Ryan Sipes, if you can read this, everybody online remembers the 2020 Servo team lay-offs, and the juxtaposition of the C level compensation.
If you are serious about winning back donors and trust:
- Allow for a transparent breakdown of expenses on things like external consultancy and also C level compensation
- Allow financial ring-fencing of donations. Such that my donation can only finance Firefox devs or Thunderbird devs.
(Not teams, not products, not managers/VPs/Directors just developers. Everyone else's compensation should come from corporate donations or other means)
I love Firefox and Thunderbird, use both everyday, was also a yearly donor up to 2020 (now I just donate to Archive.org and KDE).
You have great products that people love but if you are serious about gaining back trust you need to show judicious spending on the top side of the org. Justifying it with we need to spend money to get fundraisers doesn't pass the community test.
We need to add Palantir in bold letters to that list, they are behind this in every way except for 'officially'.
> The Commission’s failure to identify the list of experts as falling within the scope of the complainant’s public access request constitutes maladministration. [0]
> The Commission presented a proposal on preventing and combating child sexual abuse, looking in particular at detecting child pornography. In this context, it has mentioned that support could be provided by the software of the controversial American company Palantir... [1]
> Is Palantir’s failure to register on the Transparency Register compatible with the Commission’s transparency commitments? [1]
(Palantir only entered the Transparency Registry in March 2025 despite being a multi million vendor of Gotham for Europol and European Agencies for more than a decade)
> No detailed records exist concerning a January meeting between European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and the CEO of controversial US data analytics firm Palantir [2]
Greece/Austria/Finland/Belgium/Italy also discussing.
The best one for me is Portugal, parliament approved this law all while the country is being devastated by hurricane winds and flooding with several calamity zones. They are really bringing Law into effect by maximum obfuscation.
EU anonimity online is over because ivory tower folks want to speedrun all of us into 1984.
And this is obviously just a stepping stone to mass message scanning. The revolution will not be organizable.
Irrespective of the accuracy of estimates it will be in the thousands, and most tragicly it will be very young men and women most of whom university educated, the very people that would be the country's tomorrow.
Worth reminding everyone in the EU and UK that this is not a 'them' problem.
Palantir is the main software vendor for Europol. Equally pretty much all the 1984 proposals for age or id online verification that are being massaged into existence (both in the UK and pushed by the European Commission) have their fingers all over them.
They sell pre-crime and opinion control to our democratic leaders and apparently everyone in Davos loves it.
For some reasons I think europol officers (the ones taking decisions, at least) are loving ice. They didn't have issues when proposing to expand chat control, which would meant large scale surveillance, so they'd appreciate whatever palantir can come out with
That very much exists, and is issued yearly.
Consolidated Financial Statements 2024-2023:
https://stateof.mozilla.org/pdf/Mozilla%20Fdn%202024%20-%20A...
Expenses in Software Development (2024):
> 290,448,000
Total Expenses (2024):
> 588,215,000
Ryan Sipes, if you can read this, everybody online remembers the 2020 Servo team lay-offs, and the juxtaposition of the C level compensation.
If you are serious about winning back donors and trust:
- Allow for a transparent breakdown of expenses on things like external consultancy and also C level compensation
- Allow financial ring-fencing of donations. Such that my donation can only finance Firefox devs or Thunderbird devs. (Not teams, not products, not managers/VPs/Directors just developers. Everyone else's compensation should come from corporate donations or other means)
I love Firefox and Thunderbird, use both everyday, was also a yearly donor up to 2020 (now I just donate to Archive.org and KDE).
You have great products that people love but if you are serious about gaining back trust you need to show judicious spending on the top side of the org. Justifying it with we need to spend money to get fundraisers doesn't pass the community test.
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