> Yes, as long as there is a guarantee that my money will go towards actually paying people who update the documentation rather than CEO salary, degenerate activism or doomed web startups.
Interestingly, this same sentiment is a huge part of why charitable giving runs into problems.
A lot of people are willing to give, so long as they get to decide what is done with their funds. Of course, these same people have no idea what it actually takes to run a charity; they have no idea what on-the-ground problems need to be solved day-to-day; they have absolutely zero understanding of the organizational supports needed to make any organization function. They're basically in the worst possible position to decide how best to use those funds.
But they still want to decide how they're used.
This despite the fact that they're ostensibly donating to a charitable organization specifically because that organization possesses all that expertise; expertise that costs real money to attract and retain, since they're ultimately competing against the private sector.
It's one of the reasons why, when I donate to a charity, I never specify how I want those funds to be used; I recognize that the charity is in a far better position to make that decision than I am.
I feel like there's a connection to Dunning-Kreuger in here somewhere...
In my opinion, this is both unfair and simplistic. It implies that people will only donate to a charity if they have control over where the money is spent. I disagree with this vehemently; those who give likely do not want to micro-manage the funds. Rather, they want to ensure that it forwards the goals of the charity and is not spent on unreasonably large executive compensation payrolls or expensive private jet flights, etc.
For instance, we might recall people donating money to the Red Cross to aid Haiti after the earthquake that country suffered in 2010. We later found out that maybe 75% of the funds donated actually made it to the country.[0] The argument can certainly be made that some of the donated funds should go towards the overhead of the organization but it seems reasonable for people to be upset when a full quarter of those funds somehow gets lost along the way.
People are asking charities to be more accountable because such accountability is direly needed. When large charities break trust with the public, as in the case of the Red Cross (and many others, perhaps Mozilla, even), this is what happens. Laying the blame on those still willing to hand money over for the good of all strikes me as misguided.
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In my opinion, this is both unfair and simplistic. It implies that people will only donate to a charity if they have control over where the money is spent.
To be clear, I didn't meant to imply everyone does this.
I'm just saying that many people do, and it's challenging for charities. It's one of the reasons I find charities provide options to direct giving to specific efforts, as it offers the donor some measure of control while still allowing the charity to manage things at the macro level.
> We later found out that maybe 25% of the funds donated actually made it to the country.
I think you've misread that headline? It reads:
"Red Cross Spent 25 Percent Of Haiti Donations On Internal Expenses"
Further, in the article, we see:
"But Grassley's office found that 25 percent of donations sent to Haiti — or nearly $125 million — were spent on fundraising and management, a contingency fund and the catchall category the Red Cross calls "program expenses."
What that says is 75% of donations did go to Haiti, and 25% did not. This is the opposite, I believe, of how you described the article?
Nevertheless, the American Red Cross doesn't exactly have the... best reputation in the world, which is why I'd probably not give to that organization at all, but rather would direct my funds toward organizations that are better managed (and then trust them to allocate those funds appropriately).
> People are asking charities to be more accountable because such accountability is direly needed.
Accountability != micromanagement.
My comment was about individuals micromanaging their giving, not about demanding transparency about how the organization is allocating those donations.
The latter is just basic due diligence, and is something we should all expect from NGOs.
It is not a matter of expertise, but a matter of setting priorities and valuing projects. I value MDN and Firefox. I am fine with every other aspect of Mozilla dying to save those two.
How do I donate my dollar with that goal in mind? As my goals are not really aligned with Mozilla as a whole.
How do I donate my dollar with that goal in mind? As my goals are not really aligned with Mozilla as a whole.
Seems like you want control over the project, not to just be donating? At that point it appears one of your main solution would be to start a project like MDN that you can have such control over.
OP is not saying he wants decide how Firefox and MDN are run per se, He is saying we want to not be funding projects like pocket. We don't want or know how to run MDN or firefox, but we are grateful users who would like those to succeed and willing to contribute those projects specifically.
The concern of about management salary is very important in Mozilla important than in a for profit entity.
Shareholders / board will react fast enough over market challenges or poor performance in for profit companies . Many, many companies have cut base salaries for management this year due look at Airbnb for example, All Mozilla is saying variable pay will be impacted.
Given the ownership and revenue structure of Mozilla nobody is in a position to keep management of Mozilla Corporation accountable, the donors to Mozilla Foundation donate miniscule amounts compared to what the Corporation makes in the single search deal with Google to have any real leverage.
The deal with Google just got renewed well before the lay-off's, despite the empty words about global pandemic being a reason, there is no major impact on their revenue ( or Google's for that matter).
>The deal with Google just got renewed well before the lay-off's, despite the empty words about global pandemic being a reason, there is no major impact on their revenue ( or Google's for that matter).
I'm not an expert, but I'm fairly sure that "our revenues stayed the same between 2018-2023” would be seen as a failure in most companies. Not only do costs rise every year, employment decisions are made assuming it will lead to increased revenue.
For almost any non-profit maintaining their new donations for the same level for 5 years would be considered good performance.
Even in most aggressive startups maintaining revenues at $400-500 Million level is likely to cause first management change and rarely lay-offs of 25% of the workforce.
Even if that was the reason, clearly mangement have been unable and unlikely to that kind of growth. Firing quarter of your highly skilled workforce is not the right approach.
Had they killed 25% of the projects and retained the best of talent from those projects and repositioned them in other projects it would have made sense. While as you say such highly skilled workforce has salary growth expectations, hiring from the market is always costlier in terms of absolute salary, training, on-boarding, performance risk and finally attrition before RoI is achieved .
>For almost any non-profit maintaining their new donations for the same level for 5 years would be considered good performance
Donations are barely a factor here, it is not a meaningful part of their revenue.
As you say, one year of steady revenue would cause a significant shakeup in a company. By year three, things would look fairly dire. Mozilla has already tried a number of other options, and are in the middle of a management change. Eventually this becomes the only choice
I just want something similar to a restricted university donation fund. Another faculty at my alma mater had a mega donation a few years ago that was restricted to paying for new research chairs in business. They couldn't use it for anything in other faculties. They couldn't reallocate it to recruiting. I want something like that.
That's a far higher bar than we safeguard the rest of our consumer spending. At the end of the day it just sounds like excuse-making to not pay for free stuff.
If I purchase a product, I am satisfied that my money was an exchange for the product and will be used as the company sees fit. If I don't like how they use their money, I won't buy their products.
If I donate to an organization, I do so because I believe in at minimum a particular aspect of its operations. If I can't get, in return, some assurance that the money will go towards that aspect, I won't donate to them.
To me, the bar for either is essentially the same.
It's easy enough for me to think of Mozilla as a professional association rather than a charity.
Would I pay? Yes, I can't imagine being in this field without MDN, and I don't necessarily care what they do with that fee specifically as long as the future of MDN and Firefox are secure.
> It is not a matter of expertise, but a matter of setting priorities and valuing projects. I value MDN and Firefox. I am fine with every other aspect of Mozilla dying to save those two.
This is a terrible sentiment, even if the only thing you actually care about are those two products.
As long as most people use Firefox to access websites run by Google, Mozilla is screwed. Google uses both overt and covert methods to drive Firefox users to switch to Chrome. For Mozilla to maintain the Firefox userbase, they have to get them to browse other websites.
Pocket is an obvious attempt at that, by providing a time-sucking website that works great in Firefox, isn't run by Google, and is relatively cheap to run (read: it's not video).
What surprises me is that Facebook wasn't advertising Firefox. I know that sounds stupid, but back when Google+ was a thing, Facebook was stuck competing with a vertically-integrated solution from the browser (Chrome) all the way to the social network (Google+). That seems like a terrible situation to be in, and Chrome's only worthwhile competition on Windows at the time would have been Firefox.
As far as I can tell, https://give.thunderbird.net/ actually goes to the organization in charge of maintaining the software. It's not tax deductible or anything, but nor does it (appear to) go to other uses like advocacy. I would recommend looking closer for yourself first if you want to send them money.
Mozilla isn’t like most charities though, it’s really more of a charity conglomerate, where a bunch of different charities have been banded together under a single donation-processing frontend. So while I’d never request money donated to Mozilla to be specifically used for “Cloud-Hosted GPU VMs for MDN”, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to ask for the conglomerate to be broken up and to be able to donate to only the products you actually use.
There are tools to help with this. Charity Navigator collects data and evaluates charities. Mozilla looks really bad in that only 80% of funds goes toward mission [1].
There are other metrics, but many use these metrics for understanding how funds are used at charities and applying some governance.
I was surprised Mozilla is so low as many charities strive for 90-95% toward mission so their admin costs are low enough to attract institutional donors.
Charity Navigator information is tricky with Mozilla since it's only dealing with the Foundation, a pile of just $20 million in revenue in the last year they're covering there (closer to $30 million for the most recent available year), less than half of which was donations ("Licensing Royalties" is where the majority of the other revenue comes from... it looks like the Corporation pays the Foundation to license the Firefox trademarks and things like that, and that's basically half the Foundation's income).
The Corporation, though it's a subsidiary, takes in several hundred million a year, the lion's share being from revenue for selecting Firefox's default search engine.
Note that despite CEO Mitchell Baker's couple-million salary which has been much-bandied-about lately, Charity Navigator lists the top compensated director as Mark Surman at ~$200K. Baker runs the Corporation and chairs the board of the Foundation, but is paid only by the Corporation. The realities of Mozilla's existence don't really map cleanly to what gets reported on a Form 990 and shown by Charity Navigator.
So it's a little tough to get an accurate view of Mozilla's finances through Charity Navigator's usual information: there's lots of room for things to kind of shift around: for the Corporation to pay the Foundation for things and vice-versa.
Charity navigator has many weaknesses, but I still find it helpful. Especially with situations where there are shells or special structures. I wish they would cover stuff like the corporation. But I would never donate to an org with stats like Mozilla.
Both from bad governance perspective, and doubly so because the board knows how this appears and doesn’t care. I expect because they have stable donations and don’t rely on “retail donors” who need to use these cheap due diligence tools.
> I recognize that the charity is in a far better position to make that decision than I am.
At least in the case of Mozilla, they doesn't seem to posses this expertise. They have overgrown beyond what they are capable of, both in terms of people and projects they have acquired/started.
The issue is that the mission Mozilla views itself as having and the mission many people want Mozilla to have are not the same. You can't trust someone to use your money wisely when your fundamental goals are clearly not aligned. At that point your only options are to restrict how donations can be used or to not donate at all.
This is completely true, but on the other hand my choices are very limited when it comes to finding organisations with anything even remotely like the sort of mission I would like Mozilla to have.
I'm more or less resigned to supporting them (although with much less enthusiasm than I'd have otherwise) as the lesser of all available evils.
It does seem that quite a few people feel similarly, so I'd hope it'd be possible to create an alternative organisation with a tighter focus and to garner enough support to make it pay, but I'm aware what a huge undertaking a modern browser is, and how difficult it is to stand out in such a mature market.
> A lot of people are willing to give, so long as they get to decide what is done with their funds. Of course, these same people have no idea what it actually takes to run a charity; they have no idea what on-the-ground problems need to be solved day-to-day; they have absolutely zero understanding of the organizational supports needed to make any organization function. They're basically in the worst possible position to decide how best to use those funds.
It's a reverse. All donors of charities that aren't casual dilettantes know that the charities are teats to suck on by the fabulous people running them. That's why such donors use "Restricted funds"
> It's one of the reasons why, when I donate to a charity, I never specify how I want those funds to be used; I recognize that the charity is in a far better position to make that decision than I am.
But by choosing a charity, you make that decision. If you donate to MSF you expect your money to be used differently than if you donated to Mozilla or the ASPCA or the Ayn Rand foundation - and you'd probably be a bit unhappy, and less willing to donate in future, if you found out MSF spent your money on animal shelters.
Even if you donate to Givewell or similar, you're still expecting the money to be spent in line with the values they advertise (closer to MSF than the other three I named, but different).
So it's reasonable for someone to want a charity that broadly shares his values. Wanting to fund a nonprofit that produces web documentation, but not longshot startups, is a reasonable value to have.
> So it's reasonable for someone to want a charity that broadly shares his values. Wanting to fund a nonprofit that produces web documentation, but not longshot startups, is a reasonable value to have.
I absolutely agree.
However, I think it's one thing to say "I will donate to Goodwill because I think their mission is important and they have a good reputation", and another to say "and when I donate you must used my money to pay for X and not Y". The former is a statement of values and trust in the organization. The latter is very nearly the opposite!
And yet, it's still OK to say, "I would donate to this charity or organization if its executive compensation does not exceed a certain amount, otherwise I don't think my money is being used appropriately."
Also, when people donate lots of money to an organization, either as a personal grant or by bundling a bunch of donations they collect, they quite often do stipulate how it will be spent. If someone wanted to organize a drive for MDN, they would be justified in saying they want the money to appear as additional funds for MDN.
The main issue I have is why people think that switching from a profit requirement of 40% to maybe 10% suddenly means organizational theory and practices should disappear through the window.
Do they also insist they should be paying a 10th of what an Adidas costs for it because that’s basically the labor and material cost?
> Of course, these same people have no idea what it actually takes to run a charity; they have no idea what on-the-ground problems need to be solved day-to-day; they have absolutely zero understanding of the organizational supports needed to make any organization function. They're basically in the worst possible position to decide how best to use those funds.
Sounds like a democracy except funding isn’t voluntary.
Agree 100%. The problem I have is that I want to know that donations are being used responsibly, but this is hard to gauge. Different types of organizations require different levels of organizational overhead, and this changes depending on the size of the organization.
It would be nice if there was a quick way for a charity to establish their trustworthiness. Currently, I focus on a few orgs that I do trust, and basically ignore the rest.
No offense intended, but this isn't the way to have a meaningful conversation.
First, it's stated as a blind truth with no reasoning. The only thing I can do is say "you're wrong", as there's no basis upon which to have a real discussion.
Second, your repeated use of the phrase "degenerate activism" seems to have no other purpose than to elicit a strong emotional response. From my position it's borderline trolling.
Third, I have no idea what "doomed web startups" you're even talking about.
The entire comment, as short as it is, reads as bait for an argument, rather than an honest attempt to engage in a discussion.
PS: I am not the person you were replying to in GP. But I used his words. English is not my first language.
1) Look at the CEO salary. She was not even an engineer. The C-level executives don't harm themselves in this process, but there is no improvement because of her and she is still reaping a big salary. This also means many people are disappointed and less donations.
2) degenerate activism: all the SJW / diversity shit that Mozilla is into. I know some people here are going to defend it. But artificially trying to create diversity in an ecosystem means low quality. And a company like Mozilla which can't keep talented engineers doesn't need all this.
3) doomed web startups: Pocket, and their new VPN service which is going to be used by exactly 13 HN users.
A lot of what Mozilla did/does is functionally activism, "degenerate" is mostly a matter of personal opinion. For example things like fighting against EME and H264 on the web were both absolutely, objectively activism: Entirely based on moral/ethical grounds, not anything to do with the actual customer experience. The average person used Chrome or Safari to watch EME-encrypted H264 streaming video on sites like Netflix and did not give a shit, only Degenerate Activists like Mozilla employees & community gecko contributors actually cared. And they lost.
Much of what the Firefox and Safari teams do on standards committees is activism as well: fighting against useful standards from the big player because they believe the standards are bad for users. I generally agree, but it's impossible to claim that it's anything other than activism (pro-privacy, etc) when the average Chrome user just goes 'cool, I can use my midi keyboard and bluetooth headset with my web browser'.
Mozilla was a doomed web startup up until the point where Firefox finally succeeded. Now they're doomed again. I won't even claim that's false - I think it's probably true - but it's a fact that the effort was hopeless early on too.
This is my perspective as someone who previously got paid to work on Firefox, then later got paid to work on Chrome, and had an offer to get paid to work on Safari. I think people who complain about Firefox often don't understand what the web actually is and what Mozilla actually does. To be fair, Mozilla is poor at educating people about it.
They oversee how to spend the $500 million which involves managing a lot of people, projects, etc. Which includes preventing people from funneling the money to their friends.
But it does take a high salaried non-technical CEO to market the idea to more people, which brings in more funding for the project.
That's the thing. $50 / month from you or me means nothing compared to $5 / month from a 100x larger audience. Growing the audience means marketing, and tons of non-technical work.
A lot of charities become marketing firms to bring in more money. Because that's how you effectively grow a charity and get more work done. Its just the reality of modern society.
> That's the thing. $50 / month from you or me means nothing compared to $5 / month from a 100x larger audience. Growing the audience means marketing, and tons of non-technical work.
Sounds like they don't need my donation, the people who do this non-technical work are bringing in revenue by the wheelbarrow load. If they weren't the price they charge for their skills would not be justifiable.
I mean, all I have to do is bring up a highly successful 401(c) like Red Cross, or even significant portions of universities / schools.
Small donations over a large base, which largely go towards marketing (ie: Sportsball and festivals at universities) will make a far larger and more successful charity than a purely technical oriented one. Its just the reality of the modern world.
> But it does take a high salaried non-technical CEO to market the idea to more people, which brings in more funding for the project.
That's the same argument used to pay CEOs hundreds of millions ("they make us more money"). And then there are studies suggesting that the effect the CEO has on the success of the company is rather small - and of course, the CEOs who aren't successful still get paid unbelievable amounts of money.
Interestingly, this same sentiment is a huge part of why charitable giving runs into problems.
A lot of people are willing to give, so long as they get to decide what is done with their funds. Of course, these same people have no idea what it actually takes to run a charity; they have no idea what on-the-ground problems need to be solved day-to-day; they have absolutely zero understanding of the organizational supports needed to make any organization function. They're basically in the worst possible position to decide how best to use those funds.
But they still want to decide how they're used.
This despite the fact that they're ostensibly donating to a charitable organization specifically because that organization possesses all that expertise; expertise that costs real money to attract and retain, since they're ultimately competing against the private sector.
It's one of the reasons why, when I donate to a charity, I never specify how I want those funds to be used; I recognize that the charity is in a far better position to make that decision than I am.
I feel like there's a connection to Dunning-Kreuger in here somewhere...