Their text:

Hello, Happy New Year! I am excited to share some fantastic news to start 2024: we reached our goal of raising $3,300,000 USD in grassroots donations from the Mozilla community before the end of 2023!

Here’s how the Mozilla community came together in the final six weeks of the year:

An incredible 34,667 of us made a donation to reclaim the internet since Giving Tuesday, including 14,972 who made their first-ever gift to Mozilla; More than 3,000 of us donated our voices to Mozilla Common Voice, recording more than 90,000 clips to make voice recognition systems more accessible; And 1,181 of us started a monthly gift to sustain Mozilla’s non-profit work. Because of this support from the Mozilla community, we’ll be able to do even more of what Mozilla does best: holding irresponsible tech companies accountable, advocating for your privacy, and investing in the people, ideas, and organisations who will help reclaim the internet.

Thanks for everything you do for the internet.

Ashley Boyd Senior Vice President, Global Advocacy Mozilla

  • fmstratEnglish
    1•10 months ago

    The short of it is: No organization that asks for donations should have a CEO making 7M. The facts:

    • Mozilla Foundation owns Mozilla Corp
    • The licensing fee you mention is purposely fuzzy, and not only that, it’s scaled based on the revenue of the Corp
    • The licensing is most certainly NOT the only transaction between the orgs, it’s was only $195K last year. They have agreements on support, staffing, legal, administrative. The biggest of which being money flowing down from the search engine deal.
    • This search engine roll-up is one reason the IRS started an audit in 2009 of the Foundation:

    The restricted assets remain the same as last year: a “tax reserve fund” established in 2005 for a portion of the revenue the Mozilla Foundation received that year from the search engine providers. As noted last year, the IRS has opened an audit of the Mozilla Foundation.

    • To make matters worse, this is not transparent. Gotta love this line from their latest financial reports:

    all significant intercompany transactions have been eliminated in the preparation of these financial statements

    • In 2009 they were being audited because of this relationship

    I’m a Mozilla fan, but I’m not a fan of income inequality, and Mozilla is contributing to it.

    Refs:

    • Vincent
      1•10 months ago

      The licensing fee you mention is purposely fuzzy

      I mean, depending on what you mean by “purposely”, I just think there’s no good way in general to determine the exact worth of the use of a trademark.

      The restricted assets remain the same as last year: a “tax reserve fund” established in 2005 for a portion of the revenue the Mozilla Foundation received that year from the search engine providers. As noted last year, the IRS has opened an audit of the Mozilla Foundation.

      Since the Corporation was founded on August 3, 2005 - this might’ve been the reason? Before the Corporation existed, the Foundation had to receive the money from the search engine providers directly (and the “tax reserve fund” sounds like creative accounting to hold on to that money, potentially leading to the audit), whereas later, the Corporation could hold on to it and pay taxes over it like a regular corporation does.

      I’m a Mozilla fan, but I’m not a fan of income inequality, and Mozilla is contributing to it.

      I’m with you here, and I’m not saying that the ratio CEO pay:employee pay is a good one. All I’m saying is that the money used to fund the CEO pay could not have been used to fund Foundation projects like Common Voice, as far as I’m aware.