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.
And thus I guess Foundation has to do a good amount of conventional non-profitty stuff like “education and advocacy,” otherwise it would just be a flimsy facade for what’s substantially a for-profit endeavor?
Why is the browser arm organized as a for-profit at all?
This idea that Mozilla doesn't have enough money to fund Firefox is just wrong, Firefox development is perfectly sustainable, it earns more money than it spends. If you want to give money to the Mozilla Corporation instead of the foundation, you do the same thing as with any company: you purchase products from them (such as their VPN or MDN Plus, both of which are owned by the corporation).
> Why is the browser arm organized as a for-profit at all?
So that they can make business deals with the likes of Google, which they wouldn't be able to do as a non-profit.
Edit: I really wish there was a single thread about Mozilla where this isn't 80% of the completely unnecessary "discussion".
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.
Are there any actual services like this that work properly? 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.
Despite this, Mozilla says they haven’t found a values-aligned replacement yet, so OneRep continues to power the backend temporarily.
How in the world was this not considered fraud, or in the very least - breach of contract?
netule•1h ago
> Firefox is maintained by the Mozilla Corporation, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation. While Firefox does produce revenue — chiefly through search partnerships — this earned income is largely reinvested back into the Corporation. The Mozilla Foundation’s education and advocacy efforts, which span several continents and reach millions of people, are supported by philanthropic donations.[1]
[1]: https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/donate/help/#frequently...
dralley•1h ago
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.
kgwxd•1h ago
PunchyHamster•1h ago
johannes1234321•1h ago
* Make the browser development the charitable work, or
* accept funding to non-charitable company
However Mozilla earns "enough" from Google, so they don't have to try to make either work.
alwa•46m ago
From the Corp’s Wikipedia page [0]:
> As a non-profit, the Mozilla Foundation is limited in terms of the types and amounts of revenue it can have.
Is this an oblique way of saying they couldn’t take Google bucks that way?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation
hrimfaxi•44m ago
FuriouslyAdrift•18m ago
pavon•17m ago
They probably cannot do this. The IRS generally does not consider writing open source software to meet the requirements of a 501c3, for example [1]. They aren't super consistent about it so some groups have gotten 501c3 exemption in the past, but for the most part there is a reason that 501c3 open source foundations focus on support activities, conferences, and not software development.
> accept funding to non-charitable company
They could do this, just like they did for Thunderbird, and I wish they would.
[1] https://www.mill.law/blog/more-501c3-rejections-open-source-...
icepush•1h ago
spelk•42m ago
[0] https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/donate/
fhd2•41m ago
ehutch79•30m ago
input_sh•28m ago
Feel free to subscribe to them to give money directly to the Mozilla Corporation, the future you're looking for is already here.
abawany•50m ago