You're a wholly owned subsidiary of a nonprofit that owns a company of the same name that pays their CEO almost $7M. Here's my concrete suggestion, pay them less and spend that money on better things.

If your pitch is "but we're a part of Mozilla, not a part of Mozilla", you need to work on that messaging, because come on.

@jwz I don't want to attack FOSS developers, especially of the software I use daily, but this is a honest question: what *is* the benefit of being part of the Mozilla Whatever, if you have to rely on direct donations anyway?

The post you linked talks about how being a for-profit is beneficial , and alright, fair, but you can't deny this multi-level for-murky-purposes scheme looks off-putting.

I promise I will start a monthly symbolic donation to repent for asking questions if you do give me an answer.

Edit: fwiw from afar it certainly looks like Mozilla wanted to kill the project off, but when people started donating it graciously accepted the heavy responsibility of managing that money after all. I'm sure it's more complicated than that (which is the problem)

@virtulis @jwz I talk a lot about the sustainability of the project and have fought to have it protected in a separate place where it can live or die on its own merits. We get a lot of benefit from having access to experts within the larger Mozilla family to help us with build infrastructure and other areas where it would be difficult for our team to manage alone.

But being separate, financially, means we shape our own destiny. Which has been a problem.

@ryanleesipes @jwz thank you for the response. Just to clarify, I didn't question the need for a separate entity, rather the point of it not being completely separate (and that's how I read the conversation prior).

If you do indeed get help from Mozilla without additional impediment to yourselves, that is certainly a good reason.

Added a recurring €5 as promised.

@ryanleesipes @virtulis "People don't understand why the 2 (3??) organizations with the same name, one of whom owns us, don't give us any of that $450M/year from Google." Yeah, it's a mystery why people might not understand that.

I get that you consider yourselves independent of the corp, of which you are a subsidiary, but surely you get why, to anyone on the outside, this sounds like if Google held a bake sale to keep Gmail running.

Point the money hydrant at it. If not why not.

@jwz @virtulis we (the project) considered spinning out, and Mozilla was fine with that. But the help we get versus being on our own makes it worthwhile to be related.

Finally, each entity does what benefits it. Thunderbird history has shown that the Corporation spending money on Thunderbird isn't beneficial to it. Which makes sense. We (the Thunderbird community and MZLA employees) have found a way to exist and grow with (so far) complete freedom. As I see it, that's a win.