepping stone. It is not about technology, as they say, it about "people". What you might not know is that the people they are mainly concerned about is themselves. It is very hard to corrupt, defraud, steal and cheat on a project that is just about technology. So they have to make it about something else, something that transcends technology so that they don't have to accountable by any metric. All of this, am sure, may sound a bit harsh for people who are unaware of the inner workings of foundations behind their political, marketing façade. However, it should come to no surprise to anyone who has had any experience with the government in the real world. We would like to think that open source is above all of that corruption and in some ways it is, but I have to repeat my previous point that Foundations aren't about OS, they are about "people". The corruption within Foundations is subtle, but it is present and I would like to argue that it is unavoidable. The reason being is that if tomorrow I get the job of chairman of the Mozilla Foundation, I will do my best to use the funds to promote campaigns that will look good on my resume to that I can use it as leverage when I apply for a big execs job at Intel. I wouldn't give less of a shit, if those campaigns are ineffectual, wasteful or over politicized.
- RobertoG 11y ago
  It would be very naive to assume that this kind of things, that happens in all the human endeavours, don't happen in organizations that have "foundation" in the name. That doesn't mean that this can't be controlled (to some point) or that the foundation doesn't make any real good. Is it your experience directly about the Mozilla Foundation?

callesgg 11y ago

While i do think mozilla is great, firefox is my main browser and i am following the servo project. Just recently we had this article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10630996 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10630996 edit: @FooBarWidget had a good answer

richardboegli 11y ago
OK you beat both melling and myself by an hour....
icebraining 11y ago
Sorry, mistakenly downvoted :|

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

SFjulie1 11y ago

well, donating to mozilla and not openSSL, freeBSD does not make a better internet. Nowadays we have strictly NO LTS free/open source portable build chain of decent quality (compiler, linkers). (maybe also because of the norms) When I say LTS compiler, I mean a compiler that can portably and reproducibly build code in C without flags on the CLI to the same exec and without developers having to archive their compiler every time compile to be sure to be able to build it once again with the same results. You think this situation is not yet existing? Hu hu hu hu hu ... Houston, you have a problem. Even though I appreciate LLVM/GCC, LLVM/GCC new major release may imply to patch specifically the C code for the $CC release. And Ox flags may give weird unexpected results per compiler. And you may nowadays need GCC for some platform with specific code, and LLVM for others. So how do we handle this complexity? The C code is less and less idempotent in time and architecture and performance... How do we fully support long time support for reproducible multi platform build ?

yeukhon 11y ago
LTS makes sense for an operating system. LTS doesn't make sense for utility. Actually, there is an LTS version of Firefox known as ESR [1]. You typically see this on university computers or some corporate machines. Personally, I don't see the value of ESR, because internal applications should be constantly improving, more and more machines are equipped with Chrome which AFAIK doesn't have ESR, and more and more corporate are giving out machines or allowing workers to tunnel in with VPN from personal workstation, the argument to actually continue to use ESR is diminishing IMO. Anyway, I think you can create a thread to ask people to donate to other causes. That's fine. [1]: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/faq/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/faq/
admax88q 11y ago
If C compilers are such a problem then developers should move to better languages. It's not the 70s anymore.
- SFjulie1 11y ago
  No language other than C and FORTRAN have correct numerical libraries with a decent amount of speed. Would you like the next plane that will make you travel to have the math done in javascript? Would you like your pacemaker to fry 17W/h for a V8 engine and do you need mozilla embedded in it ? Would you feel safe with nuclear plants control on the cloud? Does a space probe rather needs support for an oauth2.0 or correct numerical analysis? Don't you care that banking systems are correctly translating numerical amounts? I mean computer are used for critical purpose too. EDIT PS: numpy in python is binding on fortran libraries to do the job.

tosseraccount 11y ago

Mozilla has become too politicized for me. When the board intervenes to fire the CEO for basic civic engagement which we should generally encourage in citizens, then they don't need my money any more.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
dominotw 11y ago
This is the reason i stopped donating to them.
hack_edu 11y ago
I don't keep up too much, so what basic civic engagement issues have they acted on since the one highly publicized incident? A browser like Mozilla, and its place in the market, is overtly political in itself. It always has been; open source is politics. Heck, dozens of major OSS projects have the "don't donate to us, donate to our sponsored charity" thing going on. Those projects focus on very liberal, social justice issues too though with a more global focus. But, what's happened since the one incident?
- bad_user 11y ago
  While many open source projects tend to get political, open source is not about politics any more than regular proprietary products are.
  - vdaniuk 11y ago
    >open source is not about politics This is a quite naive point of view that even very smart people hold. Open source software makes and breaks whole industries in software, of course it's political.
    - mason240 11y ago
      You don't think it's a bit silly to say that building a product or tool is the same thing as engaging in government?

janisS 11y ago

Wikipedia and Mozilla are great products so I donate once a year for both projects.

alex95 11y ago
Thanks for that. Are you trying to boost your ego or something?

jhpriestley 11y ago

After reading the FAQ entry under "How will my donation be used", I have no idea what a donation would be used for. "In general, resources are dedicated to promoting openness, innovation and opportunity on the Internet in ways that will benefit everyone." Extremely vague.

Kiro 11y ago

OT but what are they using to accept donations? I'm about to set up a donation page on a project I'm running and been looking for solutions. What do people recommend?

chimeracoder 11y ago
> OT but what are they using to accept donations? I'm about to set up a donation page on a project I'm running and been looking for solutions. What do people recommend? Previously I worked at two different non-profits which needed to answer this same question. Both times, we chose Stripe, because it ended up being the best combination of simple for us to set up and fast for donators to use[0]. (Disclaimer: I now work at Stripe, but I'm answering your question based on my previous experiences as a Stripe customer, not in any official capacity). [0] https://stripe.com/checkout https://stripe.com/checkout
davidascher 11y ago
Check out the code here: https://github.com/mozilla/donate.mozilla.org https://github.com/mozilla/donate.mozilla.org TLDR: stripe for donations, custom software for the forms.

christopherDam 11y ago

I think Mozilla is one of great organization and community. I love them as open source community. They are very polite and always helps and welcome to new bies. I really like the attitude of all the Mozillian. I think Open source world needed more polite and helpful people like Mozillians.

AdmiralAsshat 11y ago

Have they thought about coordinating with Amazon to make Mozilla a SMILE partner? I usually donate through them to the EFF, but it would be cool to throw some of it Mozilla's way.

valiant_try 11y ago
Mozilla does have an Amazon Smile account. I believe you start at smile.amazon.com and search for Mozilla.
- AdmiralAsshat 11y ago
  Oh, sweet! I guess I'll have to alternate between Mozilla and EFF now. Thanks!

parent5446 11y ago

I wish more people considered donating to Mozilla, Wikipedia, and other similar movements. I feel like many non-technical oriented people don't really understand that the software and websites they use are often times built completely with donated money, and cannot survive without it.

dingaling 11y ago
Wikipedia is big, stable, midly incremental and dominant[0]. Does it need more money that its current baseload income? If we applied the same traits to the browser market we'd be crying-out for an alternative. I don't know what that alternative is, so it's difficult to donate towards it. But I don't believe that encouraging more donations to Wikipedia is going to move collective human knowledge forward. In contrast, Mozilla is constantly having to chase new technological targets and compete against well-funded corporate alternatives. I can understand why they need to keep expanding their income. [0] deliberately setting-aside all the other subjective complaints about its internal processes.
- vlehto 11y ago
  Alternative would be encyclopedia Britannica. There every article is mostly behind paywall. Wikipedia is dominant because it's better. They need money to keep servers running. If they don't get funding, they will simply die. There is no guarantee that similar project would ever fly again.

cronjobber 11y ago

This ship sailed when they purged Eich.

storrgie 11y ago
Funding perpetually offended folks seems to have less utility than say dumping to eff
xigency 11y ago
Wow, purged is right. I don't generally follow tech. politics but reading about this episode is horrendous.

javipas 11y ago

Two donations made. First, the money ($10). Then, the post (http://theunshut.com/2015/11/30/saving-mozilla/ http://theunshut.com/2015/11/30/saving-mozilla/). We'd be in a much different world today if Mozilla never existed. If any contributor/employee at Mozilla here reads this, THANKS.

mconley 11y ago
contributor/employee at Mozilla here. Thank _you_.
- javipas 11y ago
  ;)

newscracker 11y ago

There's a lot of stuff that Mozilla does, but I wish there were a way to donate and say "try your best to allocate my money for project X" within Mozilla (Corporation, which I now understand is not the one supported by donations). While Mozilla Corporation seems to primarily focus on Firefox and Firefox OS, I would like to see more attention and effort devoted on the following: 1. Mozilla Thunderbird to get a lot more attention and a strong roadmap (something like the now defunct Mozilla Messaging initiative). 2. A good high end Firefox OS phone that is widely available and gives a good enough competition to Android and iOS, even though it's quite late and it may not have an apps collection like the other platforms do. 3. Reviving Persona/BrowserID, which many people here and elsewhere have asked for. From recent discussions I do understand this is not easy to do, but we need someone knowledgeable and available to take the lead and have Mozilla's brand pushing this for a wider reach.

Frondo 11y ago
You know what I bet'd really pique their interest around reviving Persona? Not a donation, but start talking about it and evangelizing it, and get together with other interested devs to get them to do the same. Mozilla's going to respond a lot better to widespread public developer interest than to a $100 donation.

_lce0 11y ago

just wanted to add that maybe allowing to donate without javascript enabled could make easier for people to donate?

j-pb 11y ago

They are dead to me since they tried to kill WebSQL/WebDB. Mozilla has become to the web what Stallman has become for emacs.