As the OP says, the point is not that they needed unpaid work, if that's what you mean. The point is that volunteers shaped what Firefox, MDN, Thunderbird, Mozilla itself were.
This is why I refuse to donate to Mozilla, despite only paying for open source products, believing that 100% open source should be mandatory in every democractic government, Firefox and Thunderbird being my daily drivers for many years, and donating several hundred dollars every year on FLOSS projects.
Many of Mozillas product decisions prove that the Mozilla corporation is not aligned with the interests of FLOSS. I can't donate to Firefox or Thunderbird specifically, neither at the feature or product level. There is no way to ensure my donations go to enriching these products, instead of profit generating features that benefit the Mozilla corporation. One example is the container VPN proxy, which only allows you to implement a VPN per container if you pay for Mozilla VPN. This is a feature that should be universally available to all users, and all VPN providers, but they locked it behind a paywall for profit.
The is the same (logically analogous) reason I no longer use Reddit after the API changes in 2023, after using the platform for 15 years, and has become common among newer FOSS startups like OpenAI, minio, and bambu; using the philosophy of open source &/or unpaid community labor to achieve a certain level of trust, growth, users, funding, and market saturation, only to screw them all over in the name of profit. This for-profit parasitic greed and corruption in FLOSS is the antithesis to the philosophy of the FLOSS community.
In a sane world this type of community exploitation would be criminally prosecutable. Reddit decision makers would see the inside of a prison cell; the moderators and commenters – as well as the developers who built the 3rd party apps that grew the company from nothing for over a decade – would be given shares/ownership, and paid from the company for their time and labor; same for every other scammer that exploits these "bait-and-switch" deceptive tactics to succeed in businesss. Unfortunately for us all, we live in a world ruled by parasites.
"In 2018 she received a total of $2,458,350 in compensation from Mozilla, which represents a 400% payrise since 2008. On the same period, Firefox marketshare was down 85%. When asked about her salary she stated "I learned that my pay was about an 80% discount to market. Meaning that competitive roles elsewhere were paying about 5 times as much. That's too big a discount to ask people and their families to commit to."
In 2020, after returning to the position of CEO, her salary had risen to over $3 million. In the same year the Mozilla Corporation laid off approximately 250 employees due to shrinking revenues. Baker blamed this on the Coronavirus pandemic"
Incidentally, I have recently come across some Mozilla job postings with salary ranges I would consider to be at a considerable "discount to market". For example, here is a senior role at 59 000 euro per year: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/mozilla/jobs/7843229
> I can't donate to Firefox or Thunderbird specifically, neither at the feature or product level. There is no way to ensure my donations go to enriching these products, instead of profit generating features that benefit the Mozilla corporation.
Thunderbird is no longer owned by the Mozilla corporation, so now you can donate directly to them.
From their about page: "Thunderbird operates in a separate, for-profit subsidiary of the not-for-profit Mozilla.org. This structure gives us the flexibility to offer optional paid services to sustain Thunderbird’s development far into the future."[0]
The whole "Thunderbird Council" approach sounds good in theory, but I don't see any assurances that my donation would not fund for-profit service or feature development that could be locked behind a paywall, or that the whole product can't be sold off or transitioned to some closed offering at any time.
The core problem is not Mozilla specific. It's that our legal and political systems are now corrupted and offer no safeguards to prevent this type of fraud from taking place. Tech companies from the very beginning have been given carte blanche to lie, cheat, and pivot any way they please; to betray user/customer investment and change their entire value proposition on a dime. That was the growth and funding model of tech startups; build users by offering product for free (at a loss) until they become dependent on your product, then bait-and-switch. When companies are consistently rewarded for this, and there are no meaningful financial or legal reprecussions, I see no reason to believe that this will change any time in the near future.
I wouldn't say Mozilla has reached this stage of fraud or exploitation directly yet (to my knowledge), but the decisions they make consistently indicate they are on the path to that level of corruption and enshittification, and history has taught us there are zero guardrails in place to effectively prevent it.
In the Reddit example I gave, the crime is essentially a form of "bait-and-switch", false advertising, or charity fraud; scamming volunteers into donating their time and labor to build a product under deceptive and misleading pretences then, once achieving a certain threshold of success, changing the value proposition to a state where they would not have donated their time or labor to begin with. The same applies to an open source product which switches to closed-source. When you change the value proposition on volunteers like that, you have transformed their time and labor from a donation to unpaid wages, as they literally built your product and company for free, and are the reason your product exists at all. If you do not pay them out or backpay them in some way, or you can't, you are no different to any other white collar ciminal scammer, exploiting charity for profit.
Allowing this type of fraud to succeed, and become an accepted business practice, is socially corrosive and destructive. It's a strong indicator of corruption to the rule of law in the legal, political, and economic system.
