TL;DR: Mozilla’s translation bot on Support Mozilla (that is currently overwriting user contributions is based on the closed source, copyright infringing LLM, Google Gemini. This is in spite of Mozilla claiming that they are at the forefront of open source AI, and belies their exhortations to choose to build open source AI and data sets. Although Mozilla has experience in attracting open contributions for data sets in projects like Common Voice, Mozilla is using a closed data set to overwrite open contributions. Since (paid) Gemini queries do not train the model, Mozillians can expect to correct errors every time the bot automatically updates an article.
There’s no way individual donations from ordinary people could match Google’s. They’re also likely to be less reliable.
Mozilla doesn’t even ask for donations from users a whole lot, and the money they receive mostly doesn’t go into development of the browser:
These funds directly support advocacy campaigns (i.e. asking big tech companies to protect your privacy), research and publications like the *Privacy Not Included buyer’s guide and Internet Health Report, and covers a portion of our annual MozFest gathering.
https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/donate/help/#frequently-asked-questions
Thank god. I do really believe all the Google money is actively stifling innovation at Mozilla. The only thing they can’t do is building a better browser than chrome is, for fear of becoming a viable alternative again.
So they use the money for some CEO pay. and weird projects while Firefox further falls from popularity.
I hope for the day Firefox’s market share has dropped to a level tha Google just won’t pay any money anymore for the default search engine deal.
That day - and not one day before - innovation will resume.