Mozilla has recently annouced that it is starting to accept bitcoins through Coinbase toward the Mozilla Foundation.
Mozilla, the open-source development community behind the popular Firefox web browser, has recently started accepting bitcoins through Coinbase toward the Mozilla Foundation, the non-profit entity that provides support for the community’s broad open-source development.
“Coinbase waives all fees for all nonprofits, so 100% of donations will always go to Mozilla,” Coinbase representative wrote on the company’s blog. “We are thrilled to bring bitcoin to Mozilla and help the organization continue to create a better Internet for people across the globe. Donate to Mozilla here.”
On Mozilla’s website, the company illustrates its goal for the initiative and what their stance is on the use of the internet:
“Our mission is to promote openness, innovation & opportunity on the Web. At Mozilla, we’re a global community of technologists, thinkers and builders working together to keep the Internet alive and accessible, so people worldwide can be informed contributors and creators of the Web. We believe this act of human collaboration across an open platform is essential to individual growth and our collective future.”
Mozilla works off a manifesto outlining ten principles they hold close when taking their stance in the fight for an open internet.
The manifesto states that the representatives of the company believe the internet is a global public resource that must remain open and accessible and that the internet enriches the lives of individual human beings. Furthermore, they believe that individuals must have the ability to shape the internet and their experiences involving the internet.
Charitable organizations around the world have recently begun to slowly turn to digital currency to promote donations while removing costs associated with legacy payment methods.
The company now joins the growing number of non-profit organizations that support open-source and free Web-focused initiatives that are accepting bitcoin, including the Wikimedia Foundation, United Way Worldwide and others.
“We’re a large organization and it takes us a while to move things through legal, privacy and security review. There were a lot of steps to getting this in place, but we got it done,” the company’s vice president Geoffrey MacDougall stated.
Earlier this week Mozilla has announced that they collaborate with the Tor Project and the Center for Democracy & Technology. They teamed up to work on a new initiative in internet privacy called Polaris:
“Polaris is designed to allow us to collaborate more effectively, more explicitly and more directly to bring more privacy features into our products. We want to accelerate pragmatic and user-focused advances in privacy technology for the Web, giving users more control, awareness and protection in their Web experiences. We want to advance the state of the art in privacy features, with a specific focus on bringing them to more mainstream audiences.”
Polaris is divided into two different studies. The first one is an evaluation of the Tor Project, a controversial project aiming to make internet anonymity the standard. The second study aims to understand how the company’s feature that protects customers from invasive tracking to customers will work.
It is interesting to witness the browsers competition. While Google is taking a stance and working to bring internet connections to the entire world through balloons, Mozilla is working toward open technology an internet privacy.
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