That’s actually quite impressive and surprising, though it seems that isn’t representative. The average from 2017-2022 (the last year donations were published afaict), is roughly 2.5 million per year, which is still surprisingly high for a rather niche piece of software. (but still less than 1% of what Mozilla would need to raise)
But I wouldn’t draw any conclusions yet based on the single best year since being fully donor supported would require consistently raising enough money every year (and having enough surplus to survive recessions and bad years).
Maybe not 200 million, but I think they could get 100 million in donations. I’d donate if it actually meant anything.
I wouldn’t count on it, but I’d love to be wrong. I do agree with you that Mozilla is better positioned to do so than most others in the space (with the exception of Wikipedia and maybe Signal), but I think even if they were really really really successful they’d fall short of the development budget on its own, and the development budget is just a little over half of the total expenditures.
On the other hand, if Firefox were donation supported, and if everyone who uses Firefox would just consistently donate [voluntarily pay for software we benefit from], it would actually be pretty cheap (less than $1/per user/per month) to fully support Firefox through donations alone.
I guess Signal will probably be a good case study to test/judge the feasability (albeit at a much smaller scale) once the one-time donations from Brian Acton are exhausted.
I thought it was a pretty good example because Thunderbird is a Mozilla project (again). We’ll have to see what the numbers are for 2023. Hopefully they publish them.
The reason 2022 was such an exceptional year is explained in the blog post:
Before we discuss that, you might be wondering what we did differently to generate such a significant surge of support last year.
At the end of 2021, we decided to make a bigger investment in communicating with you. That meant more frequent blog posts and newsletters, daily engagement across our social media channels, and expanding the number of places we interact with you (like our relatively new Mastodon account).
We also attribute this amazing uplift to the release of Thunderbird 102, as well as a first-of-its-kind, in-app donation appeal at the end of year.
In short, we learned that projects like ours can benefit greatly from simply asking for donations, while simultaneously explaining how those donations will benefit the project – and ultimately, how they will benefit you. So let’s talk about that!
I think Firefox gets around 2 million dollars in donations from users last I checked. But they don’t have a donation call-to-action in the browser like Thunderbird does.
I think that’s fine. Start with that. Now you have strong, diversified revenue sources. Then see if you can scale it up impossibly like Wikipedia does.
I’m not sure that it is possible to do incrementally like that because of division between the Foundation and the Corporation.
I could be wrong, but my recollection is that the main limitation of the split model is that donations made to the non-profit cannot be transferred to the Corporation. The upside is that the corporation has more flexibility than the non-profit would have in terms of the revenue streams it is allowed to pursue. But this division seems like it would prevent any sort of incremental shift towards a donation based model, and it would need to be all or nothing. It is entirely possible there are legal or financial solutions or workarounds that I’m unaware of. (better and fuller explanation here)
They have added an option in Firefox to allow sharing of measurements, and the website says they use differential privacy to anonymize user data.
There isn’t a lot of actual data on the website about their tech, so this is just me guessing.
It sounds more like they are using the browser to collect data points, which can be anonymized and send to their ad tech ML engine, and the final result is some sort of prediction of purchase intent that the website can use to serve ads.
It doesn’t seem impossible they can do this without tracking users or sharing personal information.
Only if you have a clear reason to that makes sense to you. The privacy space often skews towards negativity, high bars of purity, and jumping to conclusions. If you let the dominant sentiment of the group in any given moment effect your decisions too much, you’ll be jumping around fairly often. I have a personal rule I try to stick to, where if I can’t clearly verbally articulate a reason to use or to not use a tool, I don’t make a change until I can. I find this prevents a lot of my impulsive changes and filters out a lot of the shortterm hyperbole and fud, and forces me to learn a bit.
I recommend you find a browser you like and have at least moderate trust in, then stick with that, and work to inform yourself/keep up to date with changes. Reassess as needed.
In this specific case, I don’t think there is enough information available yet for any of us to really have a very informed opinion at this point. So what you are largely seeing here is people interpreting this through the lens of their pre-existing impression of Mozilla, of Firefox, etc, and projecting that subjective impression onto the current situation (myself included). Because of this we all see things a little differently. In a few weeks or months there will likely be more solid info to form an opinion from.
I personally have enough mostly positive history with Mozilla to extend them more of a benefit of the doubt than I would a company I’m less familiar with. That trust is nowhere near unconditional, but I do trust that they will (1) generally have their heart in the right place, even when they get something wrong in my eyes (2) be fairly transparent and upfront (3) give me control over my own browser, make it relatively straightforward to disable any feature I don’t want (4) to earnestly care and work towards the values and goals in their manifesto which includes many of the things I care about personally (individual privacy, net neutrality, open source/open standards and an open web, promoting a friendly/inclusive/diverse/human-centric web) They won’t always get things right, but in my experience they often do, and they rarely get things horribly wrong. We’ll see how this plays out.
Mozilla Foundation donations don’t really go where one might think they are going.
On the Donation Page there is a FAQ that has a section of “How will my donation be used?” which points to this page, that has no mention of Firefox, at all.
As far as I understand, donating to Mozilla = funding their broader mission, and initiatives, and all the traditional non-profit work that they do.
If the goal is financially contributing to Firefox, and/or reducing dependence on the search deal, then subscribing to one of the paid services that has been introduced in large part for this reason (reducing dependence on a single revenue stream) is the way to do this (because those paid services fall under the Corporation not the Foundation). E.g. Mozilla VPN, Firefox Relay, Pocket Premium, etc
I’d prefer (with what little I know) for Firefox to have something like Thunderbird has set up for their funding. Essentially, some independence of sorts.
But then that Firefox/Google agreement is sort of in the way and tied into the Foundation.
I’m not very familiar with T-bird or how its funding works (beyond what was stated earlier in this thread) or whether it falls under the foundation the corporation, or neither.It appears to fall into the ‘neither’ category (since 2020, it was moved from the Foundation to a new and separate corporate structure MZLA Technologies Co.) (announced on the Thunderbird blog)
I could be wrong, but I was under the impression the Google contract Mozilla has to set Search (and probably the Safe Search/Phishing feature) in the browser fed back to the Foundation.
I’m still not 100% clear what you mean when you say it is ‘fed back’ or ‘tied into’ the Foundation. Are you saying that you think the contracts for the search deal(s) are handled by the non-profit foundation?
If so, so that would surprise me, since I think the main reason the Corporation was created was to allow for Firefox to pursue commercial revenue streams like the search deal that the non-profit foundation apparently couldn’t. I believe that the Corporation does pay some royalties to the Foundation, and much of that would come from income derived from the search deals (but the royalties are something like ~2-5% of total revenue). My understanding of all this is pretty imperfect so I could be missing or misunderstanding something,
haha i dont think all that 400 million is for developing browser
Mozilla could easily switch to a donation based nonprofit. as someone said Thunderbird alone gets 10 million in donations. you think they cant develop firefox and get some infrastructure to support development with 10 or 20 million$? what a joke. so much bloat these days.
but nah they want to pay ceo 7 million a year and do 30$million Ai Slop trash
Just want to add that Thunderbird is not a niche product. A small company I worked for used it. Millions install everyday. https://stats.thunderbird.net/
The whole split is really interesting - some people mentioned Thunderbird here.
According to Mozilla themselves - Mozilla Foundation is the main non-profit that owns various for-profits such as Mozilla Corporation (the Firefox developers), MZLA Technologies (the Thunderbird developers), Mozilla.ai (an LLM model developer), and somehow, mozilla.vc (a venture capitalist fund thing???)
Also, all of these act as their own separate companies of sorts - for example, donating to Thunderbird donates to the for-profit MZLA Technologies company (as stated here - Donations — Thunderbird), not to the Mozilla Foundation - https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/?form=donate-header. So Mozilla Corporation is not influenced by Mozilla.vc, and MZLA is not influenced by Mozilla Corpo.
