• Lexi Sneptaur@pawb.social
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    6 months ago

    It seems like a profit-driven thing to me. Big piles of anonymized data are worth a pretty penny.

      • fartsparkles@sh.itjust.works
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        6 months ago

        Mozilla Foundation has a wholly owned subsidiary that is Mozilla Corporation that is for-profit.

        For instance the revenue from Google, so they’re the default search engine, is seen by Mozilla Corporation. So things search-related will indeed be part of their for-profit arm.

        • Vincent@feddit.nl
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          6 months ago

          It’s technically for profit, but it has a single shareholder: the Foundation. There are no greedy shareholders that can get rich off of that profit.

          Of course, employees/board members can be richly compensated, but that’s independent of for-/non-profit status.

          • fartsparkles@sh.itjust.works
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            6 months ago

            It’s not a loophole. As a subsidiary, profits are still invested into the nonprofit and they’re still guided by the Mozilla manifesto. It just lets them do more and raise more funds which would be difficult to do with nonprofit status (selling default search engine for instance). Here’s their original press release when they incorporated Mozilla Corporation in 2005.

      • Lexi Sneptaur@pawb.social
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        6 months ago

        A non-profit can, in fact, profit, but it has specific rules on what it can do with those profits. Tax law is a rabbit hole and I don’t even wanna peer in

        • OldManBOMBIN@lemmy.world
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          6 months ago

          Used to work for a non-profit retirement community in a pretty small area; the guy running the joint lived in a $3M “house” with a full 7 car garage.