311–320 of 352 posts
Maybe, donating to Mozilla would be nice, instead of giving to Wikipedia or other projects that don't need more money.
Donations to Mozilla go to Mozilla Foundation, the non-profit organization. These layoffs are in Mozilla Corporation, which doesn’t get the donated money and is mainly funded by the partnership with Google for the search engine setting in Firefox.
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> but is that really something that can only happen when one big company/organization is funding the project? Have you any examples of any large OSS projects that don't have this problem? > As for Rust, maybe someone could point me in the direction of the one benevolent large company that's backing GCC/G++ or CPython or Ruby? gcc [0] has a list of maintainers, which features a lot of redhat email addresses. The ruby…
PostgreSQL is probably the best example. It's maintained by many people from many different companies.
Hi everyone, the Rust core team has been talking about making a statement on this, but I left this comment in a personal capacity yesterday: ------------------------ Mozilla employs a small number of people to work on Rust fulltime, and many of the Servo people contributed to Rust too, even if it wasn't their job. They also pay for the hosting bill for crates.io. They also own a trademark on Rust, Cargo, and the logo…
Hi everyone, the Rust core team has been talking about making a statement on this, but I left this comment in a personal capacity yesterday: ------------------------ Mozilla employs a small number of people to work on Rust fulltime, and many of the Servo people contributed to Rust too, even if it wasn't their job. They also pay for the hosting bill for crates.io. They also own a trademark on Rust, Cargo, and the logo…
Hi everyone, the Rust core team has been talking about making a statement on this, but I left this comment in a personal capacity yesterday: ------------------------ Mozilla employs a small number of people to work on Rust fulltime, and many of the Servo people contributed to Rust too, even if it wasn't their job. They also pay for the hosting bill for crates.io. They also own a trademark on Rust, Cargo, and the logo…
Do you think it would be feasible to fund a team of core developers directly by the community? A lot of people love Rust and might bei willing to contribute a small amount of money regularely to keep Rust independent from corporate politics.
We will always do our best to make sure that no one single company controls Rust, but we do also want Rust to be useful to industry, and so we do want to listen to our users, no matter where they come from.
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I don't understand why they don't just create a patreon/github sponsors/bitcoin donations for core ff/rust/mdn teams salaries and call it a day. I'm sure they'll get more than enough contributions to make it viable.
Who wants to donate when their CEO makes 2.5million/year?
That will save a LOT more money and have a better impact.
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I wouldn't jump to the conclusion that management doesn't understand tech, they obviously do, it's Mozilla. What in these decisions should make that obvious? Just because its Mozilla doesn't mean its management staff understand tech. Cut the CEO salary and remove some management first.
They cut 25% of their workforce. That's 250 people. Figure all-in loaded cost of $200K per person let go, and that's $50 million in budget they cut. Mitchell Baker had made $2.5 million. You don't get $50 million out of non-technical cuts.
I used to donate to Mozilla until these news. In fact, I started specifically donating because of the Servo and Rust projects. I was impressed with the way Mozilla was pushing the envelope and once again returning to the forefront of tech, in an open source manner.
Instead, C execs keep getting raises and the guys doing the real work keep getting axed.
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I've been saying for years that Mozilla should have a services department to do consulting and corporate support for Rust. No idea why they'd leave millions of dollars on the floor like that.
Mozilla's revenue is $400M a year. A few million dollars in consulting revenue isn't going to move the needle.
And it can easily drop to $0M a year.
Meanwhile, a good consulting can grow to tens of millions, and even be acquired by a company like MS, etc.
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Apple, Microsoft, and Google: * Forbid alternative browser engines on their platform. * Bundle their browser in a leading operating system. * Use their massive Web properties to drive downloads of their own browser.
And in the case of Apple, who killed Flash to help the open web, have knee-capped PWA support on their mobile platforms to force developers to leave their cut of sales through the App Store. It's pretty anti-competitive. I believe Valve's been a bit on edge (no pun intended), about Microsoft forcing games through their store as well. Mozilla was helping us out of these walled gardens. There's even the SSB support the…
Knee-capped? For years Safari had the best PWA support compared to Android.
And at first it even asked developers to make PWAs, and they said "no, we want native apps".
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Firefox is open source and it doesn't need to be tied to Mozilla. Maybe a fork is necessary.
"Open source" doesn't necessarily mean "practical to maintain." Can an open source organization maintaining a fork of Firefox in their free time in addition to the obligations of their regular job keep up with the hundreds of webcompat issues being filed and over 3,000 open issues on the preview version of Firefox on Android alone? And there also is a fork of XUL-era Firefox already, called Pale Moon, which various p…
Blink (Chrome's engine) was once KHTML. KHTML was maintained entirely by volunteers, so I think it's entirely possible for a team of volunteers to maintain a web rendering engine.
I think most people severely underestimate how much of a modern web browser is code that does things completely unrelated to rendering web content (think telemetry and the like ,etc). Now, telemetry also needs a backend to send data to, and servers to run that backend on.
My point is that many of the people that work on a modern browser are working on things that are unrelated to rendering web content, so their equivalent would not be needed in a volunteer team. You don't need any admins to administer the servers that run the telemetry backend services if you don't have any telemetry in your browser.