Firefox is NOT made by a nonprofit, that's the problem. It's made by a for profit corporation using the shell of a noprofit to claim legitimacy. This for proffit Mozilla Corp is primarily funded by an ad tech company and has itself dabbled in ads multiple times, contrary to the interests of the userbase that the nonprofit should be looking out for. These aren't minor misteps but repeated deliberate decisions to ignore user preferences.
The Mozilla Corporation is a for profit company completely owned by the nonprofit the Mozilla Foundation. Originally there was just the nonprofit, but that caused tax issues with the money generated from the search deal, and after paying a few million to the IRS they switched to the current setup.
I don't think it's fair to claim the nonprofit side only exists to "claim legitimacy." All of their revenue goes back into the corporation or the foundation.
This a very common arrangement used by charities to enable a commercial process that funds the charity. For example, high street charity shops may be part of the commercial sub-entity so that their accounts are processed like a normal company, but 100% of their profits become donations to fund the parent charity's activities, called the charitable purpose(s).
If they didn't separate into a parent charity with a commercial sub-entity, all of the activities of the sub-entity would be subject to charity auditing, accounting and purpose rules, which in practice would make it difficult to run a shop competitively, or alternatively the parent could not have charity status and the shop profit would be subject to tax instead of all being directed to the audited, charitable purpose(s).
In Mozilla's case, if it was a tax-exempt non-profit without a commercial sub-entity giving 100% of profits to its parent, it would not be able to take Google funding as a trade in exchange for making Google the default search engine without losing its tax-exempt status, and it might not be able to pay its software engineers a competitive market rate, even if it needs to do that to compete. It would be able to take donations (not as a trade in exchange for something, just as a donation), but that wouldn't be enough to develop a competitive browser.
> In Mozilla's case, if it was a tax-exempt non-profit without a commercial sub-entity giving 100% of profits to its parent, it would not be able to take Google funding as a trade in exchange for making Google the default search engine without losing its tax-exempt status, and it might not be able to pay its software engineers a competitive market rate, even if it needs to do that to compete.
That doesn't sound like a bad thing. Googles funding is not a boon but a shackle that holds FF back. Same for developers that expect SV market rates - those will be developers that are used to user-hostile software developement practiced in other SV companies.
> It would be able to take donations (not as a trade in exchange for something, just as a donation), but that wouldn't be enough to develop a competitive browser.
How do you know? Individual donations are also far from the only possible way to fund a real charity.
Look - I cant claim that there weren't repeated and deliberate bad decisions, and I can't claim that being funded mainly by google gives the best incentives.
But it is really a nonprofit in that (like the sibling says) the corp is fully owned by a nonprofit, not public shareholders.
And its not like google doesn't get anything out of their $. They get set as the default engine. Apple gets paid hundreds of billions by google for this. So its not like Google is paying Firefox for control over it's development.
Like, seriously,
they're not perfect but its a pretty wide jump in behavior between it and chrome
the point is - the corporation is fully owned and controlled by a nonprofit so it is essentially a part of the nonprofit. if you don't see this as a meaningful difference, I don't know how to help ya.
