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.
Its a big and divisive internal issue right now. :(
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.
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)
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.
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?
>The Mozilla Foundation -- a non-profit which wholly owns Mozilla Corp -- is not funded by Mozilla Corp
Why not ?
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.
Instead donate to OpenBSD or FSF.
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.
1. Mozilla Thunderbird to get a lot more attention and a strong roadmap (something like the now defunct Mozilla Messaging initiative).
2. A good high end Firefox OS phone that is widely available and gives a good enough competition to Android and iOS, even though it's quite late and it may not have an apps collection like the other platforms do.
3. Reviving Persona/BrowserID, which many people here and elsewhere have asked for. From recent discussions I do understand this is not easy to do, but we need someone knowledgeable and available to take the lead and have Mozilla's brand pushing this for a wider reach.
Mozilla's going to respond a lot better to widespread public developer interest than to a $100 donation.
First, the money ($10).
Then, the post (http://theunshut.com/2015/11/30/saving-mozilla/).
We'd be in a much different world today if Mozilla never existed. If any contributor/employee at Mozilla here reads this, THANKS.
Just recently we had this article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10630996
edit: @FooBarWidget had a good answer
If we applied the same traits to the browser market we'd be crying-out for an alternative.
I don't know what that alternative is, so it's difficult to donate towards it. But I don't believe that encouraging more donations to Wikipedia is going to move collective human knowledge forward.
In contrast, Mozilla is constantly having to chase new technological targets and compete against well-funded corporate alternatives. I can understand why they need to keep expanding their income.
[0] deliberately setting-aside all the other subjective complaints about its internal processes.
Wikipedia is dominant because it's better. They need money to keep servers running. If they don't get funding, they will simply die. There is no guarantee that similar project would ever fly again.
Previously I worked at two different non-profits which needed to answer this same question. Both times, we chose Stripe, because it ended up being the best combination of simple for us to set up and fast for donators to use[0].
(Disclaimer: I now work at Stripe, but I'm answering your question based on my previous experiences as a Stripe customer, not in any official capacity).
TLDR: stripe for donations, custom software for the forms.
But, what's happened since the one incident?
Nowadays we have strictly NO LTS free/open source portable build chain of decent quality (compiler, linkers). (maybe also because of the norms)
When I say LTS compiler, I mean a compiler that can portably and reproducibly build code in C without flags on the CLI to the same exec and without developers having to archive their compiler every time compile to be sure to be able to build it once again with the same results.
You think this situation is not yet existing?
Hu hu hu hu hu ...
Houston, you have a problem.
Even though I appreciate LLVM/GCC, LLVM/GCC new major release may imply to patch specifically the C code for the $CC release.
And Ox flags may give weird unexpected results per compiler. And you may nowadays need GCC for some platform with specific code, and LLVM for others.
So how do we handle this complexity? The C code is less and less idempotent in time and architecture and performance...
How do we fully support long time support for reproducible multi platform build ?
Anyway, I think you can create a thread to ask people to donate to other causes. That's fine.
[1]: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/faq/
Would you like the next plane that will make you travel to have the math done in javascript?
Would you like your pacemaker to fry 17W/h for a V8 engine and do you need mozilla embedded in it ?
Would you feel safe with nuclear plants control on the cloud?
Does a space probe rather needs support for an oauth2.0 or correct numerical analysis?
Don't you care that banking systems are correctly translating numerical amounts?
I mean computer are used for critical purpose too.
EDIT PS: numpy in python is binding on fortran libraries to do the job.
