Aral Balkan
Mozilla announces they’re launching Greenzilla to tackle the climate emergency…
Greenzilla will be a not-for-profit foundation that owns a for-profit corporation that is funded by half-a-billion dollars every year from ExxonMobil.
Tech folks: wow, that sounds great! Thank you for saving the environment, Greenzilla!
#greenzilla #mozilla #google #SiliconValley #institutionalCorruption #privacy #publicRelations #pr #lobbying #whitewashing #bullshit
Aral Balkan
@louisderrac It’s parody.
Louis Derrac 🇫🇷 🇬🇧
@aral Do you have a source or an article ? I couldn't find anything. Thanks !
Aral Balkan
@vsaw @louisderrac What’s saddest is that we live in a world where you can actually believe this to be true. And I mean why not, when Mozilla itself says it exists to protect your privacy and is a not-for-profit foundation that owns a for-profit corporation that gets half-a-billion dollars every year from trillion-dollar surveillance capitalist Google.
Valentin Sawadski
@aral @louisderrac I wished you would have made this clearer in your original post.
In my opinion, someone with your reach should be very careful about the jokes and parody they do on the expense of others.
Aral Balkan
@buzigde Not really. You can look at LibreWolf (Firefox fork that’s private by default) but the problem is not the browser, it’s the funding and the economic-model underlying it. In other words, it’s structural.
Mozilla is about the best you can hope for under capitalism and Silicon Valley. We must think beyond that model and create technology for the common good from the common purse if we want true alternatives that aren’t just the vassals of Big Tech.
Marcus C.
@aral but what to choose?
Brave=crypto stuff/s*it
Opera=company as well/vc backed
Chrome=no words needed
Vivaldi= i do not know tbh
Do you have suggestions/recommendations for usage on smartphones, linux and Windows?
Thanks in advance
Aral Balkan
@ohiorob Exactly. Sadly, tech folks don‘t get it. (Watch my replies and you’ll likely see me getting eviscerated by some for daring to call out the patron saint of Silicon Valley.) :)
ohiorob
Thank you for calling bullshit. It’s like if cigarette makers funded a foundation to promote lung health. Similar bullshit.
Mozilla, this is very disappointing indeed.
Aral Balkan
@ohiorob Oh, Greenzilla is a parody. Mozilla in real life, though, is a for-profit corporation owned by a not-for-profit foundation that says it exists to protect your privacy and is funded by half-a-billion dollars every year from Google.
ohiorob
Well, there’s no defending this scam, so I await the best attempts to moralize any of ExxonMobil’s behavior because just like tobacco, there are no healthy 🚬.
And $500 million is nothing compared to the cost of destroying our planet, surely everyone can see.
Marcus C.
@aral thanks. So I'll continue using Firefox. 🤷😅
Aral Balkan
@buzigde When you live in a sewer it’s not surprising that all your options are shit :)
Dr James Ravenscroft
@aral allowing non-profits to "own" for-profits is such a ridiculous and overt loophole that needs closing pronto! You should also not be allowed to call yourself "Open" something if you have a closed business model. If a private company can trademark the word "saga" then we should be able to protect "open" for public good.
Aral Balkan
@jamesravey Couldn’t agree with you more.
Aral Balkan
@antonia Exactly :)
Completely Normal Hausdorff Antonia
@aral@mastodon.ar.al the fact that I looked this up to see if it was real says a lot about Mozilla.
Aral Balkan
@louisderrac So the context is that Mozilla is a not-for-profit foundation that owns a for-profit corporation and says it exists to protect your privacy, etc., when it is funded by half-a-billion dollars every year from ExxonMobil.
The fact that this is not better known is part of the problem (that hopefully this thread will, in its own small way, help to fix). Then there are those who know it and think nothing of it. That, I don’t entirely know how to tackle :)
Louis Derrac 🇫🇷 🇬🇧
@aral Without context, I don't really get it :/ Maybe I missed something though
Aral Balkan
@femme_mal @jamesravey Greenzilla is parody but yes, it’s an interesting framing of what Mozilla does for Google in the real world. (Mozilla is a not-for-profit foundation that owns a for-profit corporation that says it exists to protect your privacy and is funded by half-a-billion dollars from Google every year.)
Femme Malheureuse
@jamesravey @aral This is where concrete action can begin — citizens lobbying lawmakers to eliminate nonprofits' ability to own for-profit businesses. The best reason is anti-corruption/anti-money laundering.
Because that's what this is: Mozilla's nonprofit launders a small amount of ExxonMobil's dirty profits to greenwash the fossil fuel producer.
Louis Derrac 🇫🇷 🇬🇧
@aral I didn't know. It was bad enough to be dependant from Google, but from ExxonMobil ??? How long has it been like this ? This is so disappointing and yet what alternatives do we have ? We really need a new open source and EU funded open source browser...
Julianoë
@louisderrac there is a typo in your clarification @aral. Mozilla is not funded by Exxonmobil. In this parabole, exxon is google
Aral Balkan
@femme_mal @jamesravey Very hard to do from scratch and also unnecessary. A publicly-funded independent EU organisation, however, could be set up to hard fork Firefox and develop and maintain it as a private-by-default browser.
Femme Malheureuse
@aral @jamesravey The ultimate answer is a new browser built from the beginning with privacy and security in mind, and a sustainable model to support it, one which embraces decentralized federation at inception. No forking, start from scratch.
Aral Balkan
@1dalm That’s because Mozilla Corporation, owned by Mozilla Foundation is what generates the rest.
Fun, no?
https://techcrunch.com/2021/12/13/mozilla-expects-to-generate-more-than-500m-in-revenue-this-year/
Dallas (Join Something IRL)
According to their IRS filings, the Mozilla Foundation had revenue of $28 million. Not Half a Billion.
https://apps.irs.gov/pub/epostcard/cor/200097189_201912_990_2021040217867584.pdf
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