Mozilla getting financial support from USaid?
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@danielson Not long at all in my opinion. They are already saying that they are likely to lose $3.5 million in funding from USAID due to Trump and Musk. That may be the primary motivation for selling user-data to make up the shortfall.
I have never used Firefox in earnest. I kept installed until now to check webpages that don’t load in Vivaldi.
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@danielson Wow, pretty awful video.
The USAID funds went into initiatives of the Mozilla Foundation, not directly into Firefox itself. The main claims of that guy in the video seem to be him attacking their goals because he doesn't believe the initiatives Mozilla are advocating for are worthwhile. Much like DOGE's other claims of "fraud and waste".
I have some bad news for him and others that are shocked by the types of things Mozilla is helping. In the course of my studies in Mechanical Engineering and Computer Science, we were already required to take courses addressing the same issues...
People with the responsibility of designing products, infrastructure, and services have the potential to cause immense harm by not considering the perspectives of the people their projects will affect. There is a big focus on finding the stakeholders (people who stand to be affect by the project) and getting their opinions and focusing on not causing harm. This often means looking out for marginalized groups to make sure their perspectives are heard.
That is exactly the sort of thing the video is attacking Mozilla for doing. He just lists off a bunch of buzz words that are guaranteed to make his viewers angry, but that is exactly why advocation for those groups is necessary. Because so many people seem to think anything tied to accommodating marginalized groups shouldn't be considered, or in worse cases, they believe anything that even mentions a marginalized group should be actively fought against. Even in this very video, he blindly labels so many different things as bad and evil by simply looking for and highlighting words.
The Mozilla Common Voice thing he attacks is about making sure technological products aren't only made for a few of the world's languages. Who hasn't seen a funny video about someone with a thick accent trying to use voice control with Amazon Alexa and not being able to get it to do the proper action. That is even within the confines of just English, which already is the main focus of many products, so when you consider the implications across all the other languages of the world, it isn't difficult to see how this could be a problem that is worth addressing.
Since this funding wasn't going toward Firefox, the claims of this being related the the privacy policy change don't make sense.
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Whether you agree with Lunduke's opinions or not.
I for one, would sure like to see that contract between USAID and Mozilla Foundation.
After all, it is taxpayer money involved here right?
Stumbled on this one just after posting here.
Interesting to hear about Lunduke's long investigations into Mozilla, and how its CEO only made about 7 million a few years ago...Tom talks about it (just a few hours ago) at about the 15:40 min. mark:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXtvQpweekg
