Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Mozilla lays off 70

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 962 posts

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#201

Post by petagonoral »

shawndrost wrote: post #189
petagonoral wrote: post #35

in 2018, mozilla had 368 million USD in assets: 2018 financials: https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2018/mozilla-fdn-201... wow, 2.5 million for the executive chair of Mozilla in 2018. is that person really bringing 2.5 millions dollar worth of value to the company. this is in addition to the 2.x million from the year before. 10s of million exfiltrated out of a non-profit by one person over the last few years. n…

The person we're talking about is Mitchell Baker, who has spent over 20 years contributing to Mozilla, including years as a volunteer. She has been on Time's 100 most influential people list. She has directly authored many foundational pieces of Mozilla and (arguably) the internet. She is the founding CEO of the Mozilla Corporation, which pays her paycheck from its ~$500M in revenue. Mozilla Corp is the highly-profit…

> She has directly authored many foundational pieces of Mozilla and (arguably) the internet

Like what? The wiki page doesn't tell.

You are making it sounds like she created Mozilla & products herself, rather than an admin/exec role throughout. And also making it sound like her presence alone is what is bringing in ~$500 million.

Is there some connection you would like to disclose?

by the way, I'm not arguing her position.i'm arguing her compensation. nice chart from brendan eich (formerly of mozilla) https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1217512049716035584

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#202

Post by saagarjha »

Yoric wrote: post #166
coldtea wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How big do you think a "productive browser team" needs to be? I'd say 50 or so people would be fine. > How big do you think the Chromium team is? Around 60-80 people judging from the names listed under the various Blink teams (Rendering, DOM, Memory, Style, etc).

> I'd say 50 or so people would be fine. With 50 or so devs (let's forget for this example about managers, UX researchers and designers, HR, etc.) you'll get maybe a JavaScript VM and a small UX. Not nearly a browser :( > Around 60-80 people judging from the names listed under the various Blink teams (Rendering, DOM, Memory, Style, etc). That sounds like a really, really vast underestimation. To the best of my recoll…

> With 50 or so devs (let's forget for this example about managers, UX researchers and designers, HR, etc.) you'll get maybe a JavaScript VM and a small UX.

Safari does those two specific things with a quarter of the number you mentioned. The entire team is nowhere near a thousand people.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#203

Post by paul7986 »

dman wrote: post #56

Brendan Eich has a helpful chart of Compensation of Highest paid executive at Mozilla vs Firefox market share over time. https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1217512049716035584/p...

Seems odd in his tweet he noted he was unable to get funding in the valley for Brave. The guy created JavaScript and was a creator of Firefox. Don't get it ..as JS alone has contributed like how much to world economies, as well to almost every HN reader's wallet/bank.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#204

Post by zelly »

petagonoral wrote: post #35

in 2018, mozilla had 368 million USD in assets: 2018 financials: https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2018/mozilla-fdn-201... wow, 2.5 million for the executive chair of Mozilla in 2018. is that person really bringing 2.5 millions dollar worth of value to the company. this is in addition to the 2.x million from the year before. 10s of million exfiltrated out of a non-profit by one person over the last few years. n…

This will discourage people from donating. Absolutely disgusting. Maybe it's good for them to go bankrupt, so that other non-profits will learn from their mistake.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#205

Post by jasonlotito »

tapoxi wrote: post #139
Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BSD licensed browser can become a closed source browser with just a hand waive. Imagine this: Chrome has 80% share and introduces a new feature that works only in chrome (let's say, some DRM to watch YouTube videos), and cites this as an excuse to close sources. Then, it starts updating it's own websites with specific code that can run properly only in new (proprietary) versions of Chrome. Of course, outcry in tech p…

> BSD licensed browser can become a closed source browser with just a hand waive. So can a Mozilla licensed browser, the licenses are very similar. > Chrome has 80% share and introduces a new feature that works only in chrome (let's say, some DRM to watch YouTube videos) This already exists, it's called Widevine and browsers download it as a binary blob. This is also a different argument, Chrome vs Chromium. If there…

> So can a Mozilla licensed browser, the licenses are very similar.

So, you were talking about not understanding why a mono-culture is bad. So your license argument here means you don't understand the parent.

"BSD licensed browser can become a closed source browser with just a hand waive."

This means that once FF is no more, what's stopping Google from slowing closing off even more parts of the browser to just Chrome? They can start forcing their will with their control over Chromium. They make the rules. And the BSD license can't do anything to stop it. That's the point.

And because these other browsers invested into Chromium, simply forking and continuing work on their Chromium version becomes more and more challenging without massive financial support. Only a few companies can do that.

Look at Apple and Safari. Safari lags behind Chrome in many areas. And this is Apple, not some small startup.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#206

Post by bzbarsky »

jahlove wrote: post #138
bzbarsky wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How big do you think a "productive browser team" needs to be? How big do you think the Chromium team is?

> How big do you think a "productive browser team" needs to be? Wait, that was my question...

OK, let's do some data-gathering. If I git clone https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src.git and then run:

  git log --since=2019-01-15 | grep "^Author:" | fgrep chromium.org | sort -u | wc -l
to get one year's worth of commits as of today (as of rev c43e247d6444 to be exact), I get 1250. If I repeat that with "google.com" instead of "chromium.org", I get 623. So figure ~1800-1900 there.

If I git clone https://github.com/WebKit/webkit.git as of today (rev ba925cdbc8c3f2dff44cdcb92d9a374816b0215b) and run:

  git log --since=2019-01-15 | grep "^Author:" | fgrep webkit.org | sort -u | wc -l
I get 15. If I repeat that with apple.com instead of webkit.org I get 70. If I just list all distinct authors, I get 128. Note that this is an underestimate of what it takes to build a browser, because a bunch of the parts of an actual browser are not in the webkit repo itself last I checked. Like the whole network stack.

If I hg clone https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/ (the repository for Firefox) and run:

  hg log -d 2019 | grep "^user:" | sort -u | fgrep mozilla.com | wc -l
I get 359. I am quite sure this last is is an underestimate: I am a Mozilla employee, but I use a non-mozilla.com address in my commits, because I started contributing before becoming an employee. I'm not the only one. The total number of distinct committers there is 1497 which is a serious overestimate: web platform test changesets come with their original author, who is often an engineer working on some other browser. If I filter out webkit.org, microsoft.com, google.com, chromium.org, webkit.org, that leaves me with 1265. This is almost certainly a significant over-estimate, since it's more than the total number of Mozilla employees.

Note that we may be undercounting QA here, since not all of them might commit to the main repository.

On the other hand, we might be counting one-off contributors who are not really on the "browser team" per se, especially for "apple.com" and "google.com". We're also overcounting somewhat depending on how much churn there was over the course of the year (people leaving, new ones joining).

But pallpark, I suspect an unrealistic lower bound is 100 and a reasonable lower bound is 150-500, depending on how much of the tech stack you want to delegate to other entities. The Chrome team is a lot bigger than any of those numbers, of course.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#207

Post by shuckles »

bzbarsky wrote: post #112
jahlove wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They made $450m in revenue in 2018. What fraction of that is actually needed to keep a productive browser team afloat?

How big do you think a "productive browser team" needs to be? How big do you think the Chromium team is?

Google employs thousands of engineers who spend a majority of their time thinking about Google Chrome. This gets slightly more complicated because of, e.g., the strategic impact of Chrome in other places like ChromeOS. The right comparison would be Apple's WebKit and Safari teams.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#209

Post by aidenn0 »

dralley wrote: post #67
dman wrote: post #56

Brendan Eich has a helpful chart of Compensation of Highest paid executive at Mozilla vs Firefox market share over time. https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1217512049716035584/p...

I don't much care for Eich but that graph (as in, what it represents) is just shameful.

The salary of top executives has gone way up in the past 20 years or so across industries, and largely without relation to company performance.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#210

Post by flurdy »

Yoric wrote: post #153
csdreamer7 wrote: post #147

This feels really bad. I feel she seems to be hinting that they are cutting people in case they lose revenue. As others have posted their financials: https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2018/mozilla-fdn-201... They seem to be very dependent on search engine revenue: 91% and 93% for their revenue. Once again, I feel she is worried Mozilla will be cut off very soon. Still feels like really bad news for Firefox. Mic…

> I wonder if Mozilla gets cut off from search engine revenue means they will start to develop products/fund OSS competitors to GSuite? How would Mozilla fund this? > And I don't feel the CEO should be increasing her pay when the workforce suffers (from $2.3m to $2.5m). Where do you find this? At the moment, Mozilla doesn't have a CEO, only an interim CEO, are you sure that's her?

> Where do you find this?

https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1217512049716035584

Post reply on HN