this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2024
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Privacy
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Here's a take by a Mozilla employee :
https://fosstodon.org/@gabrielesvelto/112779506156690032
Firefox has never tried to run on donations though.
You're actually wrong. They did when they started.
I know because I donated
The funny thing is that the people who complain most about stuff like this, tend to be the people who contribute the least.
If you don't like them making money to support development, you're more than welcome to work full time on developing it for free
You're not supporting development, you're supporting a rich guy getting richer:
https://lunduke.locals.com/post/4387539/firefox-money-investigating-the-bizarre-finances-of-mozilla
I could be mistaken, but I'm pretty sure all donations go to The Mozilla Foundation. I believe the foundation is the decision-making power for the corporation.
Either way, yes, Mozilla sold their soul to Google (specifically, giving preference to Google Search) in exchange for sustainability (read: survival). Rather difficult to compete in a market where Google and Apple collectively hold upwards of 85% market share for something they provide "free."
https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share
Rich guy?
Presumably that is about Mitchell Baker.. A woman.. who was there since the beginning when the company was failing.....
The new CEO is also a woman and a temp CEO, who I'm guessing will again be replaced by an existing employee. Which guy are you referring to?
What browser projects are you assisting with or donating to?
Are you assisting with any open source projects at all?
The biggest problem with the oss community is that as a developer, you need to accept always that you'll get treated like absolute dirt by the community.
One of my projects went FrontPage on many major Linux sites, and I ended up dropping it because I got tired of the abuse.
You'll get plenty of people contributing nothing to your project or competing ones, but they'll tell you the 50 different ways you suck
I donated back when Firefox was in beta. They were a dying company back then.
Are you saying open source developers shouldn't be rewarded at all?
Donations are a tiny fraction of Mozilla's income. Firefox and related projects are their money earners for their actually charitable projects, pulling in at least half a billion or so a year.
Not saying that the CEO pay is adequate or something, but your take is literally ignoring the article you yourself quoted.
Non-profits of the scale that Mozilla is need good talent to continue to exist. Good talent needs to be paid close to market rates to work for non-profits, and retaining good talent requires even better pay and benefits than just what will get good talent in the door
No matter how much or how little the talent at a nonprofit is paid people will go "why are they paying the CEO a $1 million dollar salary? They could hire 6-8 developers for that much!" "Why are they paying developers 100k/year? Can't they accept 80k for the privilege of working for such an important bastion of the open internet?"
15 million a year is a lot but it's also 1/3 the median CEO pay rate. They have to pay the CEO at least semi-competitively to retain them