#mozilla has done a lot of good for the web, but the hybrid "for-profit owned by non-profit" model is and always has been a mistake.
You get the worst of both worlds -- a layer of nonprofit bureaucracy on top of for-profit business practices, compensation structures, and decision-making.
It reflects Mozilla's history, being born in the ideological swamp of hypercapitalist Silicon Valley, which frowns upon nonprofits, and which pursues profit, growth & "disruption" above all else.
@eloquence Having worked there, the Foundation (MoFo) and Corporation (MoCo) were actually pretty separate.
The non-profit owning the for-profit is kind of a tax loophole AFAIK whereby MoCo pay for the use of MoFo's IP (logo, etc.)
In 2010 there were <5 people working for MoFo, then they scaled it up to focus on Webmaker, Open Badges, etc. (stuff I was part of) and then scaled back again.
Lots of mistakes, but I don't think non-profit bureaucracy is one of them!
For sure - I didn't mean to imply otherwise. To me the separation _is_ the problem: you have a separate Board, a separate ED, a separate revenue strategy, 501(c)(3) compliance requirements to worry about, all the while the for-profit goes about its business in a manner largely independent of this structure.
Tax reasons are a huge factor, but of course MoCo could align its business practices much more with NPO practices even under its legal structure, but chooses not to.
And those tax reasons are tied to a specific decisions which I would frame at least partially ideological: to make itself utterly dependent on Google (briefly Yahoo) as a source of revenue. That achieved faster growth, but it meant foregoing the creation of single, independent organization with diversified revenue.
This decision to grow a business instead of an institution is what I am most critical of.
As you may know, 501(c)(3)s are legally entitled to earn as much mission-related income as they want - that's why massive nonprofit enterprises with plenty of questionable practices like Goodwill can exist. They can even make substantial taxable _unrelated_ income.
So you can absolutely create a nonprofit that makes deals with other businesses to sustain itself -- just probably not one that makes one big deal with a single corporation that almost entirely sustains it.
Erik Moeller
˗ˏˋ Doug Belshaw ˎˊ˗ 🇪🇺☠️✊: