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Firefox usage is down despite Mozilla's top exec pay going up

calpaterson.com

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Re: Firefox usage is down despite Mozilla's top exec pay going up

#341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is shocking if true, but doesn't seem to be? AMD's Lisa Su was the highest-paid CEO of a company in the S&P 500 last year. Su earned a total of $58.5 million in 2019 [0] Mitchell Baker, Mozilla's top executive, was paid $2.4m in 2018 [1] [0] https://edition.cnn.com/2020/06/01/tech/lisa-su-amd-highest-... [1] http://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html

From your first article: "In 2019, she earned $1 million in base salary and a $1.2 million performance-based bonus." . So not 4x, but 2x based on base salary.

Good point. It is misleading to compare base pay rather than overall comp, though.

Re: Firefox usage is down despite Mozilla's top exec pay going up

#342
post #326

> The real problem is not the royalty cuts, though. Mozilla has already received more than enough money to set themselves up for financial independence. Mozilla received up to half a billion dollars a year (each year!) for many years. The real problem is that Mozilla didn't use that money to achieve financial independence and instead just spent it each year, doing the organisational equivalent of living hand-to-mouth…

This is what happens when you throw an LGBT office party every weekend. Just one of the many stupid ways they found to spend money.

Re: Firefox usage is down despite Mozilla's top exec pay going up

#343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe we shouldn’t have canceled Eich after all...

We see Eich with his own browser vision and executive style over at Brave, where he is unencumbered by legacy bureaucracy or codebases. He wouldn’t have been as free if he were at Mozilla.

The problem is that we have the person who arguably most understands the domain of web browsers, online privacy, and all the legal and ethical aspect thereof, working on another Chromium-based browser.

I do not need to elaborate on why a diverse browser ecosystem is important, there are enough threads on that already.

Mozilla had this jewel, exactly what it needed to succeed and make the web a better place. He was attacked for his personal beliefs regarding gay marriage, which went against the current popular liberal attitudes, who attack anything they perceive as against them with a fury on the scale of lynch mobs. The web, for better or for worse, gives huge leverage to whoever is willing to make the most noise and be the most unruly.

So Eich was attacked, Firefox market share plummeted, the new CEOs take home four times what Eich was taking home yet add "Pocket" and other misfeatures while funding for Rust and MDN is being cut. Instead of a 95% monoculture of a Microsoft product we now have a 95% monoculture of a Google product. But hey, the guy who doesn't support gay marriage is out of the picture, right? That's a win, right?

Re: Firefox usage is down despite Mozilla's top exec pay going up

#344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> t wasn't long ago that comments were shouting that this was the absolute most qualified person to lead Mozilla when others were questioning having a lawyer lead a tech company. I don't think you'll be able to attribute that quote to me. Eich fucked up, and should have realized that you can't be leading a flagship of diversity on the one hand and be a bigot on the other. But he resigned (he wasn't forced out, though…

> I don't think you'll be able to attribute that quote to me. Eich fucked up, and should have realized that you can't be leading a flagship of diversity on the one hand and be a bigot on the other. I have a problem with characterizing Brendan Eich as a bigot for donating to a non-fringe political group. IIRC, the proposition campaign he donated to had close to a 50/50 split in support for/against. Eich's ouster cryst…

[deleted]

Re: Firefox usage is down despite Mozilla's top exec pay going up

#345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is a problem that she is both on the board and CEO, which effectively makes her impossible to hold to account Is this really a problem? The CEO is often a director, and even as chairwoman I doubt anything in the bylaws prevents the board at large from removing her if they wanted to. Instead, it seems like the board itself is the issue, since they allowed Mozilla to stray so far from its core mission.

stay/stray.

Cheers. MacBook keyboard strikes again.

Re: Firefox usage is down despite Mozilla's top exec pay going up

#346
So I think we can all agree that Mozilla's path to success is not obvious and running it is strategically harder than running most companies. You have to find a way to make your free product compete with Google / Microsoft without compromising your core values and also paying your bills.

I am not defending this CEO's pay but I am just curious: how much do people on HN think the CEO of Mozilla should be paid? It's got to be enough to attract someone with extensive management experience at a high-functioning tech company so to me the absolute floor would be like $500k unless the person is retired and doing it for fun/charity.

Or do people not think they need a particularly qualified CEO and would be fine with a more democratic governance model?

Re: Firefox usage is down despite Mozilla's top exec pay going up

#348
Now might be the right time to distribute donations directly to the developers. The project https://github.com/protontypes/LibreSelery does exactly that. It can probably be set up for firefox exclusively. Then private donations can go directly to a firefox pool, which in turn will be distributed directly.

Re: Firefox usage is down despite Mozilla's top exec pay going up

#349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> t wasn't long ago that comments were shouting that this was the absolute most qualified person to lead Mozilla when others were questioning having a lawyer lead a tech company. I don't think you'll be able to attribute that quote to me. Eich fucked up, and should have realized that you can't be leading a flagship of diversity on the one hand and be a bigot on the other. But he resigned (he wasn't forced out, though…

> I don't think you'll be able to attribute that quote to me. Eich fucked up, and should have realized that you can't be leading a flagship of diversity on the one hand and be a bigot on the other. I have a problem with characterizing Brendan Eich as a bigot for donating to a non-fringe political group. IIRC, the proposition campaign he donated to had close to a 50/50 split in support for/against. Eich's ouster cryst…

That's great, but those of us who were directly affected by his actions—funding a group specifically intended to focus on ensuring we were prevented from accessing certain rights—will probably just dismiss this rather privileged view.
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