Big difference to the Wikimedia Foundation is how much money they need. The Mozilla Corporation (which develops Firefox) has around 750 employees.
Optimistically, only 500 of those are devs and work on Firefox. If you pay those a wage of 100,000 USD, that makes 50 million USD of costs just for wages.
Firefox has less than 200 million monthly active users, so everyone using it would need to donate $0.25, or alternatively 1% of users would need to donate $25, yearly.
That’s a lot of money to hope people donate, and this is a very optimistic ballpark estimate.
I don’t understand why cryptocurrency isn’t an accepted solution to this. Open firefox, attach wallet, drip $0.25/month/user. It’s good for tiny transactions.
Yes now it does, it’s beyond soured. But it’s a strange disconnect. Ignoring all the social commentary and looking for the most practical solution for making small pay-per-use payments - it was right there.
Maaaaaybe. I think the actual advantages over other methods are fairly intangible.
If “surfing the web” required making many very small anonymous payments every hour then yeah, there’s advantages. I’ll admit that doesn’t actually sound terrible - I’d rather pay a few cents to read articles than the current advertising & subscription model.
As a solution for mozilla in isolation though, it would be an over engineered solution with too much baggage. Current mozilla users might have the aptitude for something like this but Mozilla wants to seduce a larger market share which is not people like us.
Big difference to the Wikimedia Foundation is how much money they need. The Mozilla Corporation (which develops Firefox) has around 750 employees.
Optimistically, only 500 of those are devs and work on Firefox. If you pay those a wage of 100,000 USD, that makes 50 million USD of costs just for wages.
Firefox has less than 200 million monthly active users, so everyone using it would need to donate $0.25, or alternatively 1% of users would need to donate $25, yearly.
That’s a lot of money to hope people donate, and this is a very optimistic ballpark estimate.
I don’t understand why cryptocurrency isn’t an accepted solution to this. Open firefox, attach wallet, drip $0.25/month/user. It’s good for tiny transactions.
Because crypto just has such a stink on it.
It may well be a reasonable solution for this specific problem, but still… no one is going to get behind this.
Yes now it does, it’s beyond soured. But it’s a strange disconnect. Ignoring all the social commentary and looking for the most practical solution for making small pay-per-use payments - it was right there.
Maaaaaybe. I think the actual advantages over other methods are fairly intangible.
If “surfing the web” required making many very small anonymous payments every hour then yeah, there’s advantages. I’ll admit that doesn’t actually sound terrible - I’d rather pay a few cents to read articles than the current advertising & subscription model.
As a solution for mozilla in isolation though, it would be an over engineered solution with too much baggage. Current mozilla users might have the aptitude for something like this but Mozilla wants to seduce a larger market share which is not people like us.
Ya I think the ship has sailed, maybe one day. Right now it would be a loony toons move.