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Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products

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Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products

#791

Post by will4274 »

DonHopkins wrote: post #787
will4274 wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't hold Mozilla to higher standards. I regard Mozilla as being deeply sick, even by the standards of a non-profit. The Mozilla Corporation has three plagues. First, the plague of Debian and the logjam breakers. Mozilla, like Debian, has many technical users with loud opinions and struggles to reach consensus. Debian suffers from this problem because it comes to consensus oh so very slowly - multiple competing pa…

>Google also doesn't fire executives because of their political views or previous donations, when held privately, particularly when those political views are relatively common. Obviously you're referring to Brendan Eich. But you're wrong: Eich was not fired, and he was not forced to resign. In fact just the opposite: the board tried to get him to stay. This should not be news to you: it was in the FAQ on CEO resignat…

Thank you for the correction, I'll make an edit.

Edit: it appears I cannot make an edit. I do think the correction is immaterial to the larger point. Eich was not able to function as CEO given his donation. The wide publicity of this event, the other event I mentioned in my post, and even the FAQ you shared and the blog post that is OP are symptoms of an organization that is more interested in being seen positively from outside than in treating its people well. Given the wide publicity of these events, Mozilla struggles to extract experienced and high quality talent from the industry.

Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products

#792

Post by ObsoleteNerd »

mark_l_watson wrote: post #733

I came here to ask a question, hopefully one other people would like answered also: If the funding for the FireFox web browser combined with all Mozilla projects/products, or is there some separation? I would like to donate just to support development of the FireFox browser. Is that possible? FireFox containers is a very important feature to me and supporting FireFox and containers is something I would like to suppor…

Donations to Mozilla (the non profit) do not go towards Firefox, and there's no way currently to directly donate to Firefox.

Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products

#794

Post by tracker1 »

staycoolboy wrote: post #595
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #547

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I certainly don't think the corporate doublespeak is reason to switch to Chrome, but I do think the corporate doublespeak in this announcement is just awful. When you're doing a layoff, just announce the layoff, show compassion to the affected employees, and if you want to announce other changes, do it in a separate announcement. Putting stuff about the fight against systemic racism in the opening paragraph of a layo…

> inviting a tidal wave of eye rolls. That depends entirely on how the reader feels about diversity. EDIT: I made a claim that the reader's reaction depends on what the reader is thinking, and six people claimed I was wrong, which means they can read minds. Nice. Critical thinking means removing your emotional bias from analysis.

Any corporate entity making claims of supporting diversity without creating efforts to improve actual diversity which requires much earlier interaction long before hiring, is likely not really concerned about diversity but virtue signaling.

This is just my own opinion. There's also the consideration that merit and talent should exceed diversity as a goal. For developers, I find that those that I would hire are roughly 10-15% of those I've interviewed. I've always paid more attention to content and character, and that has shaken itself out to include quite a bit of diversity in the end without being a goal.

Maybe it's a side effect of coming from a generation online before cameras and even gui interfaces were really much of a thing. I never really cared much about someone's sexual or racial identities, only what their ideas and statements were. I almost wish we could return to those things. When I see a pull request on github, I don't go looking into the person, only the code.

Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products

#795

Post by shard972 »

billyhoffman wrote: post #234

“We need to focus...” followed by 5 different areas to focus on. That’s not focusing. “[We] need to go beyond the browser to give people new products and technologies that both excite them and represent their interests.” What? Mozilla needs to build great products that solve people’s problems better than Google or whomever else does. That’s what Firefox did when it came out. It was objectively better than IE in ways…

> Mitigate harms?

Probably related to BLM.

Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products

#796

Post by alex_young »

Mozilla, with revenue of $27M last year, is mainly responsible for Firefox and a few related applications [0].

Apache meanwhile, has revenue of less than $1M, and has over 350 projects with huge adoption like Cassandra and Kafka and Lucene and Maven and that eponymous HTTP server [1].

In 2017 Mozilla paid their CEO $2.3M and their treasurer (who only worked 6 months) $1.2M [2].

Mozilla is a foundation which owns a for-profit corporation. That corporation had revenues of $450M in 2018 [3]. I double checked this shocking amount.

Most of that revenue comes from their search partner, which was switched back to Google recently [4].

How is all of this possible given the relative contributions of these software non-profits?

[0] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/products [1] https://projects.apache.org/projects.html [2] https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2017/mozilla-2017-fo... [3] https://www.ghacks.net/2019/11/26/mozilla-revenue-dropped-in... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#Google

Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products

#797

Post by bagacrap »

dblohm7 wrote: post #258

[I am a Mozilla employee, and yes, I do recognize how my position influences my perspective.] One thing that always frustrates me a bit whenever Mozilla comes up on HN or elsewhere is that we are always held to impossibly high standards. Yes, as a non-profit, we should be held to higher standards, but not impossible standards. OTOH, sometimes it just seems unreasonable and absurd. Stuff like, to paraphrase, "Look at…

I don't think you should read comments on the internet if vitriol gets to you. Users routinely threaten to switch to the competitor's product over trivial issues or conspiracy theories, but I've learned to ignore it because those users aren't going to be able to use any product for long if they're that sensitive.

Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products

#798

Post by dependenttypes »

DonHopkins wrote: post #787
will4274 wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't hold Mozilla to higher standards. I regard Mozilla as being deeply sick, even by the standards of a non-profit. The Mozilla Corporation has three plagues. First, the plague of Debian and the logjam breakers. Mozilla, like Debian, has many technical users with loud opinions and struggles to reach consensus. Debian suffers from this problem because it comes to consensus oh so very slowly - multiple competing pa…

>Google also doesn't fire executives because of their political views or previous donations, when held privately, particularly when those political views are relatively common. Obviously you're referring to Brendan Eich. But you're wrong: Eich was not fired, and he was not forced to resign. In fact just the opposite: the board tried to get him to stay. This should not be news to you: it was in the FAQ on CEO resignat…

> the board tried to get him to stay

What about https://www.theverge.com/2014/3/28/5559284/half-of-mozillas-... then?

Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products

#799

Post by Witeshadow »

dblohm7 wrote: post #258

[I am a Mozilla employee, and yes, I do recognize how my position influences my perspective.] One thing that always frustrates me a bit whenever Mozilla comes up on HN or elsewhere is that we are always held to impossibly high standards. Yes, as a non-profit, we should be held to higher standards, but not impossible standards. OTOH, sometimes it just seems unreasonable and absurd. Stuff like, to paraphrase, "Look at…

For some reason reading that press release made we want to give money to Mozilla, and made me think about how important it is that there be more than one (all the chrome cousins are practically one) browser.

I do so hope Mozilla survives for many more years.

Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products

#800

Post by wlesieutre »

wlesieutre wrote: post #374
sbahr001 wrote: post #335

I find this sad, Mozilla is really an advocate for the open web and web standards. Since web browsers are free, they can't make much. They might be able to sell something like Thunderbird; if they improve it and make it more into a service, like Hey! for example. They could also try the sponsorship model that a lot of open source projects are doing. They already have sponsors, but maybe sponsors for their open source…

If downsizing the organization and bringing some revenue in from a VPN service helps them be less financially beholden to Google, I think that's a net positive. I don't know that they would need to sell Thunderbird as a whole bundled product/service like Hey; they could launch a paid email service (in the "it's not Gmail" market occupied by Proton, FastMail, Posteo, etc.) and use that money for work on Thunderbird. N…

Too late to edit window, so adding a note here from ZDnet coverage: https://www.zdnet.com/article/mozilla-lays-off-250-employees...

> Furthermore, Mozilla's contract with Google to include Google as the default search provider inside Firefox is set to expire later this year, and the contract has not been renewed. The Google deal has historically accounted for around 90% of all of Mozilla's revenue, and without it experts see a dim future for Mozilla past 2021.

If that's the case, I doubt they have another option.

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