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smt88last Tuesday at 11:37 PM1 replyview on HN

The contributors are paid by Mozilla Foundation. This is not complicated.


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sfinklast Wednesday at 12:44 AM

Hm. I'm dumb so you'll need to spell it out for me.

MoFo and MoCo both have contributors, yes. Both have unpaid contributors, which apparently are not who you're talking about. Both also have paid people who work for them. Whether or not you call them "contributors" or "employees" doesn't matter much, I guess. But still, MoFo contributors, paid or not, do not work on Firefox. Firefox is not a MoFo product. Most MoCo contributors do work on Firefox. Firefox is a MoCo product. It's confusing because MoFo owns MoCo, but owning a company does not mean its products are your products, nor that you can freely assist with those products (especially in an arms-length setup involving taxes, which is the very reason for the MoFo/MoCo split in the first place.) MoFo does other things, non-Firefox things, like advocacy and pissing off HN commenters who assume that "Mozilla does X" headlines always mean MoCo is doing X.

One of us is confused. I have that uneasy sensation I get when something is going "whoosh!" over my head, so it might be me.

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