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Mozilla lays off 70

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Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#531
post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 also wrote this incredibly rude and grotesque obituary for Gervase Markham after he died of cancer (working for Mozilla until the end). You are welcome to disagree, but Gerv contributed just as much to Mozilla as Mitchell did. https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2018/08/07/in-memoriam-gerva...

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Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Appeal to legality isn't proof of moral superiority. Racial segregation was also legal via Jim Crow laws, and people still hold the political opinion it should still be despite society changing and moving forward. It is also not censorship nor is it illegal to terminate employment with someone based on their political actions.

> Appeal to legality isn't proof of moral superiority. Then why was it so important for gay marriage to have legal blessing? > It is also not censorship nor is it illegal to terminate employment with someone based on their political actions. It is if it becomes the norm (and it has, and it has lead to a Chilling Effect, and the blowback is going to be tremendous).

> Then why was it so important for gay marriage to have legal blessing?

Because it is currently illegal in many places?

>It is if it becomes the norm (and it has, and it has lead to a Chilling Effect, and the blowback is going to be tremendous).

Which is a slippery slope fallacy. Political views are not and have not ever been protected classes.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#533
post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am I the only one who thinks no single person should be earning more than $1 million per year? especially if they are working for a non-profit?

Not the only one, but you are part of a very small group. Anyway, I also disagree in general. If a person brings so much value, than why not compensate that person adequately? The "only" thing that is bothering me with the insanely high salary of CEO's etc. is that they quite often seem disconnected from actual success. Like in this case: https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1217512049716035584 The market share of…

> The market share of Firefox goes down, yet her compensation goes up. Why???

Obvious: because she has to make bank before the ship sinks for good. I'm sure she would put forward a lot of arguments for it (all the extra time she spent over the years "underpaid" etc etc).

Baker has been more than "a lawyer" to Mozilla, for a very long time. She shouldered a lot of decisions - some good, some bad, some terrible. It's not surprising that she might be reaching for the money (most execs will, at that level), but rather that nobody at the corporation or the foundation is willing or able to stop her anytime soon.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#534
post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mitchel, as leader of Mozilla, was essentially speaking for the entire organization; an organization, and set of ideals, Gerv devoted his entire adult life to. Saying things like-- "Eventually Gerv felt called to live his faith by publicly judging others in politely stated but damning terms. His contributions to expanding the Mozilla community would eventually become shadowed by behaviors that made it more difficult…

Anderson's analysis feels very straw-mannish to me, giving the impression that Mitchell disagreed with Gerv being a Christian in the first place. > I'm sure was a great comfort to his surviving wife, children and friends, in their time of grief. Well, maybe - you'd have to ask them. Quite likely they share Gerv's faith and outlook and possibly don't see anything negative there. But the point of the piece was obviousl…

Nihil nisi bonum. Imagine how his widow would feel reading it.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MoCo doesn't get the goodies. It's a cash generator (in theory, probably not so much at the moment) for MoFo, and money has to flow only in that direction as I understand it. It's not treated as a non-profit in any way, which is why it could do multi-million dollar partnerships and pay competitive tech salaries without the kind of scrutiny or restrictions a 501(c)-anything would have.

No, sorry -- it is encumbered as a for-profit to pay taxes, but it cannot operate as a for-profit wholly owned by private investors or public shareholders would (I'm not saying that is good or bad). It is different. It's like many sports stadia/teams, universities, hospitals: for-profit wholly owned sub of a non-profit. As I just noted in my last reply, this is abused via double-think to defend Mozilla as a "non-prof…

>Mozilla has not been able to act aggressively as a commercial player. Just one example: KaiOSTech ...

I am just speculating here, but would this involve significant compromise on Mozilla's core values - specifically privacy? For example one of their investors and partners is Reliance Jio (the reason why KaiOS is the second most popular mobile OS in India) who brag about monetizing the data of their subscribers as a fundamental business model and strategy. The reason i was excited about FirefoxOS was that i was hoping that they would do the same for mobile operating systems as they did for the World Wide Web. Personally, i trust KaiOS devices even less than Android in that regard.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only in enacting company-wide policies to coerce political participation. Terminating employment for political actions in an at-will employment state like California is still legal. From your article: >On the contrary, political beliefs or views are not a specifically protected category under California's discrimination laws. Nothing in either of the two labor code provisions above directly addresses discrimination o…

How is policy of terminating employees who donate to certain ballot propositions not amount to coercing political participation? It's directly coercing employees against donating with the threat of losing their jobs.

How do you know that it is Mozilla's company policy? That is the distinction based on the law that you cited. Firing someone for a reason in an at-will employment state does not suddenly make that reason part of the company policy.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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://g…

Note that getting a chromium.org email does not require being a Google employee.

https://www.chromium.org/getting-involved/become-a-committer

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#538
post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The minute Mozilla goes bankrupt and Firefox loses funding is the minute the internet is dead. Imagine only having a single client for HTTP (Chrome/WebKit).

Then we would lose a company that pretends to care about privacy while doing the opposite, thereby allowing actually ethical organizations to grow.

Re: Mozilla lays off 70

#539
post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, aesthetics is ultimately a subjective thing, but that's not what I'm saying.

It's not? That's exactly how I've been interpreting it. Objectively, how is the Safari version better? Other than subjective design.

When I say polished I don't mean a polished visual style in an aesthetic sense. What I mean is that a designer has put some work on a UI element and after some iterations there has been a conscious decision over why an element looks the way it looks.

For example, one of the major considerations when doing UI design is creating elements that have a cohesive style (regardless of which aesthetic style that is).

None of that happened on that god forgotten alert. It's probably the first thing that someone came up with in a rush, in a style that no other UI element of FF shares, and it has stayed like this probably because nobody cares.

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