If I could, I would. Sadly being from North Africa makes it hard for me to donate to my favorite FOSS projects. There are many restrictions and even getting a credit card that’s usable internationally is a pain, and it only gives you an amount each year you can use online. Not to mention having a really low currency and bad economy would make even a trivial donation feel like a sizable portion of your income.
My comment wasn’t a dig at Firefox but a lament. It shows how complex things are. The FOSS and privacy oriented option has to rely here on Google having enough money to give to it. Google having enough money relies on data mining. So the monetization of privacy-respecting option relies on other users letting go of their privacy to Google. While Firefox is a superior option, it is worth seeing how ultimately we are still fucked. Even the FOSS option survives through ad revenue of another company. This highlights the problem of FOSS monetization that needs to be solved.
Firefox should learn from Thunderbird.
There’s some gripes around that, actually, as donations don’t flow to Firefox but to the other stuff the foundation does with the profits they earn from Firefox. In fact Firefox development is done by the corporation, not the foundation, so they can’t even send money there (at least I assume you can’t funnel money from non-profit to for-profit corporations in the US, that would be nonsensical even for their legal system). It might fund Firefox indirectly, though, e.g. awarding funds for a FLOSS SSL library which Firefox then uses but stuff like funding a UI framework or such probably won’t fly because it’s not web.
It’s not that the stuff they fund is bad, it just ain’t Firefox. Also they have quite some administrative overhead (30%). About 1% of what they spend on that stuff comes from donations, the rest is income from, primarily, Firefox, primarily by selling the default search engine spot – different ones depending on market.
Do you donate money to them monthly?
If I could, I would. Sadly being from North Africa makes it hard for me to donate to my favorite FOSS projects. There are many restrictions and even getting a credit card that’s usable internationally is a pain, and it only gives you an amount each year you can use online. Not to mention having a really low currency and bad economy would make even a trivial donation feel like a sizable portion of your income. My comment wasn’t a dig at Firefox but a lament. It shows how complex things are. The FOSS and privacy oriented option has to rely here on Google having enough money to give to it. Google having enough money relies on data mining. So the monetization of privacy-respecting option relies on other users letting go of their privacy to Google. While Firefox is a superior option, it is worth seeing how ultimately we are still fucked. Even the FOSS option survives through ad revenue of another company. This highlights the problem of FOSS monetization that needs to be solved. Firefox should learn from Thunderbird.
That’s actually a very good point. There aren’t that much big FOSS projects that can survive just from donations.
There’s some gripes around that, actually, as donations don’t flow to Firefox but to the other stuff the foundation does with the profits they earn from Firefox. In fact Firefox development is done by the corporation, not the foundation, so they can’t even send money there (at least I assume you can’t funnel money from non-profit to for-profit corporations in the US, that would be nonsensical even for their legal system). It might fund Firefox indirectly, though, e.g. awarding funds for a FLOSS SSL library which Firefox then uses but stuff like funding a UI framework or such probably won’t fly because it’s not web.
It’s not that the stuff they fund is bad, it just ain’t Firefox. Also they have quite some administrative overhead (30%). About 1% of what they spend on that stuff comes from donations, the rest is income from, primarily, Firefox, primarily by selling the default search engine spot – different ones depending on market.