Okay hear me out. What if we all chipped in 5 bucks to ? How many people would it take to fund it well enough so they don’t have to do layoffs? I get it, the FOSS community wants the “F” part

Brandon Leedy@mastodon.social to Firefox@lemmy.ml – 69 points –

Okay hear me out. What if we all chipped in 5 bucks to @firefox? How many people would it take to fund it well enough so they don’t have to do layoffs? I get it, the FOSS community wants the “F” part but we all should contribute some for good infrastructure. And the idea that search engine payments from Google is what keeps Firefox afloat should worry us all. We need browser engine diversity if the web is going to stay open and not littered with walled gardens any more than it already is.

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The thing is they don't need a one-off donation, they need a stable revenue stream. Can't plan for the future if the financials are uncertain or bleak..

What if the community funded a living trust that accepted all donations in perpetuity and had set payouts regularly scheduled to Firefox (or other FOSS/privacy projects)?

They don't need any money because they had a good browser once upon a time and made it so bloated and tracking and garbage that people quit using it.

It's less bloated than the alternatives, and the tracking is opt in for the most part?

Browsers need to stay up to date with the features people need. If they kept it as the original "good browser", it would have been ditched even harder

That was true when Chrome dropped, but that was years and many major ersions ago. FireFox is a different beast now. It can be annoying in ways, but it's insanely customizable if googling tweaks doesn't scare you.

I agree with this: Firefox claims to be privacy-focused, but if you truly need privacy, you have to use a fork like Librewolf. Chrome is a better choice as it supports PWAs and you can also use Vivaldi, which is more customizable and secure than Firefox.

The only reason I don't donate to mozilla right now is that mozilla doesn't actually funnel any donation funds to firefox. I want to support firefox with donations, but I can't.

Exactly, 100%. Hell I'd drop them $100 a year forever if it all went to Firefox, and they didn't fuck around with stupid monetisation like pocket, adding AI, etc. I don't mind them selling a VPN, but I do mind that I can't use any VPN as a container proxy because of them selling a VPN.

Exactly.

There's a lot more ways Mozilla could make privacy-friendly features that don't restrict choice, so they should focus on those. I'm willing to pay if they make good products, but make it easy to pick something else instead.

Poor leadership causes layoffs. Give them money now and you’ll be asking the same question a year from now.

The "focusing on AI and Pocket" part provided proof that the current crisis is due to poor management. The poor management could even have come from tech leadership; I've met plenty of chief architects who were just as prone to bandwagon-jumping as anyone else.

It's always poor leadership, but people on the lines never write the press releases.

They get 600 million a year from Google....

For those that look at this and still think the solution might just be more money, first recognize that Google donates only to keep Firefox as a viable competitor to avoid anti-trust legislation.

If we raised half a million dollars, we haven’t saved anyone any money except Google - they’d simply donate only 100k next year so Firefox remains competitive, but not successful.

I don’t disagree with the sentiment of the post, but we also have to realize that we’d only be improving things after the first ~600k.

$0, not because it would actually help. But $0 because CEOs and their board would rather have the money in their pockets. Sad, but true

Fun fact: non-profits are required to report the incomes of their highest paid employees on IRS form 990. In 2022, Mark Surman was paid $344,483. This is well below executive pay in Silicon Valley, and on par with normal software engineer pay in the same area according to GlassDoor.

Sure, some executives are overpaid, but this is very much not the case here.

It’s worth it to find out before spewing hate and bias.

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kinda agree with you.

Firefox is not doing well, and greedy CEO's are not helping the cause. I wish they'd take a playbook from Nintendo's leadership, show they really back the product, and take a pay cut to help the cause.

I can't imaging the CEO being significantly impacted if they had to go from $6,700,000 per year to $3,350,000 and could single-handedly save at least 10 engineers at $300,000+ each to continue to work on core features and guarantee long-term success.

Nintendo's Satoru Iwata on layoffs:

If we reduce the number of employees for better short-term financial results, employee morale will decrease, and I sincerely doubt employees who fear that they may be laid off will be able to develop software titles that could impress people around the world

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60 people would be like... 9 mil for just a year. That's like 2 million donations of 5 bucks. I don't think Lemmy is at 2mil users yet

They'd use it for something else. Certainly not to keep jobs they believe are useless anyway. Someone up there will decide that the project their niece is working at requires more funding, and a few company cars.

No thank you. :)