Their text:
Hello, Happy New Year! I am excited to share some fantastic news to start 2024: we reached our goal of raising $3,300,000 USD in grassroots donations from the Mozilla community before the end of 2023!
Here’s how the Mozilla community came together in the final six weeks of the year:
An incredible 34,667 of us made a donation to reclaim the internet since Giving Tuesday, including 14,972 who made their first-ever gift to Mozilla; More than 3,000 of us donated our voices to Mozilla Common Voice, recording more than 90,000 clips to make voice recognition systems more accessible; And 1,181 of us started a monthly gift to sustain Mozilla’s non-profit work. Because of this support from the Mozilla community, we’ll be able to do even more of what Mozilla does best: holding irresponsible tech companies accountable, advocating for your privacy, and investing in the people, ideas, and organisations who will help reclaim the internet.
Thanks for everything you do for the internet.
Ashley Boyd Senior Vice President, Global Advocacy Mozilla
I don’t understand the negativity. This is objectively good news. Would y’all rather people not donate to the Mozilla foundation? This hostile cynicism against Mozilla popping up time and again is getting old.
I feel like partly because of this infighting is why stupid stuff like brave and chrome keeps on getting recommended and more and more popular. Like I understand we’re supposed to hold Mozilla to a higher standard and all. But I am really tired of this constant infighting among not just privacy/FOSS enthusiasts but also among the climate movement or left leaning people in general. This need for absolute 100% alignment with one’s goals/beliefs gets no progress done. At some point y’all need to look at the bigger picture and root for the David fighting against the Goliath. FFS does it really need to be spelt out that how big of a loss it’d be for the vision of a free and open internet if orgs like Mozilla aren’t around‽
It’s not difficult to understand why Mozilla has become difficult to root for. This is the news story more people heard about so far this year: https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/02/mozilla_in_2024_ai_privacy/
I still do root for them of course, since there aren’t really any other web browsers. But they’re not making it easy.
I’d really like to know how you evaluate the following topic. Mozilla’s CEO earns 7 million. Mozilla asks for 3.3 million in donations. Please evaluate pro and con and draw a conclusion.
Compare that to Wikipedia’s CEO and it’s even worse.
Of note is that the Corporation CEO is paid from Corporation revenues, i.e. primarily the Google search deal. Firefox development very likely could not be supported by donations alone, and the Corporation can’t take donations for it.
Donations to the Foundation go to the Foundation’s advocacy work, and projects like Common Voice.