Yes, charitable donations go to charitable causes, not development of a browser which produces profits for a for-profit entity. There's no legal way to channel charitable donations back into a business. To do otherwise would be tax fraud.

This is not a "gotcha", this is a persistent misunderstanding of what is and is not possible in tax law.

I have nothing against this, but at best it would be a modest side hustle. The major comparables in online user fundraising are Wikipedia, which AFAIK is the largest annual online fundraising drive in the world and it raises less than 50% of what search licensing gets. Tor is another one, but off the top of my head, I think it's maybe 1/20th of what Wikipedia raises.

If Firefox stood up a donation drive for the first time I would guess Tor-level revenue and maybe it might crawl upward from there depending on how things go.

Also, my understanding is their organizational structure is what legally enables them to do the search licensing which is their biggest revenue stream. But it means that their browser development is done to generate commercial revenue. If they moved the core browser development under the Foundation, it would unravel the ability to do search licensing deals to support development, which are much stronger than whatever their prospect for user donations would be.

I'm a bit out of my depth here but I believe it's all about the search licensing.

Integrate better calendar and contact management, then create a best of class commercial email service platform, and commercial hosted services around that.

I thought it would have been a great option long before Gmail was even a thought. Even today, they could work with or create a service like Protonmail or another system to offer these services. 10m users at $4/mo/user is $480m/year and that wouldn't be an unreasonable expectation just for the US market in 3-5 years given where they were in 2008.

Of course, I had similar thoughts about Blackberry when iOS and Android hit the market... since they were already entrenched in corporate email at a lot of places, they could have created a best in breed mobile client for their integrated usage ahead of MS playing catch up.

But with Mozilla, it would have been a natural extension as a commercial offering without disrupting the good will behind Firefox and Thunderbird as they were...

You can donate to Mozilla Foundation (parent entity of Mozilla Corporation), which is a non-profit. But you can't expressly state that the money go towards browser development.

I think that Firefox needs an exclusive non-profit foundation, but I don't think Mozilla Corporation/Foundation would allow it, so a fork with a new name (marketing problem) sounds necessary (although splitting the forces may not be a good idea?), I wonder if the current Firefox's forked communities could join forces to create such non-profit foundation, and start from there, making grow the developers under such non-profit foundation, the new main tree.

No

>I've noticed whenever it indicated that a service has removed my data, that same service would come back online as having my data a few weeks later

That's literally their business model. Or it pops up on another site from the same people.

However, the specific issue Krebs highlights with Mozilla/OneRep is trust. It turns out OneRep’s founder was actually running active people-search sites (like Nuwber) on the side. It's hard to trust a removal service that has a financial stake in the very industry it's supposed to be fighting.

For an alternative without that conflict, take a look at Optery (YC W22). We've been flagging the OneRep situation for years. Full disclosure, I'm on the team at Optery. Optery launched on HN in 2021.

breach of contract: unless it was in the contract that he warranted that he didn't/wouldn't do this, it's not a breach of contract?

It does showcase extremely poor due diligence from Mozilla.

As in, you don't want a law to make it illegal in general, you only want to ban immigrants from being data brokers?