
Mozilla funding $245,000 for Black artists to show how #AI can reinforce/disrupt - poisonarena
https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/supporting-black-artists-who-are-examining-ai/
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tootahe45
Yeah Mozilla really need to make it so you can donate to certain things i.e
Firefox or TOR browser development. Until they do my money is going elsewhere.

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jdhbbbhb
Tor development is separate from mozilla. You can donate to them directly.

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ecmascript
So are we supposed to ignore the fact that Mozilla is now openly racist?

Does no one realize that stuff like this is as racist as it gets? They
literally base the competition on a skin color.

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ppf
I've known for a while that Mozilla's focus is not on producing technically
excellent software. However, their latest actions and messages have only
accelerated my desire to move away from Firefox - they are now just another
"socially-aware" activist group, complete with ambitious ladder-climbing upper
management, and apparently burdened with maintaining a browswer.

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Normille
_" Get woke. Go broke"_ \--as the Gabsters say.

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cannedslime
Gabsters? Isn't that just a true statement?

I dont even know what a gabster is, is this the new "alt-right" label to throw
around on people you have a mild political disagreeance with?

This post is now at -1 score and I still don't know what a gabster is, can you
elaborate?

Ah I think I figured it out. Just like we call twitter users "Twits" we
apparently call gab.ai users gabsters.

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vladvasiliu
Probably relted to "Gab". Not sure about "alt-right" but from what I know gab
was founded as a "censorship-free alternative to Twitter".

[https://gab.com/](https://gab.com/)

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esarbe
Yeah, you know.

This might not be the best move, right after they had to let go so many
developers.

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p49k
The for-profit Mozilla Corporation laid off developers. The not-for-profit
Mozilla Foundation is launching this initiative.

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vladvasiliu
Right. The have absolutely nothing to do with each other, because the Moz
Foundation has probably no say whatsoever in the Corporation's decision.
Especially since the Corporation is not only wholly owned by the Foundation
but they also have a common chair.

The first line of "About the Mozilla Corporation" [0]:

>The Mozilla Corporation was established in August 2005 as a wholly owned
taxable subsidiary _that serves the non-profit, public benefit goals of its
parent, the Mozilla Foundation_ (emphasis mine).

[0] [https://www.mozilla.org/en-
US/foundation/moco/](https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/moco/)

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p49k
I’m not sure why you’re being snarky and uncivil. Yes they are related (never
said they weren’t), but the Foundation cannot transfer $245k to the
Corporation to help fund salaries of workers. The Corp exists to be run as a
business and the Foundation exists primarily for advocacy.

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vladvasiliu
Well, I don't think the Foundation would need to transfer 245k to the
Corporation. From what I understand, the Google search deal was done with the
Corporation. So the cash transfer is rather Corp -> Found. Instead, it would
be enough for the Foundation to give the Corporation a better deal on their
various trademarks.

This is published in their financial statement for 2018 [0]. I'm not an
accountant nor am I familiar with US Tax law, but from what I understand they
received $6M in donations (contributions line) and spent $33M on "programs"
(other than software development, which gets its own line). So the difference
must have come from somewhere.

Apparently the various trademarks are owned by the Foundation. The Corp has to
pay royalties to use them. It's not clear how much, but I don't see why the
Foundation wouldn't be allowed to set its own rate and / or give discounts.
Internal cash flows are omitted from the consolidated report, though.

What I gather from this is that basically the Foundation is getting most of
its money from the Corporation. The Corp. being mainly concerned with Firefox,
it could be argued that the Foundation gets money thanks to Firefox.

I can see how people who want to support the browser may take an issue with
the Foundation's other, non browser-related activities. Especially when it's
clear that they do so to the detriment of the browser (by firing people in
order to focus on other pursuits).

[0] [https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2018/mozilla-
fdn-201...](https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2018/mozilla-
fdn-2018-short-form-final-0926.pdf)

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p49k
I'm not a tax attorney, but I know that there are serious restrictions on how
two companies (non profit or otherwise) owned by the same people or entities
are allowed to use them to benefit each other. Those restrictions exist for
obvious reasons: being able to easily shift around money can lead to all kinds
of tax evasion and other corruption.

And I'm also fairly certain that suddenly renegotiating a licensing agreement
in which the obvious purpose is to secure more revenue for the Corporation at
the expense of the Foundation would be considered self-dealing, and there
would be severe penalties, the least of which being the loss of tax-exempt
status for the Foundation.

Being controlled by the same entity does not mean that they are allowed to
shift assets and money around or spend their own resources resolving each
others' financial issues, and doing something sneaky like trying to hide such
transfers as part of a trademark licensing renegotiation would not pass a
smell test.

> Especially when it's clear that they do so to the detriment of the browser
> (by firing people in order to focus on other pursuits)

How disingenuous and trollish to put this at the end of your post. In the
reply to an argument explaining that the Foundation is a separate entity with
its own charter acting independently, you simply ignore the argument and say
the same thing over again instead of addressing it.

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danielscrubs
I'm cynical at heart. Anyone else that thinks that some higher up have done
something racist and now the PR/HR machinery is working full time preemptively
wash the brand?

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whywhywhywhy
It's more just likely people at the top are not very passionate about
technology but are very passionate about social issues.

I know a lot of people look to Firefox and therefore Mozilla as being a beacon
against the big three and browser monoculture but there is evidently a
disconnect between what most of us want from Mozilla and what interests the
people in charge of Mozilla, judging from the engineers who were let go the
other week.

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ed25519FUUU
It's curious to me that you can make race a legal requirement for anything.

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olliej
Ideally you wouldn’t, but if there’s a long history of discrimination against
that race/sex/orientation/identity then you need to do that to correct for the
historical bias.

I’d rather it not exist, but there isn’t really any other corrective measure
you can make.

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pure_simplicity
That's simply a false dichotomy. You can very easily tailor social programs to
help correct for the effects of historical injustice without resorting to
discrimination by simply targetting the effect itself, not the group that was
discriminated against. Any group that is disproportionally affected by the
effect will be disproportionally helped by the alleviation and remediation of
said effect.

The argument that we need more racism because of racism is a vicious cycle. I
hate all racism, no matter if it's well intentioned. The road to hell is all
too often paved with good intentions.

Groups do not endure injustice, individuals do. The moment we start thinking
of people as competing groups rather than individuals, individuals become
devalued and get thrown under the bus without regard for their unique
personhood. Under a program like this a well to-do black immigrant who is not
the product of a history of injustice would receive preferential treatment
over a non-black person trapped in generational poverty who may have
personally endured injustice.

Why do white leftist think that blacks are dependent on special treatment from
whites? Isn't that white supremacist in and of itself? They are still denying
us the dignity of succeeding on our own merits on a level playing field.

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leosarev
Wow. Tech writers for MDN? Servo team? Or PR stunt?

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null_deref
I don't think 245k is the amount it takes to pay the MDN or Servo team for
more than one month.

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cannedslime
It could have payed for maintenance in some way, thats for sure.

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null_deref
That's right

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divs1210
Mozilla REALLY needs to focus on firefox.

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randompwd
#SaveFirefox #DefundMozilla

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ppf
As I understand it, the build process for Firefox is now so painful it might
be beyond saving.

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stingraycharles
What happened that caused that? I remember from about a decade or two ago it
was already relatively involved (on par with OpenOffice and the likes), is it
worse now?

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xmodem
I recently had reason to build both Chromium and Firefox from source and
Firefox was considerably simpler, on Windows at least

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ppf
Fair enough, my information might be out of date.

