Seems kind of like it is part of an ARG. I can't say I'm totally against something like that; Mozilla's gotta make money somehow, and as long as it's not selling out user privacy it's a better tradeoff than Chrome.
Not to mention the great amount of money they've wasted in certain previous frivolous, doomed projects, like Firefox OS - great idea, by the way, to make your "native" app platform the most power hungry, slowest of them all, and then market the OS only for pairing it with low end devices sold to third worlders - because third worlders totally need slow software running on the hardware they can barely afford - it's not as if they were people, with real world needs, just like us, and not lab rats. For a company that prides itself on its open values.. that's really treating people with contempt.
I think the the term “non-profit” is more about how an organization spends the money, rather than how they make it. Non profits and charities definitely bring in money through channels other than donations...
I merely challenge the notion that a nonprofit -- which proudly tumpets its benevolence and non-profitness -- should get a free pass for covertly installing advertising arrangements, just because they need to "make money".
Their charter and marketing is all about defending the internet from the companies doing shady things to make money, so they can't have their cake and eat it.
There is a difference between a non-profit and a non-for-profit (most health insurance companies are the later; go try and figure that out).
Firefox gets most of its donations from corporate sponsors. That's why the default search and switched back and fourth between Yahoo and Google; it's all about the amount of money they contribute for that. I'm not sure, but Pocket might be another example.
User contributions are actually pretty low. They don't go out and request them though like NPR or Wikipedia.
You're confusing mozilla foundation and mozilla corporation here. The default search with google and yahoo is not donations for the foundation but a commercial contract with the corporation.
I'm not sure mozilla even gets a significant amount of donations compared to their commercial contracts.
That would be a valid complaint if this was an advertising arrangment, rather than one where if you watch the TV show, you learn that you can activate a firefox addon to participate in an small AR game that changes your normal web experience into a Mr Robot style web experience for the duration.
The addon itself does not advertise for Mr. Robot, Mr. Robot advertises for this addon.
Sure, but why install it on random people's installs, even in some sort of disabled state? Viewers should be called on to install it themselves. I'd be cool with, say, an about: page that makes it easy for users to discover it, but pre-installing the addon in people's browser's seems a bit much.
I'd charitably call it "Augmented Memory", but it's definitely not "Augmented Reality".
And I'd hardly call it a game, just a parasitic advertising gimmick that slows and bloats the browser. It just injects a bunch of JavaScript code, DOM elements and CSS effects into every tab.
There's really no game there, and it's pretentious to call it an "Alternate Reality Game", which is defined as "intense player involvement with a story that takes place in real time and evolves according to players' responses":
This extension just wraps all occurrences of a set of keywords (now including "fuck") in a span with some css animations and a tooltip that links to their web page.
But in terms of memory usage, CPU and battery consumption, it's not that small, either.
It injects a blob of CSS and some JavaScript into every tab, then it does a regular expression search of every text node on each page, filtering out everything but paragraphs, then for each occurrence of a keyword in the text, it creates a new text node to split the current text node, then inserts a new span element between them, containing its own text node, then it creates an additional tooltip element containing six text nodes, five br elements, and one anchor element linking to https://support.mozilla.org/kb/lookingglass , and it also configures css class names to associate all those new nodes it created with the blob of css styling and animations that it injected.
This extension isn't the best example of their technology for Mozilla to be promoting and distributing, if they're really serious about delivering a fast memory efficient browser.
While I agree with you on that, your previous comment was simply wrong. Non-profits are very much allowed to just "take money" (legal restrictions aside, but for-profit businesses also have legal restrictions). They're not allowed to take that money and distribute it to shareholders as profit.
Non-profit orgs are such due to legal designations that give them favorable tax treatment. In return they promise to organize and operate only to fulfill a charitable mission. The mission of Mr. Robot (content sniffing) has nothing to do with the charitable mission of Mozilla, "Our mission is to ensure the Internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all."
The charitable mission of mozilla ended with their deal with google in 2004.
Let's not forget that mozilla had frozen 15 millions dollars because of the IRS audit related to this deal and mozilla status, ending up settling outside of court for 1.5 millions.
This is a very common misconception about non-profits that is not true.
The details depend on local laws, but generally a non-profit only means that the owner of the non-profit can't take the all of the actual profit (money) directly out of the non-profit via dividends.
Things like non-profits must be focused public good or they can't pay high (or any) salaries are urban legends that have no basis in reality.
That's not a misconception I share. I understand Mozilla can and should make money to further its mission.
But unlike a for-profit, making money isn't the mission of Mozilla. So needing to make money can't be used as a justification for doing naughty things against the public good.
Making money may not be the mission of the mozilla foundation, but it is the mission of the mozilla corporation fully owned by the mozilla foundation.
And money it makes, in the hundred of millions, for serving its users to the worst known worldwide privacy offender, collecting and profiling user to sell advertising.
The "good" non profit charity foundation is governing the "evil" for profit corporation giving away users to the worst opponent of the mission of the charity. Quite a contradiction in this.
They also have limits on political speech. The IRS gives them breaks. One of the big misunderstandings/myths is that a church cannot support a political candidate.
Some people cry "free speech violation" but they can endorse a candidate, they just need to give up their tax privileges. This is why the ACLU is split into two parts. One you can donate to and get tax dedications for, but the other is their lobbying arm, and therefore cannot allow tax deductions for their donors.
"non-profit" isn't a magical incantation that means they can run with a revenue deficit forever though. They have expenses and there has to be enough revenue coming in to cover those expenses, or they will go out of business. That's true for any business, whether it's for-profit or non-profit.
Mozilla foundation (the non profit) set up Mozilla Corporation (the for profit raking in hundreds of millions of dollars) when the IRS investigated the foundation about tax fraud.
I believe the idea is that Mr. Robot fans use Firefox to participate in the ARG, not that Firefox users suddenly start watching Mr. Robot. So if anything I'd expect that Mozilla pays Mr. Robot for this.
