
Donate mozilla - swcoders
https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/
======
FooBarWidget
Their FAQ
([https://wiki.mozilla.org/Donate#Don.27t_Mozilla_products.2C_...](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Donate#Don.27t_Mozilla_products.2C_like_Firefox.2C_earn_income.3F))
contains pretty important information.

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.

~~~
amooiman
This is exactly right. I'm an engineer at the non-profit Mozilla Foundation,
and these donations keep us working towards our mission (found at
[https://www.mozilla.org/en-
US/about/manifesto/details/](https://www.mozilla.org/en-
US/about/manifesto/details/)).

~~~
hack_edu
Now if only it all wasn't spent on the current massive expansion of the
Marketing team and their new executive's salaries. The new CMO has a very
checkered history with questionable results. Very much the nepotist who
manages to pack his team with former colleagues.

Its a big and divisive internal issue right now. :(

~~~
orbitur
At Mozilla _Foundation_? Got any links to discussions?

~~~
hack_edu
Admittedly, its all off record hearsay as it's not to smart to talk badly
about your C-levels in public discussion. Though I must say, as a user its
hard to sincerely distinguish the business motives of Firefox from other parts
of the org. Especially in the recent push of the browser.

~~~
caseysoftware
> not to smart to talk badly about your C-levels in public discussion

For certain things. But for badthink, seek and destroy.

------
newscracker
There's a lot of stuff that Mozilla does, but I wish there were a way to
donate and say "try your best to allocate my money for project X" within
Mozilla (Corporation, which I now understand is not the one supported by
donations). While Mozilla Corporation seems to primarily focus on Firefox and
Firefox OS, I would like to see more attention and effort devoted on the
following:

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.

~~~
Frondo
You know what I bet'd really pique their interest around reviving Persona? Not
a donation, but start talking about it and evangelizing it, and get together
with other interested devs to get them to do the same.

Mozilla's going to respond a lot better to widespread public developer
interest than to a $100 donation.

------
javipas
Two donations made.

First, the money ($10).

Then, the post ([http://theunshut.com/2015/11/30/saving-
mozilla/](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.

~~~
mconley
contributor/employee at Mozilla here. Thank _you_.

~~~
javipas
;)

------
christopherDam
I think Mozilla is one of great organization and community. I love them as
open source community. They are very polite and always helps and welcome to
new bies. I really like the attitude of all the Mozillian. I think Open source
world needed more polite and helpful people like Mozillians.

------
callesgg
While i do think mozilla is great, firefox is my main browser and i am
following the servo project.

Just recently we had this article:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10630996](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10630996)

edit: @FooBarWidget had a good answer

~~~
icebraining
Sorry, mistakenly downvoted :|

------
jhpriestley
After reading the FAQ entry under "How will my donation be used", I have no
idea what a donation would be used for. "In general, resources are dedicated
to promoting openness, innovation and opportunity on the Internet in ways that
will benefit everyone." Extremely vague.

------
parent5446
I wish more people considered donating to Mozilla, Wikipedia, and other
similar movements. I feel like many non-technical oriented people don't really
understand that the software and websites they use are often times built
completely with donated money, and cannot survive without it.

~~~
dingaling
Wikipedia is big, stable, midly incremental and dominant[0]. Does it _need_
more money that its current baseload income?

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.

~~~
vlehto
Alternative would be encyclopedia Britannica. There every article is mostly
behind paywall.

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.

------
cronjobber
This ship sailed when they purged Eich.

~~~
xigency
Wow, purged is right.

I don't generally follow tech. politics but reading about this episode is
horrendous.

------
AdmiralAsshat
Have they thought about coordinating with Amazon to make Mozilla a SMILE
partner? I usually donate through them to the EFF, but it would be cool to
throw some of it Mozilla's way.

~~~
valiant_try
Mozilla does have an Amazon Smile account. I believe you start at
smile.amazon.com and search for Mozilla.

~~~
AdmiralAsshat
Oh, sweet! I guess I'll have to alternate between Mozilla and EFF now. Thanks!

------
janisS
Wikipedia and Mozilla are great products so I donate once a year for both
projects.

------
Kiro
OT but what are they using to accept donations? I'm about to set up a donation
page on a project I'm running and been looking for solutions. What do people
recommend?

~~~
chimeracoder
> OT but what are they using to accept donations? I'm about to set up a
> donation page on a project I'm running and been looking for solutions. What
> do people recommend?

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).

[0] [https://stripe.com/checkout](https://stripe.com/checkout)

------
j-pb
They are dead to me since they tried to kill WebSQL/WebDB. Mozilla has become
to the web what Stallman has become for emacs.

------
eridal
just wanted to add that maybe allowing to donate without javascript enabled
could make easier for people to donate?

------
tosseraccount
Mozilla has become too politicized for me. When the board intervenes to fire
the CEO for basic civic engagement which we should generally encourage in
citizens, then they don't need my money any more.

~~~
hack_edu
I don't keep up too much, so what basic civic engagement issues have they
acted on since the one highly publicized incident? A browser like Mozilla, and
its place in the market, is overtly political in itself. It always has been;
open source is politics. Heck, dozens of major OSS projects have the "don't
donate to us, donate to our sponsored charity" thing going on. Those projects
focus on very liberal, social justice issues too though with a more global
focus.

But, what's happened since the one incident?

~~~
bad_user
While many open source projects tend to get political, open source is not
about politics any more than regular proprietary products are.

~~~
vdaniuk
>open source is not about politics

This is a quite naive point of view that even very smart people hold. Open
source software makes and breaks whole industries in software, of course it's
political.

~~~
mason240
You don't think it's a bit silly to say that building a product or tool is the
same thing as engaging in government?

~~~
vdaniuk
Ah, but politics isn't limited to governmental affairs, it is everywhere:
communities, technical committees and standard groups. Also some projects
contribute more change to the structure of the society than most governments.
I would say that linux and *bsds had a much more pronounced impact on global
affairs than most countries governments.

~~~
mason240
Ah, but now you've made the term "politics" meaningless, as what I had for
breakfast falls under your new definition that encompasses everything.

~~~
snerbles
How is your breakfast meaningless? Did it contain meat, or genetically
modified organisms? Was it grown with water in a drought-stricken area, or
from a subsidized or non-unionized farm? Have you considered its carbon
footprint?

Someone, somewhere, has opinions on that breakfast of yours...and some of
those folks have the power to enact those opinions. If it somehow involves
policy, power and status - no matter how petty - there are politics attached.
See in particular definitions 1.3, 1.4 and 1.5:
[https://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_en...](https://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/politics)

------
SFjulie1
well, donating to mozilla and not openSSL, freeBSD does not make a better
internet.

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 ?

~~~
admax88q
If C compilers are such a problem then developers should move to better
languages. It's not the 70s anymore.

~~~
SFjulie1
No language other than C and FORTRAN have correct numerical libraries with a
decent amount of speed.

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.

~~~
cballard
The idea of those things being built in a language without memory and good
type safety (no ability to cast everything to void*) should terrify you.

