Comment by bad_user
1 year ago
Name a project whose development costs as much as Firefox and that survives from donations.
Many people want AI in their browser. And what does Firefox have to do with crypto?
1 year ago
Name a project whose development costs as much as Firefox and that survives from donations.
Many people want AI in their browser. And what does Firefox have to do with crypto?
Thunderbird is doing pretty good. They actually have a surplus in donations they have to get rid of. Yet Mozilla abandoned it and refuses still to accept donation for Firefox.
Thunderbird is built on Firefox. Thunderbird is not nearly as big as Firefox is.
Linux kernel is backed by Linux Foundation, Servo web engine is backed by Linux Foundation Europe and both are making a great progress. Why can't Firefox be funded by companies like Linux is?
> Name a project whose development costs as much as Firefox and that survives from donations.
Wikipedia.
I think it absolutely would be great if a Wikipedia-like model were viable, but Wikipedia is like the extreme high watermark for that, and they get five billion visits a month, which I think is an order of magnitude higher than what Firefox has access to. Ramping up to Wikipedia scale levels of donations would be a serious project and a significant gamble.
Wikipedia has also been around as long as the internet itself and its current fundraising drives are the culmination of decades of momentum and cultivating a perception of the compact that exists between them and their users.
Also, I believe that even in the best of times Wikipedia is raising about half as much as it costs to run Firefox.
There's probably important caveats that relate to comparing software development projects with resources and content, because I think the most successful donation-driven examples are Wikipedia, NPR, and The Guardian. And what they seem to have in common is generating content to be consumed.
In terms of software development projects, to me the most natural analogy is something like VLC, which does indeed rely on donations and is orders of magnitudes smaller. Or maybe the Tor project which does rely on donations, but I think they're at the order of like 10 million or so, which is certainly promising, but not a like for like substitution for the revenue they get from Google.
Similar to Mozilla & Firefox, there isn't an exact breakdown for Wikimedia expenditures to know the costs associated with Wikipedia. For Firefox, it's often stated its costs are ~200m but those are all expenses Mozilla categorizes under software development. For Wikimedia, within their operation expenses, ~3m were in hosting and ~84m in salaries (related to programs). The salaries are stated to be for multiple initiatives, among which platform development is mentioned*.
*Although arguably the most important part of Wikipedia, and their other collaborative projects, are the volunteers maintaining and contributing to it, rather the developers.
Wikimedia does not raise $200 million per year.
You're right. They only raise $180 million a year.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fundraising_statisti...
Still feels like it aught to be enough to make a browser.
Linux?
Linux is massively funded by companies like IBM and Red Hat.
The Linux Foundation receives over $15m in corporate funding.
Note that $15 million is nowhere near enough to pay the number of employees who work on Firefox. As a for-profit (unlike the foundation), Mozilla the corporation has to pay folks market rates, and if you're paying an employee in the US, you're paying that same amount on top as taxes, insurance, benefits, etc. etc. so $15 million gets you a few dozen people at most. Mozilla employs a few hundred. So you'll have to add a zero to that number before it's in the same ballpark (e.g. wikipedia would be a good example).
1 reply →
> And what does Firefox have to do with crypto?
Firefox is all AI this year, but they've been all blockchain when that was in fashion.
Is the AI coming at a prohibitive cost? I'm not sure I understand what is going to come of those bets, and I'm not a fan of AI everything so I hope it's only used in measured ways that are beneficial, but I certainly would rather them continue innovating.
I don't think they did a whole lot with blockchain beyond some very preliminary dabbling in decentralized web stuff which if it could have gained traction I absolutely would have supported but it certainly doesn't seem like it was a significant drag on developer resources or finances so far as I could tell.
And wouldn't that have to be the argument for any of this to matter?
It depends if having the organization chasing the latest fad as it changes yearly inspires you trust or the opposite...
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> they've been all blockchain when that was in fashion
They've never been “all blockchain”, what are you talking about?
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