Every year as December 31st looms, I sit down and parcel out my end-of-year donations to organizations I care about.  Wikipedia, EFF, and of course some non-tech-related charities.<p>Every year, I weigh whether I should throw some bucks to the Mozilla Foundation.  I&#x27;ve been using their browsers, under one name or another, for over 20 years since the day I first discovered the web.  It&#x27;s been the most important piece of software in my life.<p>I appreciate what they (along with Apache and BSD) have done in providing an open source counterexample for the GPL, and opening the door for open source in corporate software development.<p>Moreover, I worry about their long-term financial viability.  Yahoo is NOT going to be around in its current form forever.  I&#x27;m not sure whether there&#x27;s any other &quot;anchor sponsor&quot; on the horizon that would fund Mozilla at the same level as Google or Yahoo without forcing compromises in principles.<p>However, I still just haven&#x27;t been able to make myself click the donate button.<p>The things that I ACTUALLY care about from Mozilla (i.e. Firefox and Thunderbird) are things that fell into their lap from Netscape back in 1998, and which they&#x27;ve incrementally tweaked or re-worked in the two decades since.  I don&#x27;t feel a sense that anyone in a leadership position at Mozilla really cares about those things.  I think they see them as &quot;legacy software&quot;, providing only a &quot;brand&quot; to be &quot;leveraged&quot; in squeezing a bunch of other junk onto their resumes.<p>They work on a lot of interesting technical things behind the scenes, but little of it appears to have traction or visibility.  The things that ARE promoted by leadership and marketing are &quot;day-late-and-dollar-short&quot; imitations of whatever Google did a few years prior.  I don&#x27;t care if you create a &quot;me too&quot; copy of Android without any phone carriers to sell it.  I don&#x27;t care if you create a &quot;me too&quot; Raspberry Pi, that will be lost in a sea of other coming-soon hobby boards by the time it&#x27;s actually released.<p>The Wikipedia article on Mozilla suggests that their annual budget has grown from $2 million initially, to over $300 million today.  You know what?  They were a better <i>and more RELEVANT</i> organization when they were closer to the $2 million mark.  I don&#x27;t want to donate money so that a band of Google-reject executives can pad their resumes with nonsense and shut down Thunderbird.<p>I almost kinda HOPE that their funding collapses in the wake of Yahoo&#x27;s death, so that the leadership bails and they&#x27;re forced to downsize into something sensible and focused on the flagships.  I just hope that the perhaps-inevitable reformation can happen gracefully without being so jarring as to end Mozilla altogether.