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.
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.