Donations only get you so far. Take a mid-sized project, that needs $500k per year (a few devs, very modestly paid, zero expenses). It's a lot of money. It requires a huge user base. Say you have 500k users, and 5% donate $25 per year (I'm optimistic). And that's just $500k US, a few devs, zero expenses. A project that size probably has audit requirements, hosting costs, accounting, legal, trademarks, etc.

I see finances for a few free software projects, and many of them really struggle to get donations year after year, in a way that helps make the project predictable and sustainable.

For the US, people want you to be a 501c3, and then you need a EU equivalent. Canadians are unlikely to give to a US org (especially these days), but the market is too small to setup a local charity. So you need partners. All that has many compliance requirements and paperwork, so you need non-tech employees for the fundraising and accounting.

Eventually your big donors start blackmailing the project if you don't do what they want, and often their interests are not aligned with most users. You need various income sources.

To expand on Firefox mobile: if you haven’t tried it, give it a shot. uBlock Origin works just like on desktop. I have seen maybe five ads on my phone browser (including Youtube!) since buying it in 2019.

> I guarantee you that Mozilla will be fine without all the non-sense people

> just put engineers in charge

I would like that but is that even possible? Look at Wikipedia. Look at schools. Once an organization develops a bad case of fat "administrator" class, can it be cured or is it terminal?

I don't want to get my hopes up for nothing.

> Mozilla will be fine without all the non-sense people, just put engineers in charge.

That's always said by the engineers and never seems more than the obvious egocentric bias: What I do is important, everyone and everythying else is pointless.

Kagi already has their own WebKit based browser, not sure they'd be interested in that partnership.

No. Kagi uses Google results behind the scenes. Partner with Duckduckgo, yes. Or others. But please stop fueling Google, even indirectly.

I don't know that a partnership with Kagi is the move, as great as the two work for me. The last thing you want users to see when starting up a new browser is a paywall. It would be rad to see Firefox treat Kagi as a first-class citizen, but I think a true partnership would be detrimental to both.

Agree with you on everything else, though.

Frankly, looking at the shape of Firefox I don't think that Mozilla cares for it at all - they just hold the brand because it's really well-established.

What would be the best solution today is to convince all these Firefox spinoff projects into combining forces and fully forking Firefox away from Mozilla, and don't look back. But seeing what happens around, how various projects - even the smallest ones are being lead, the moods in communities, I highly doubt that's actually possible.

Good, agreed. Let's just hope Anthony will read this.

Also, speaking of trust, return the "never sell your data" to the FAQ.