Bogomil Shopov – Бого

“I am a Mozillian” costs 5$. Awesome!

Today I discovered this news here, about the Mozilla membership program:

“

Basic offering: $5 to join Mozilla. Gives you bragging rights to say ‘I’m a Mozillian’ and an inside track on information about what’s happening in Mozilla and on the web.

“

So,The Mozilla project is a global community of people who are paying 5$ tax AND believe that openness, innovation, and opportunity are key to the continued health of the Internet.

Why?
I perfectly understand why Mozilla is doing that, but I am a Moziilian cannot be payed,because I am a Mozillian, but I will not pay 5$ tax in order to have the right to use that.

I am donating more than 300$ (for me it’s a lot) per/year by one way or another and a lot of my time and passion to Mozilla, because I want to, not because I have to.

I am Mozilla!

What do you think? Am I right or not. Please share your opinion as a comment.


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P.S:
The problem is you *CAN’T build relationships between people with money*, unless you don’t wont only the money from all your members for any reason.

There is no open community based on money participation. And people who are paying usually will NOT contribute and will NOT communicate, because they believe they fulfill their mission – to give 5 $ to be a Mozillian. It’s like me for example for EFF – I am paying EFF a tax to defend some of my rights and I am paying FSF to work on Free software issues arround the world. Yes I am member of EFF and FSF, but I don’t contribute and I don’t make any relationships with others, because my role is to pay.

If you want to build relations with your community, you need something like that, not membership fee.

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Bogomil Shopov

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24 responses to ““I am a Mozillian” costs 5$. Awesome!”

  1. Samuel Avatar
    Samuel

    Maybe there will be different levels of Mozillians :)

    There are Some Things Money Can’t Buy. For Everything Else, 5$ entry tax:)

    Reply
  2. Bogo Avatar
    Bogo

    Funny :) The problem is you *CAN’T build relationships between people with money*, unless you don’t wont only the money from all your members for any reason.

    There is no open community based on money participation. And people who are paying usually will NOT contribute and will NOT communicate, because they believe they fulfill their mission – to give 5 $ to be a Mozillian. It’s like me for example for EFF – I am paying EFF a tax to defend some of my rights and I am paying FSF to work on Free software issues arround the world. Yes I am member of EFF and FSF, but I don’t contribute and I don’t make any relationships with others, because my role is to pay :)

    //Bogo

    Reply
  3. Danny Moules Avatar
    Danny Moules

    And of course the large majority of those people will be users who contribute nothing to the project other than the $5 ‘I’m cool’ tax…

    Openness, but you need to pay for it.
    Innovation, but not necessarily if the new membership doesn’t like it.
    Opportunity, but only if you’re ‘in’ on it.

    Reply
  4. Bogo Avatar
    Bogo

    @Danny:
    Maybe, but I don’t like the approach -give me 5$ to be a mozillian and to know our secrets. It sux!

    If we need a membership program, the money shall be the last thing on it.

    Reply
  5. Samuel Avatar
    Samuel

    Mozilla is a volunteer-based organization and our glue is openness, not the money. If I have to pay to be part of Mozilla I will not do that.

    Reply
  6. Tomer Avatar
    Tomer

    I am currently spending more than 20$ per year in order to keep our local Mozilla community domain alive, and we also spend some money on the website hosting in addition to the domain registration and our time to manage the site and its content. We also take part in other Mozilla activities such as being the voice of Mozilla in our countries and We are Mozillians and part of the global Mozilla community even that we are not paying that tax. I don’t understand why we have to pay that bill, and hope it will fade away from people who already prove their activities and loyalty to mozilla.org or willing to do that in the future.

    Reply
  7. Giuliano Avatar
    Giuliano

    Hi Bogo, this is the reply I left to Mark’s post:

    I am volunteering for Mozilla since 2003, I spend at least 4 hours per day (including week-ends) of my life “working” for Mozilla and since 2006, I’m driving the Official Italian Mozilla Community (Mozilla Italia).
    So, please Mark, be so kind to explain me why I should donate at least 5 USD to be called/identified as a Mozillian?
    Maybe Mozilla should donate some USD to me instead… ;-) :-P

    I think its explains very well my thoughts…

    Reply
  8. Bogo Avatar
    Bogo

    Hey Guiliano, Tomer,
    Thanks for your comments. It seems we are having the same worries about that and this is because we love Mozilla.

    Reply
  9. Danny Moules Avatar
    Danny Moules

    @Bogo I was not disagreeing with you at all… I’m very opposed to the idea.

    Reply
  10. Fulano Avatar
    Fulano

    There is a book somewhere that talks about this – creating a special type of users that donate money create barriers between people who pays and people who doesn’t, so the community idea of “everyone is equal” breaks. It’s a bad idea.

    Reply
  11. Mark Surman Avatar
    Mark Surman

    Hey Bogo (and all):

    I can totally understand your reaction — hopefully it’s at least in part because I’ve poorly explained the idea.

    I just posted this update on my blog, which aims to clarify:

    —

    We’re still in the early stages of defining the membership program. There are many decisions yet to be made about how we describe it and how it works. Eg. what should we call people who sign up? Comments below suggest it should be something other than ‘Mozillian’.

    There is one certainty however: this progream it is not a replacement for the awesome community of 50,000 Mozillians who make, localize and promote Firefox everyday. These people are the life blood of what we do and will never be asked for money in order to belong to Mozilla. They are already giving something much more valuable. The ‘Join Mozilla’ program is for people who are not — and may never be — ready to contribute at this level.

    —

    It could be there are other reasons to object to doing a membership program. Very open to discussing those.

    However, the idea that community members need to pay to belong was never on the table — that would be crazy in my mind. The Mozillians who give their time are already at a much higher level of belonging that anyone who would sign up just for the ‘Join Us’ program. As you say, people contribute time ‘are Mozilla’.

    On the flip side, I believe we need a way to let millions more people express their support for our cause. And, over time, to make it easy for some smaller group of these people to contribute time (100s of thousands?). It’s hard to do that without some kind of connection and channel reach out to them. Membership programs with symbolic donation amounts have proven to help other organizations do this in the past (e.g. the 25 cents I used to pay each week to be a Boy Scout).

    Reply
  12. Mark Surman Avatar
    Mark Surman

    PS. Happy to chat on skype or IRC if you want to work through this some more. Might be good to wait til I can post more details next week, though.

    Reply
  13. Alex Vincent Avatar
    Alex Vincent

    Hm, I missed that in the planet feed. And you’re right, it’s kind of offensive to the community that’s grown up around hacking on the platform.

    Maybe to be a Mozillian under these circumstances is to risk getting stomped on by a big red lizard… :D

    Reply
  14. Bogo Avatar
    Bogo

    Thank you Mark for the clarifications. I (we) am waiting for more info and will be happy to give a feedback on that.

    //Bogo

    Reply
  15. Tiago Sá Avatar
    Tiago Sá

    I am a Mozillian: I use Firefox.

    a-a

    Reply
  16. Tom Schuster Avatar
    Tom Schuster

    Well i was really amazed after i read this blog post. I can’t understand the real reason, i am not sure for what this money is required at all. The cool Firefox Team T-Shirt just arrived from oversea, and now i should pay to call myself a Mozillian? Don’t get me wrong, i could afford this, but for different reasons i don’t have any bank account for online transactions, so i am not even sure if i could pay the “memebership” (yes i read you don’t want to call it like that, but how else would you call this?). I hope this is just some weird American oddity required for some law stuff.

    Reply
  17. Vito Smolej Avatar
    Vito Smolej

    I will gladly donate 5oUSD for a T-shirt stating “5$ Harvey rules NOK”, “5$? Not on my chinny chin chin”, “5$ bozillan? NOT” etc

    If I understand it all correctly, we volunteers are mission critical, right? So’s cash. And it can be collected without hurting any feeling.
    Why not take the addon approach:”if you would like to support the further development”…? Why not “adopt-a-code”?

    If “adopt-a-highway” works for US’ highways (well, sort of;) the idea could just as well work for Mozilla code. Ill raise a hand for say 20 lines for 100 bucks – something out of chrome would be warmly welcome, thank you -. I’ll have the T-shirt printed myself. Just send me the code and the confirmation. No regressions, pls, just pure, unadulterated head code!

    Reply
  18. mawrya Avatar
    mawrya

    So, $5 gets me “bragging rights” and inside information on an already open organization?

    I thought Mozilla was all about giving, not getting; community and working together, not bragging. I’m afraid that the people who are targeted in this sales pitch would not espouse the spirit of Mozilla. Maybe this plea for money could be reworded to reflect the community spirit.

    Reply
  19. Otto de Voogd Avatar
    Otto de Voogd

    Good post Bogo.

    They should call it “Mozilla fan” or something like that but not Mozillian.

    Reply
  20. Vito Smolej Avatar
    Vito Smolej

    … the starting paragraph was bracketted with rant \rant pair, but I wrote them(a knee-jerk reaction) in an html form, so they were simply gobbled away.

    Just to say 1st par was not meant as seriously as the rest.

    regards

    smo

    Reply
  21. Bogo Avatar
    Bogo

    Thank you for your opinion. We are waiting for more clarifications then.

    //Bogo

    Reply
  22. Mozilla membership program – (part 2) :: TalkWeb

    […] can read part 1 here. I will post my messages with Mark Surman. They shows everything I think about Mozilla’s new […]

    Reply
  23. Mozilla membership program – existing communities vs. new global one. :: TalkWeb

    […] can read part 1 and part […]

    Reply
  24. moznot Avatar
    moznot

    $5 and I “get to” continue to suffer ram hogging and focus stealing issues ignored from “upgrade” to “upgrade”?

    yay?

    Reply

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