Bizarre Finances of Mozilla | Prime Reacts

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[andre]

30K to a tiny company with no website and an address sounds like a part time contractor. As someone who knows someone with a business with no website and a residence as the address.

[kenwood]

Bill Gates provided Microsoft Office to Apple back in the day so that he was not an antitrust monopolist. That's why Google funds Mozilla.

[riemervdzee]

I think Google benefits from having Firefox as an alternative browser. Otherwise they would be seen as a monopoly very soon, with possibly the EU sending in a wrench in or two.

There are already talks that combining chrome with their search engine is unfair. A solution would be a pop-up to allow the user to select their search engine on first startup, bit like Windows and edge. But Google won't like that ofc

[insydegroup]

"Hush money" is mostly in the cash. I'm from a very corrupt country and believe me, you don't want to have digital traces. 30k you can physically put into the pocket of your jacket. No need to overcomplicate things.
I can speculate, but 30k can be a simple one-time payment for some services from an outsourcer or subcontractor.

[kevinkkirimii]

I see a correlation between Mozilla and Rust now.

[burhanbudak]

I hate the Mozilla board for cancelling really good projects like STT, TTS, DeepVoice, DeepSpeech, Send, Notes, FirefoxOS and others. Brenden Eich situation is still weird but he was right, some sect abducted the foundation.

[vantagepointmoon]

1 billion in assets with 300 mil in net profit isn't terribly a lot. Overall, it seems they are riding the wave of having a stable revenue while throwing around some amounts to justify their non-profit status (same with keeping the donations open). Overall the bigger news is that google basically controls their browser competitor via revenue capture

[briand]

Google needs Mozilla to survive the same way 90's Microsoft needed Apple to do the same. It's a much better deal to fund your competitor than be viewed as a monopoly by regulators.

[apollolux]

There was a time when Firefox was almost 50% of the desktop browser market share, and this was during IE's heyday when us webdevs had to make shims and hacks to work around the ridiculous layout and behavior quirks that MS refused to fix until IE8 if we wanted to maintain multi-browser compatibility for our websites. Then Mozilla fumbled the bag when Apple not only released decent versions of Safari starting with the Intel Macs but also the Windows versions of Safari and Google started releasing Chrome, both not coincidentally descended from KHTML and friends rendering.

[superschnitzeltv]

just a note, but with a single Google search i found lots of information on Neil Lewis, Jr and the Action Research Collective (including a website). He is a behavioural scientist and an associate professor at Cornell University and there is lots of information on his research. After checking the newsletter linked in the article i could even find a link to the website there (might have been added later). Now i dont know if some of this information was not available at the time this article was written, but i do think its at least bad practice to make this seem more opaque than it really is.

[ymi_yugy]

What a bizarre article.
I'm not a lawyer, but the Mozilla structure seems very sensible.
At it's core the foundation has social goals, including increasing diversity, that grant them the 501(c)(3) tax exempt status.
Retaining that status actually requires them to solicit donations.
So why do those for-profit companies exist? Developing Firefox, VPNs and selling ads is not a charitable purpose.
The entire foundation would loose their tax exempt status if they used charitable donations to fund Firefox development. I think this is pretty clear. The only mention of Firefox I could find on the foundations website is in the history section.
The foundation is spending money dei organizations because it's their stated goal, to advance dei causes.

[kyguypi]

Foundations can keep a balance at the end of the year, that's the idea. A simple foundation is meant to be a store of capital that can perform it's mission indefinitely from the interest on that capital.

It just sounds like Mozilla spends money on lobbyists, which isn't all that unexpected. It's common for lobbying firms to have little or no public presence or website, and it's common for them to pop up out of nowhere and disappear just as quickly as they're often based on immediate relationships with specific politicians that might have a 2 year term in office. Lobbying in general is pretty gross, but you bet st judes is giving money to companies with no website so done congressman's former chief of staff will get them a meeting about some health insurance regulation.

Also, lobbying being mostly about relationships, a lobbyist might present a certain agenda that matches the agenda of some politician or group, but even pro-racial-justice focused politicians have a vote on net neutrality regulations.

[Mempler]

Everything except Firefox is khtml developed by KDE.

Webkit? khtml!
Chrome? WebKit!
Edge? Chrome!
Opera? Chrome!

[duncanw]

The statement about nonprofits is false. Nonprofits (501c3, at least) can run "operating surplusses, " and even save them up over multiple years, make large-scale capital investments, own interest-bearing assets, etc.

The difference is that nonprofits cannot issue stock. "Profit" means dividends and speculative gains on shares by the owners (shareholders).

[kratosgod-citq]

Strangest thing is they recently fired 250 firefox developers because of "lack of money".

[Warflay]

Cynics would say that Google is financing Firefox mostly to not have to deal with anti-trust actions by the US or EU

[snowballeffect]

The Action Research Collaborative DOES have a website... It's literally linked in the article the guy is quoting from lmao. I'm honestly surprised prime didn't even try to google anything this article was saying lol.

[SturmxHawke]

500k to racism, 400k to leftists, it's a Californian company, it all makes sense.

[Brawaru]

Funnily, Mozilla does not fund the development of Thunderbird, it's running entirely on donations, while still being a part of Mozilla. Like an abandoned child.

[ya]

It's funny that Mozilla and Firefox, specifically, promote themselves as being a privacy focused company and software, while profitting the most from a company which the main business is selling all their customer's data.