[FooBarWidget]

Their FAQ (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.

[amooiman]

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/).

[hack_edu]

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]

At Mozilla Foundation? Got any links to discussions?

[zrail]

The latest IRS Form 990 for the Mozilla Foundation I can find is here:

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.

[hack_edu]

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]

> not to smart to talk badly about your C-levels in public discussion

For certain things. But for badthink, seek and destroy.

[mrec]

Out of curiosity, is the MDN a Corp or a Foundation thing? I couldn't tell from the homepage, and I'm always stunned at how good a resource that is.

[davidascher]

MDN is powered by Corp staff but also a large # of awesome volunteer contributors.

[FooBarWidget]

Hi amooiman, I love Mozilla. I've been following it since pretty much the beginning, and I think it's not getting the recognition it deserves. For example, if you read HN or Slashdot, it's always filled about negative reactions about Mozilla. Some of them have a point, but a lot of them are based on old misconceptions or wrong information. How do you feel about this and what do you think can be done about this? I feel that Mozilla needs to focus on improving its image for a while.

[amooiman]

I only started working here a few months ago so I'm still forming my thoughts, but I definitely agree with the general notion that there needs to be some better external visibility/clarity of what we're doing. I can tell you the people here are the most passionate I've met about what they're doing and the organization's mission as a whole, which excites me to log on for work every day in a way that other jobs haven't. As for negative reactions online, well, it's the internet and that's bound to happen. It's only reasonable to expend a certain amount of energy correcting people vs focusing on the work that matters.

[FooBarWidget]

It's true that the Internet in general attracts negative reactions. But Mozilla is based on the Internet, so don't you think that these reactions are representative of the true demographic and that they should be given more weight?

[J_Darnley]

Would that be your mission to copy Chrome as much as possible?

[magicalist]

> 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.

[kevinzawacki]

Donations to the Mozilla Foundation support work in the realms of education and advocacy. More specifically, this means gifts support the free, open source tools and curriculum at teach.mozilla.org, which teach skills like privacy, security, HTML, CSS and more. These activities and products are used in classrooms around the world.

A couple more examples: Thimble, our educational code editor (mzl.la/thimble), and Webmaker, our Android app for mobile-first Web users (mzl.la/webmaker).

Donor support also helps Mozilla fight for pressing issues like net neutrality and mass surveillance reform. Mozilla's community of donors provided the resources we needed to support a successful campaign for net neutrality in the U.S. this year, plus supported other advocacy campaigns internationally.

-Kevin (from the Mozilla Foundation)

[FooBarWidget]

You could just go to their website (www.mozilla.org) and find out.

[magicalist]

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/

[2] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/contribute/events/

[3] https://www.eff.org/issues

[kentrado]

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]

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?

[simula67]

> 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 ?

[bzbarsky]

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.

[dragonwriter]

Because Mozilla Foundation, which is the sole owner of Mozilla Corp, has decided not to extract money from Mozilla Corp.

[newhnuser1]

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]

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]

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.

[melling]

Less than a week ago Mozilla said they don't need the millions from Google.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10630996

[amooiman]

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/

[melling]

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]

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]

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.

[richardboegli]

You just beat me to this :)