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Leaving Mozilla

blog.unitedheroes.net

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Re: Leaving Mozilla

#61

Post by blackhaz »

TalkingCodeMonk wrote: post #50
klez wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As the OP says, the point is not that they needed unpaid work, if that's what you mean. The point is that volunteers shaped what Firefox, MDN, Thunderbird, Mozilla itself were.

This is why I refuse to donate to Mozilla, despite only paying for open source products, believing that 100% open source should be mandatory in every democractic government, Firefox and Thunderbird being my daily drivers for many years, and donating several hundred dollars every year on FLOSS projects. Many of Mozillas product decisions prove that the Mozilla corporation is not aligned with the interests of FLOSS. I…

Not to mention scandals like this...

"In 2018 she received a total of $2,458,350 in compensation from Mozilla, which represents a 400% payrise since 2008. On the same period, Firefox marketshare was down 85%. When asked about her salary she stated "I learned that my pay was about an 80% discount to market. Meaning that competitive roles elsewhere were paying about 5 times as much. That's too big a discount to ask people and their families to commit to."

In 2020, after returning to the position of CEO, her salary had risen to over $3 million. In the same year the Mozilla Corporation laid off approximately 250 employees due to shrinking revenues. Baker blamed this on the Coronavirus pandemic"

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#62

Post by magpi3 »

Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy absolutely applies here:

https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html

"Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people:

First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers, launch technicians, and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.

Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers' union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.

The Iron Law states that, in every case, the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules and control promotions within the organization."

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#63

Post by utopiah »

lawgimenez wrote: post #19

I think Mozilla started getting nuts the day they ventured with Firefox OS. To this day, I am still kind of confused with that move.

Firefox OS was amazing and, sadly, would STILL be amazing today.

Boot-to-Gecko is brilliant because honestly most apps today... are Web pages packaged in an "app". Most PWA with desktop shortcuts (and ideally offline responsive mode) show that. Very few "apps" genuinely need to be apps.

Consequently being "just" a phone with basic connectivity and delegating the rest to the browser made perfect sense.

I didn't work because it didn't make sense or wasn't technically feasible. It didn't work because anybody who made a mobile OS wanted THEIR own walled gardens. The fact that today we are stuck with Android an iOS shows how needed it was and still is.

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#64

Post by tjpnz »

blackhaz wrote: post #61
TalkingCodeMonk wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I refuse to donate to Mozilla, despite only paying for open source products, believing that 100% open source should be mandatory in every democractic government, Firefox and Thunderbird being my daily drivers for many years, and donating several hundred dollars every year on FLOSS projects. Many of Mozillas product decisions prove that the Mozilla corporation is not aligned with the interests of FLOSS. I…

Not to mention scandals like this... "In 2018 she received a total of $2,458,350 in compensation from Mozilla, which represents a 400% payrise since 2008. On the same period, Firefox marketshare was down 85%. When asked about her salary she stated "I learned that my pay was about an 80% discount to market. Meaning that competitive roles elsewhere were paying about 5 times as much. That's too big a discount to ask peo…

Failed their way to the top.

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#65

Post by utopiah »

samiv wrote: post #29

Why can't people just leave? What compels them to write these lengthy self grandiosing posts "zomg I'm leaving company X".

I can't speak for the author but I can say that I left companies or institutions on my own despite loving both the (idealized) mission and the team.

I wanted to stay but the strategy was wrong, to my own moral compass.

Consequently leaving in silence, without being able to express why, and maybe even what could possibly be fixed, feels like giving up.

Leaving while telling whomever might want to hear what problems were, and possibly how to fix them, helps to move on while being truthful.

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#66

Post by charcircuit »

chii wrote: post #26
matsemann wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again: Would it have made a measurable difference? Or is it just moaning from a small core? Not saying the core is not important, but I don't think Fx can survive on only us.

> don't think Fx can survive on only us. not at the current employee and costs. But do they need to do that? Do they need to produce new products (and pay the cost to do so)? Why can't they be lean and mean? Focus purely on browser experience without any BS, without any upsell? And there are volunteers out there that willingly contribute code/fixes for free.

If they truly wanted to be mean and lean and focus on the browser experience they would need to throw away their pride and port the browser from gecko to blink. I think they are too prideful to do that though.

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#67

Post by userbinator »

shevy-java wrote: post #4
eps wrote: post #2

Who is this person?

Some mozilla software developer I guess. They still have not fixed their build system. Meson/ninja or cmake would be alternatives. Nothing to have them abandon mozconfig ... this is legacy code. The rest of the world moved on. Mozilla lives in the past.

Mozilla lives in the past.

And one would hope they stay there, because all the newer stuff is far more user-hostile.

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#68

Post by PurpleRamen »

klez wrote: post #7

Some 10 years ago I was a Mozilla volunteer. I mainly worked on MDN, to the point of becoming a so-called "topic driver" for the glossary. Some of the work I did landed in the citations of a couple of papers about web technology. They flew me a whole week to Vancouver for an event where employees and volunteers worked together in the same room and they even made me (and the other volunteers ) attend a sort-of-corpora…

> But on the last day they announced that they were moving the day-to-day conversations from IRC (an open protocol) to Yahoo Messenger (a closed protocol).

IIRC they had a partnership with Yahoo around that time. Interesting to hear it went that deep. Notable: Yahoo Messenger was shutdown in 2018.

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#69

Post by nntwozz »

klez wrote: post #7

Some 10 years ago I was a Mozilla volunteer. I mainly worked on MDN, to the point of becoming a so-called "topic driver" for the glossary. Some of the work I did landed in the citations of a couple of papers about web technology. They flew me a whole week to Vancouver for an event where employees and volunteers worked together in the same room and they even made me (and the other volunteers ) attend a sort-of-corpora…

Dat feeling when reading "IRC (an open protocol)" on HN—the parenthesis being necessary to explain IRC.

Makes me think in 10 years time the web will all be discord-like data silos behind infernal subscriptions and/or dark patterns with ads.

What a wonderful thing we've created.

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#70

Post by Angostura »

magpi3 wrote: post #62

Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy absolutely applies here: https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html "Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers, launch techni…

I hate this. It basically takes as axiomatic that anyone in an administrative position in an organisation has zero interest in the goals of the organisation -and that those at the coal-face have no interest in the organisation and that there is little or no overlap in interest. Its reductionist, divisive and stupid.
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