> Having people pay, even voluntarily, and having even a small reliance on those payments would just kill Mozilla more quickly without a visible leadership change first.
Wikipedia relies on user donations, and yet they still spend vast sums of money on what might be described as frivolous side projects (eg. Wikipedia Zero).
Not so long ago (late 2000s) wikipedia ran on 39 servers, mostly squid proxies, and did not cost very much money to keep running. Given the increase in server performance I imagine they could run on a similar number of servers these days (maybe less with help from a CDN).
Now they spend nearly $100m per year.
So there is no guarantee that this would help Mozilla.
I'm seeing lots of successful developments from the Wikimedia folks. Their latest project, namely Wikidata is already bigger than Wikipedia ever was; not to mention the projects they launched before that. (Wikimedia Commons free media repository, Wikivoyage travel guide etc.)
Donations to Wikipedia more than pay for the technical infrastructure, they do have lots of money to waste. Mozilla obviously doesn't. So as a donor, Mozilla wasting money is more of a problem, because as a donor I see it is actually not keeping Mozilla running and if I stop donating it will hurt far worse.
There's either a misconception in this comment or a misreading of it on this side.
Compare the Wikimedia numbers given (nearly $100m per year to keep running) to Mozilla's, who last reported spending much more than that (over $173m) just in their non-software development spending.
It looks like the misreading part was the right one, then. The intent of your original comment is clearer now, in light of this response.
You're saying that Wikimedia's spending is somewhat rational, whereas Mozilla's revenue might disappear as the result of a single party making a decision to walk away. You're not saying that Mozilla is a ragtag group of browser developers with barely any money. (There was too much focus on "Mozilla obviously doesn't [have the money to waste]" in the earlier reading.)
Wikipedia relies on user donations, and yet they still spend vast sums of money on what might be described as frivolous side projects (eg. Wikipedia Zero).
Not so long ago (late 2000s) wikipedia ran on 39 servers, mostly squid proxies, and did not cost very much money to keep running. Given the increase in server performance I imagine they could run on a similar number of servers these days (maybe less with help from a CDN).
Now they spend nearly $100m per year.
So there is no guarantee that this would help Mozilla.