Mozilla accepting donations for Firefox ad in New York Times

[Eric]

The Mozilla group recently announced that they are accepting donations of a minimum of $10 to raise fund for publishing an advertisement of their Firefox browser on a popular newspaper.

According to their website, they plan to raise enough funds to take out a full page advert in the New York Times, a highly acclaimed newspaper. The group hopes that taking out an advert in such a high profile and widely read paper will highlight the fact that there is an alternative to Internet Explorer; equally, the project hope to raise the profile of Open Source software.

The fund raising and advertisement will mark a significant development in terms of Mozilla’s promotion of Firefox. Previously, advertising had been online only. Taking out a full page advert will open Firefox up to a much larger and “wider” audience. Interestingly, the advert will also be the "first” national print advertisement for an Open Source project.

All of the people who donate (donations start from $10) will see their names listed on the advert. The group aims to get 2,500 donations within 10 days, yet like previous campaigns, will no doubt see much more than this target. Extra funds will be put towards 1.0 launch marketing, which is expected mid-November.

Firefox, as well as other browser alternatives like Opera, have done especially well in the past 6 months, slowly gobbling up Internet Explorer's dominant market share. Continued success could provoke Microsoft into releasing an update to Internet Explorer much sooner than 2006 (Longhorn), something Microsoft currently denies it will do.

In my opinion, its a big mistake that they are doing...The money they are receiving from donations could've been put to better uses. This won't affect Microsoft or IE in any way...If they want they will just publish an advertisement of IE and Windows in the NYT the next day. But I think they won't even care...They have too much money ...

I won't be donating this time...I donated last time when they were accepting donations for something else(forgot what)...I won't donate this time because its for a worthless cause...

[andy]

$10 is for students, its $30 for regular people

[neno.tu]

So What sould I be? Poor to give 1$? heheheh