What you gonna do? Go to Google? Mozilla is not allowed to make advertisements (even with the goal of privacy respecting ads), Mozilla is not allowed to get money from Google and Mozilla is not allowed to sell Firefox. These are some of the problems Mozilla is facing. I'm personally not entirely against ads, if its done right (respecting my privacy and not being annoying, also not trying to scam me).
People shit on Mozilla and Firefox, but there is no alternative. Forks off course are alternatives, but without Mozilla's Firefox, there wouldn't be forks. Google, Microsoft and Apple are way, waaay worse.
The fact that Mozilla is not as evil as Google (yet) is only so good, though. If they continue in this downward trajectory, they might eventually put out a browser worse than Chrome, and if that becomes the case... I guess so.
If Mozilla is hemorrhaging money, then maybe they should plug the $65 million in donations towards AI and venture capital firms. Maybe they should lower the CEO salary, which is what happens in general to CEO salaries when markets underperform... Instead of raising it by nearly $2 million.
Agree. If it was a perfect world then governments would fund and contribute to open source project to make sure there are good free solution to keep your data private (at least from being collected and sold to some random companies) and make sure they won't go down.
Sadly I don't think it's really happening...
I don't understand governments. They want to be in a position where they are not controlled by single giant tech companies, yet they do not do anything for their freedom. Here in Germany from time to time the government, or parts of it, want to switch to Open Source (Linux and Office) and start funding it. But then after some time they give up. If they would fund the projects now, then later it would be a much easier task to switch entirely.