I'd pay for a supported product. I'll not just donate randomly into Mozilla, because that doesn't let them know what aspect of their work is useful to me.
I don't want Pocket. I don't want VPN. I'd pay for Firefox though, and only Firefox.
Buying a product to solve a problem is very different to donating to a foundation.
> I wish as a community our reaction to Mozilla's troubles was "let's all start donating!" instead of "screw those evil pigs".
But what would that change? You're not donating to the makers of Firefox, you're donating to the entity that owns the makers of Firefox. They'll spend the money on whatever they find interesting or lucrative or politically wise. Firefox might or might not be among them.
Sure, they could fuck it up. Lots of people fuck obvious things up, and Mozilla hasn't been lucky in several of their recent investments.
But if serious money came in through donations, and everyone put "for firefox, keep it simple and good" in their donation box, they'd have to be particularly braindead to put that money elsewhere.
That being said, now that I do some math, it'd take 3.7mm people each donating $10/mo to match their 2018 revenue of $450mm/yr. Which does sound difficult to achieve...
> That being said, now that I do some math, it'd take 3.7mm people each donating $10/mo to match their 2018 revenue of $450mm/yr. Which does sound difficult to achieve...
For normal users who can hardly tell Chrome and Firefox apart and say "Chrome? Firefox? Sorry, I'm using the internet"? Yeah.
For power users? I'm not convinced. JetBrains makes about $250mm a year only from developers. But their focus is on delivering value to developers, making their lives easier and their work more fun. I'm sure Firefox could deliver a lot of value too, but they're focused on the lowest common denominator of all users, not on targeting e.g. developers or web power users and offering them something that Google does not.
But if there's a good chance that the money ends up in political activism or some hobby project at Mozilla ("why don't we build a new OS?"), donations aren't going to work.
Make Firefox a great Developer tool so you don't need Fiddler & co as a developer and sell that as a commercial version, keep the open source version. I don't know whether it will bring in $450mm, but I'm sure it will bring in lots of money.
I would argue JetBrains doesn't make most of their money from individual developers (consumers) but rather from businesses (who in some cases may be freelancers or solo founders).
Firefox offering a browser to companies, that's a better product for them from a security perspective or something, sounds possibly interesting.
But that being said, the competition from Chrome (which is free, integrated with GSuite, and already offers corporate security features) would be stiff.
And of course, Firefox's mission has always put humans at the center, not businesses. Moving from "Google Search $$" to "Business $$" might be a frying pan to fire move in terms of distracting from their core mission...
But still, interesting, and I appreciate your thoughts..
I assume it's easy to set up a monthly donation.
Or would you rather they start demanding or pleading for money?
EDIT: To be fair, I don't either, and I do use FF. I donate to wikimedia and the internet archive but not Mozilla.
I wish as a community our reaction to Mozilla's troubles was "let's all start donating!" instead of "screw those evil pigs".