What are the alternatives? How should Mozilla fund itself? It's the same problem that every piece of open source software has: developers cost serious money and relying on unpaid volunteers is unsustainable as well as dangerous (see https://xkcd.com/2347/ for the appropriate meme).
Some projects have attempted to solve that problem by providing enterprise consulting (MySQL), SaaS hosting (Elasticsearch), getting funded/acquired by a megacorp (Google, IBM, Oracle)... but for Mozilla and its various projects I can't see any way of monetization.
> Firefox OS, all failures.
Again, the same problem: Google and Apple have probably sunk dozens of billions of dollars into Android and iOS. It is impossible to create a viable competition against such massive amounts of money, even Microsoft with its advantage of many years of experience with Windows CE / Windows Phone and the bankroll of being Microsoft has failed.
> Some projects have attempted to solve that problem by providing enterprise consulting (MySQL), SaaS hosting (Elasticsearch), getting funded/acquired by a megacorp (Google, IBM, Oracle)... but for Mozilla and its various projects I can't see any way of monetization.
You see, they had a good chance with doing the exact same thing with Rust and creating a consultancy around it, but they threw it all away. Erlang and OCaml also still have consultancies around their languages as well and I already suggested something along the lines of that before, but for Rust [0].
Instead, they wasted it on the Rust Foundation and threw away their trademarks where it has been hijacked by the same companies competing against Mozilla. An opportunity wasted.
maybe focus on building the browser better and allowing donation for it instead of spending money (including any donation) on rubbish executives/political causes?
Donations are a notoriously fickle beast. Other than Wikipedia, no successful open-source project is being dominantly funded from donations - and one might argue that Wikipedia only gets so many donations because their funding drives are pretty damn obnoxious (Yes I'm aware that it's Wikimedia Foundation but let's be honest the side projects are pretty much irrelevant). To make it worse, even the behemoth that Wikipedia is creates barely 160 million dollars a year in revenue [1]. That is orders of magnitude less than the amount of money that Google, MS and Apple have at their disposal.
Some projects have attempted to solve that problem by providing enterprise consulting (MySQL), SaaS hosting (Elasticsearch), getting funded/acquired by a megacorp (Google, IBM, Oracle)... but for Mozilla and its various projects I can't see any way of monetization.
> Firefox OS, all failures.
Again, the same problem: Google and Apple have probably sunk dozens of billions of dollars into Android and iOS. It is impossible to create a viable competition against such massive amounts of money, even Microsoft with its advantage of many years of experience with Windows CE / Windows Phone and the bankroll of being Microsoft has failed.