I'm starting to sincerely hope there'll be a fork of Firefox or at least a separation from Mozilla, and for Quantum/Servo to be separated and made an easily embeddable. The inability to donate directly to projects has imo has had a direct result of requiring Google money.
Firefox and Quantum don't need 100M to survive. That's that just absurd. Even if you had 250 people working on it for 100k each, you still wouldn't get to anything as crazy as 100M. 100k for working on open-source is a pretty good salary.
There's no need to branch out and make all kinds of other side projects that have to fit under the Mozilla umbrella. Splitting focus like that just makes it become a juggling game of who needs the money more, shifting focus between projects and making it difficult for donators to comprehend where the money is going to.
When I donate to KDE, it's doesn't come as a surprise that I can't request my donation to be earmarked for something. The project is for a desktop environment after all. It's in the name and it's the flagship product. But when your flagship product is a browser and you don't provide people the possibility to donate to that product... well, what's the point in donating?
Even the argument of "I know better what to do with your money than you do" sounds incredibly pretentious. We hear that all the time from politicians and we clearly see where that money goes to: their pockets, their friends pockets, some other project we never heard of and THEN it goes to the project we thought it would go to. If I wanted to give my money to an institution I didn't believe in, I'd pay more taxes.
> 100k for working on open-source is a pretty good salary.
The kind of people you're trying to hire have the option to earn 3-4x as much working for a FAANG. Being excited about working on something you believe in can get you a long way, but that's still a lot to ask.
If money were everything, nobody would be working on opensource.
I'd jump at that opportunity. Earning a third or a even a quarter of what I earn now would pay for every single one of my living expenses and even allow a comfortable life. There's no way that salary would be OK for a corporation, but for doing something I truly believe in? It's friggin' great.
> If money were everything, nobody would be working on opensource.
A large majority of hours spent on open source are paid, though. Developers working full-time on open source projects at various large corporations. I was in that category from 2012 to early 2017 working on mod_pagespeed, for example.
There are many small labor-of-love open source projects, but large ones are uncommon.
> I'd jump at that opportunity.
There are definitely people who would be happy to make that trade; I'm not claiming that you're the only one or something like that. Instead, what I'm saying is that there are a lot of people who are willing to take a modest pay cut to work on a public-benefit project like Firefox but aren't willing to take a ~60-75% one. And, further, Mozilla isn't going to be able to make a top-notch browser without hiring many of these people.
Also, when estimating total employee cost from salary, a good rule of thumb is to double it to cover indirect compensation and overhead such as healthcare, retirement matching, employer's share of income tax, office overhead, IT infrastructure, etc.
Firefox and Quantum don't need 100M to survive. That's that just absurd. Even if you had 250 people working on it for 100k each, you still wouldn't get to anything as crazy as 100M. 100k for working on open-source is a pretty good salary.
There's no need to branch out and make all kinds of other side projects that have to fit under the Mozilla umbrella. Splitting focus like that just makes it become a juggling game of who needs the money more, shifting focus between projects and making it difficult for donators to comprehend where the money is going to.
When I donate to KDE, it's doesn't come as a surprise that I can't request my donation to be earmarked for something. The project is for a desktop environment after all. It's in the name and it's the flagship product. But when your flagship product is a browser and you don't provide people the possibility to donate to that product... well, what's the point in donating?
Even the argument of "I know better what to do with your money than you do" sounds incredibly pretentious. We hear that all the time from politicians and we clearly see where that money goes to: their pockets, their friends pockets, some other project we never heard of and THEN it goes to the project we thought it would go to. If I wanted to give my money to an institution I didn't believe in, I'd pay more taxes.