[httpsoverdns]

I recently purchased Firefox relay because I thought it was a nifty service to start using to prevent spam and preserve my privacy, but also a driving factor in my purchase was giving money to Mozilla. I didn't really look into it beyond that internal thought process. Your comment made me wonder, are things so segmented at Mozilla that supporting something like relay doesn't actually help Firefox in general?

[input_sh]

Long story short, you made the right choice. You can't purchase anything from a non-profit and you can't donate anything to a corporation.

If you purchase a product from them, it goes to Mozilla Corporation which makes all the products[0], if you donate money to Mozilla, it goes to the foundation.

[0] Minus Thunderbird, Thunderbird is developed by a separate foundation. Both the "Thunderbird foundation" (not actually called that) and Mozilla Corporation are 100% owned by the Mozilla Foundation.

[jamienicol]

I’m a Mozilla employee who works on Firefox, so I’ll try to answer this to the best of my knowledge but as a disclaimer I can’t guarantee I’m 100% correct

Paying for relay will give money to Mozilla Corporation, the same pot the google money goes into, which will predominantly pay for Firefox development but also other products. The corporation’s profits also fund the non-profit Foundation’s activities.

People often raise this argument regarding donating to the Foundation, as that money will be spent by the foundation, therefore not on Firefox. But a dollar raised by the foundation is a dollar less the corporation has to give the foundation, leaving it with more money to spend on Firefox and other things.

You can also donate directly to “MZLA” which makes thunderbird, and that money will be spent on thunderbird.

[Hendrikto]

The problem many people have with donating to the Mozilla Foundation us them squandering enormous amounts of it. Mostly on things nobody asked for and executive pay.

Personally, I don’t feel like firing Firefox devs and starting controversial and expensive diversity campaigns while raising executive pay when Firefox is losing market share every year is being a great steward.

[godelski]

People have a lot of weird excuses for disliking Mozilla. There are definitely legitimate ones, but the point really is "what's the alternative"? Are the faults of Mozilla really so much worse that we'll turn to Google instead? Honestly, that seems silly to me.

Can we just for once not blindly hate something for not being perfect and consequently strengthening an even worse option?

[pessimizer]

> hate something for not being perfect

Could you, and everybody, stop saying this for any reason about any subject? Go through this thread, pick out all of the people saying that they hate Mozilla for "not being perfect." Argue with them.

> the point really is "what's the alternative"?

Yes, that is the point. If there were an alternative people wouldn't complain, they would just leave. But Google is paying Mozilla (and Apple by the way) massive amounts of money not to compete. Mozilla is just very-ungoogled-chromium. It is not an alternative to google, it is one of the alternatives that google offers. I use it because I don't want to leave the internet altogether. It is a pain in the ass that involves a lot of work to bring it up to 70% of the functionality and UI it had 20 years ago.

[bonoboTP]

> so much worse that we'll turn to Google instead

Did you know that ~85% of Mozilla Corp's revenue comes from Google?

[godelski]

  > Did you know that ~85% of Mozilla Corp's revenue comes from Google?

Actually, yes, I did[0] ;)

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45369826

[bonoboTP]

So what remains from your argument? It's been shown that Mozilla Corporation is for-profit, donations to the Mozilla Foundation do not go into the pot that pays for Firefox development, and Mozilla Corporation is 85% funded by Google.

So not independent of Google and not a non-profit.

To be clear: I use Firefox, mainly because uBlock origin is blocked on Chrome.