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Pay who, and how much?

Or perhaps you think some individuals at the top are siphoning it off somehow ... which is a pretty serious insinuation to make really.

You said that, not me. I merely point out that your "Mozilla is a charity" viewpoint misses the big picture. There's $70 million flowing annually, getting divvied up, paid, allocated, spent, all sans 501c restrictions. I do think it deserves more community scrutiny than it gets. And I do think that it could benefit from another strong FOSS competitor, as KDE and Gnome benefit from each other, and as Debian has benefited from having another strong distro appear in their camp. Agreed on current market shares, but recommend that we revisit the issue in a year. I fully expect a less worrisome, less lopsided, and more vibrant FOSS browser market to emerge by then. "

I have no problem with there being an audit to establish that the money that flows through Mozilla is indeed used for its stated aims, and to ensure that no-one is raking off some cash somewhere.

However, if an audit does establish that Mozilla's money is being used as per its charter and stated purpose, then I have no problem with Mozilla retaining its tax-free status.

What would be the point of taking some of the funds going through the self-funded Mozilla orgaisation, which is being used for a stated purpose to help the people, and instead tax those funds for adding to the public purse ... ostensibly also to help the people.

Personally ... we can see what Mozilla are doing with the money. It would appear that they are sticking exactly on task to their stated purpose, and doing everything they can to make a better, more popular open browser, and hence keep the web open for everyone. If Mozilla were to be taxed ... then the government would instead be in control of some of those development funds.

Where would YOU trust the money to be better spent for your interests?

When 10s of millions per year flow through any 501c organization, for profit subsidiaries or not, I think it best for there to be plenty of 3rd party scrutiny. You'd be surprised (or maybe you wouldn't) at how millions of dollars can affect the judgement and ethics of good, well intentioned people.

However, that is not really the essence of what bothers me about the current Free browser situation. The thing that bothers me is the historical lack of credible competition which you helpfully pointed out in a previous post. Firefox, having been such a FOSS success story thus far (which is good) has developed a sort of fan base of uncritical followers (which is bad). Firefox can do no wrong. I find this worrisome. The main thrust of many of my posts on Firefox is that another strong FOSS browser/rendering engine/javascript engine would be good for everyone, including (and perhaps especially) FF users. I believe that we will see substantial progress toward that end in the next year, and look forward to it.

Not to distract, because this is also not my main point, but interesting to note, is the philosophy, regarding FOSS, of the FF advocacy community. There are plenty of "FF Rulez!" folks who do not care that much about FF's FOSS status beyond it being another bullet point for why FF Rulez and IE Sucks. You may recall the full page New York Times advertisement that the Spread Firefox community ran a fund drive to pay for, and successfully produced. I was a Spread Firefox community member then. After publication, the official PDF of the ad was made available for download. The only problem was that it was not viewable in *any* Free pdf viewer. It *required* Adobe's Acrobat to be opened at all. I mentioned this in the SFF forums. The response from the community was along the lines of "What's the problem? Just use Acrobat". I further suggested that using a pdf that required the proprietary Adobe Acrobat was not really in keeping with the spirit of what we had donated money for in the first place. (Yes, I had donated.) The response that I got (and I quote) was to "get a life". As an advocate of FOSS since 1995 (though we didn't call it that back then) I got a very "we're not in Kansas anymore" feeling at that point. I did view the ad with Acrobat, because I did want to see it, and I'm not *that* anal about using proprietary software. But I came away feeling that I had learned something about that community which I found worrisome.

-Steve

Edited 2008-11-21 20:13 UTC