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Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products

blog.mozilla.org

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

#931

Post by jefftk »

fergie wrote: post #858
alex_young wrote: post #796

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 fo…

Revenue: $27M; CEO pay: $2.3M Are these numbers accurate? The first seems very low and the last seems very high? Is it still like this?

Yes, that's wrong. I'm not sure about the CEO number, but Mozilla's 2019 reported revenue was ~$450M.

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

#932

Post by SilasX »

blub wrote: post #863
renewiltord wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haha, this is what it looks like to cater to the privacy/security crowd. They have a picture of ideological purity. They don't actually use your product. Essentially if these were customers you'd want to fire them. People in this business always discover this stuff and then they're always like "Why do they hate me?". The answer is "they never wanted to love you. They want to watch you fall". Like DDG with their favic…

This announcement has nothing to do with privacy and security and suggesting that it does is a red herring. People generally want privacy and security, as numerous polls show, but: a) it's very hard to figure out if something is private/secure b) the company can change the deal at any point c) the market has stacked the deck against privacy and security. Until there are laws with teeth which will punish transgressors…

> a) it's very hard to figure out if something is private/secure

> b) the company can change the deal at any point

Yes! Don’t forget the time Firefox, bastion of privacy, forgot to update a critical cert that allowed addons to work, and then said, “don’t worry guys, the whole time we had the power to force our updates without your consent, under the guise of an analytics feature, and we used that to fix this!”

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19825745

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19826827

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

#933

Post by DonHopkins »

rsj_hn wrote: post #835
DonHopkins wrote: post #780

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eich was not forced out or fired. In fact, just the opposite: the board actually tried to get Eich to stay, but he decided to leave all on his own. Don't try to rewrite history to make an ideological point. It's all very well and unambiguously documented what really happened, and there's no excuse for you spreading that misinformation. https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/04/05/faq-on-ceo-resignat... Q: Was Brendan Eic…

Then the financial settlement was just for kicks?

What financial settlement?

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

#934

Post by alex_young »

jefftk wrote: post #931
fergie wrote: post #858

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Revenue: $27M; CEO pay: $2.3M Are these numbers accurate? The first seems very low and the last seems very high? Is it still like this?

Yes, that's wrong. I'm not sure about the CEO number, but Mozilla's 2019 reported revenue was ~$450M.

The nonprofit revenue in 2019 was $27M. See line 12: https://pp-990.s3.amazonaws.com/06_2020_prefixes_13-20/20009...

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

#935

Post by Hello71 »

jefftk wrote: post #930
alex_young wrote: post #796

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 fo…

Apache projects are generally developed by a combination of interested volunteers and corporate-funded teams, not by employees of the Apache foundation.

and why is that?

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

#936

Post by jefftk »

Hello71 wrote: post #935
jefftk wrote: post #930

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apache projects are generally developed by a combination of interested volunteers and corporate-funded teams, not by employees of the Apache foundation.

and why is that?

The Apache Foundation is organized as a legal entity to host projects, but is intentionally decentralized. Because they have chosen to organize themselves this way, many large companies have chosen to work with them to host collaborative open source projects they care about. It fills a very different niche than Mozilla.

Looking at the revenue of the Apache Foundation is about as misleading as looking at the revenue for the Mozilla Foundation. In both cases, development is generally funded through corporations, though in the Apache case the corporations are independent while in the Mozilla case the Foundation owns the Mozilla Corporation.

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

#937

Post by pmontra »

johnsea wrote: post #846
vages wrote: post #627

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to respectfully disagree. It is common for leaders to re-state their entity's reason for being as they bring bad news. See Churchill's speeches during the battle of France, for instance. I think this opening was well-written and clearly communicated Mozilla's purpose. You can blame it for being populist, but don't hate the player, hate the game.

The opening, coming from a super well paid CEO, pissed me off. I need a good browser, maybe with accompaigned products but no save the internet, racism, bl, etc. Most likely won't ever support Mozilla with such language.

Exactly. I care about Firefox and Thunderbird, not about Mozilla. If another company forks the projects and delivers a better program I'll be as happy as if Mozilla keeps doing it.

Supporting and directing Internet standards, resisting Google, etc, are a byproduct of developing an independent browser.

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

#938

Post by devwastaken »

renewiltord wrote: post #339
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…

Haha, this is what it looks like to cater to the privacy/security crowd. They have a picture of ideological purity. They don't actually use your product. Essentially if these were customers you'd want to fire them. People in this business always discover this stuff and then they're always like "Why do they hate me?". The answer is "they never wanted to love you. They want to watch you fall". Like DDG with their favic…

Criticism of errors in privacy/security does not mean they "want you to fall". Forcing proper change often requires public pressure.

Advocating against security is you advocating against yourself for no purpose other than sticking it to others. That's incredibly poor reasoning, and you're generalizing all groups as if they're all outrage for bad reasons.

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

#939

Post by DangerousPie »

eloisant wrote: post #921
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 think the issue is multifold, but basically from what I've seen (including having multiple friends at Mozilla and visited their HQ multiple times), Mozilla is run exactly like any other Silicon Valley company. Sure, there is no shareholders so there is this freedom, but people working there were basically hired after working in other tech companies, and they just work as they did in other tech companies. The fact t…

So you think Mozilla would be better if it wasn't run like a tech company? How should it be run instead? Why should they not be using metrics to measure the impact of what they do? It's not obvious to me that running it less like a tech company and more like a non-profit (whatever that means) would work better.

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

#940

Post by schwinn140 »

vages wrote: post #627
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…

I have to respectfully disagree. It is common for leaders to re-state their entity's reason for being as they bring bad news. See Churchill's speeches during the battle of France, for instance. I think this opening was well-written and clearly communicated Mozilla's purpose. You can blame it for being populist, but don't hate the player, hate the game.

Agreed. Think of the countless companies, arguably most, that will never publicly acknowledge their layoffs.

"Corporate double-speak" is still far better than not saying anything and/or hoping that nothing leaks.

Public acknowledgement in difficult times is near impossible for most companies, especially those that are private, to accomplish.

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