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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
#592Over the past decade, Mozilla has capitulated over and over again on critical issues. They failed their users and the ecosystem by not standing up to industry pressure for h.264 and EME. They also ended up following rather than leading on key privacy issues like third-party cookie behavior. In every case, they defended these decisions by saying that they couldn't risk losing users, arguing that these issues weren't h…
> They failed their users and the ecosystem by not standing up to industry pressure for h.264 and EME.
But they did stand up to industry pressure, to a larger degree than most are willing to give them credit for.
On H.264, they refused to implement it, arguing that while the licensing requirements were acceptable at the moment, there was no guarantee that the patent pools would get greedy later on (boy did that turn out prescient with H.265). And they got Google to agree to rip out H.264 support from Chrome... except Google appears to have no intention of doing so, and it took Mozilla a year to realize that they had lost the battle.
On EME, Netflix faced the problem that it couldn't implement its contractual obligations to encrypt films without Silverlight, which was clearly on its last gasp. I believe it was Google and Microsoft who brought the original specification, based on their existing implementations. Mozilla objected vociferously and continuously, trying to get more parts of the system specified (such as communication between the browser and the CDM), and generally trying to make the CDMs as narrow as possible and as open as possible. They ultimately lost on most, if not all, of those issues, but it's not for a lack of trying!
Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products
#593Earlier quoted context omitted.
So what are your suggestions? Let Mozilla die and enjoy Google monopoly in the web? No, thanks. I prefer a non-profit organization which " failed their users and the ecosystem by not standing up to industry pressure ". By the way, consider donating to Mozilla if you want them to (be able to) listen to you.
100% agree with that. Maybe Mozilla's greatest skill really is in PR and that it is a rotten organization inside (which so many comments on HN seem to imply), but I don't buy that. When you try to do good, you always put yourself in a vulnerable position. As soon as you make a single mistake, people love to point the finger and criticize for being a hypocrite and not living up to your standards. When an evil company…
Nah Mozilla's PR is mainly due to historical stuff, not to new marketing (post FxOS era more or less)
The org inside is.. like many old orgs, half rotten, half fine. There's a lot of good engineering and even good leaders, thought the ones that are genuine tend to be pushed aside over time for ... more evil reasons, friendship, money, wrong color, you name it. You like you said when you try to do good you put yourself in a vulnerable position and its valid externally just as well as internally as I'm sure you're aware (all companies have this problem to some extent and Mozilla is in my opinion on the "worse side" of the slider atm)
Note also that Mozilla Corp is not Mozilla Foundation. Pretty much none of your donations go to the web browser itself.
Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products
#594Without Firefox though everything is Chrome.
Skype, Zoom, Slack, Discord, Chrome itself, Safari, Edge, Opera, VS Code, Atom...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SCfNhyIo_U
We need to encourage competition even if companies continue to spew this kind of cringe. Firefox is the last holdout.
Good luck Mozilla, you're our old hope.
Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products
#595[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 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.
Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products
#596Over the past decade, Mozilla has capitulated over and over again on critical issues. They failed their users and the ecosystem by not standing up to industry pressure for h.264 and EME. They also ended up following rather than leading on key privacy issues like third-party cookie behavior. In every case, they defended these decisions by saying that they couldn't risk losing users, arguing that these issues weren't h…
They may have made mistakes over EME but would you have sacrificed netflix or other stuff and continued to use pure OSS?
I dont think EME was a mistake. It sucks, but they didnt have a choice, if the choice is death or EME.
Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products
#597It worries me that nobody in power at Mozilla seems to have the first clue how to make money from Free Software and so they have made "commercialism" a corporate fetish.
Making money and looking commercial are not the same thing, team. For the some organizations they can be diametrically opposed. Mozilla, for example.
Mozilla need a CEO who knows how to make money for the company rather than just receive it in their paycheck. Ideally one who eats up less than the revenue from the first 50,000 VPN subscriptions.
Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products
#598Over the past decade, Mozilla has capitulated over and over again on critical issues. They failed their users and the ecosystem by not standing up to industry pressure for h.264 and EME. They also ended up following rather than leading on key privacy issues like third-party cookie behavior. In every case, they defended these decisions by saying that they couldn't risk losing users, arguing that these issues weren't h…
"The fact that they've chosen to focus on revenue instead says everything you need to know about how far Mozilla has fallen. " Maybe you have not noticed that money actually matters? Mozilla maintains a global infrastructure for serving Firefox updates and new installs; they have to pay developers to keep up with bugs, vulnerabilities, and new web standards; they have to pay lawyers to deal with the various legal iss…
Having to pay lawyers for legal issues shouldn't be a reason to lay off 250 employees. It certainly can cost a lot, if they are getting service from top-legal firms, working on billable hours. But they can choose to stick retain lawyers for important matters such as IP-rights, etc., get help from the community for other legal matters and work. For example debian has the debian-legal mailing list, where a lot of lawyers hang out and are ready to help. I certainly would like to contribute if any questions regarding my area of expertise popped up.
Big law firms also do a lot of pro-bono work. Since Mozilla is a foundation they might also try to exercise these channels.
If an OSS community like Debian can manage this, why shouldn't Mozilla be able to do it.
Covid-19 crisis shouldn't affect Mozilla, everyone is still using browsers while working at home.
There are also other ways to raise money for a corporation, for example Mozilla can go public to raise money to sustain their workforce and finance important infrastructure updates such as Servo engine.
Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products
#599[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…
I think it is possible to market privacy and security to casual users, but it's far more difficult to market anything to the privacy and security crowd. Apple has succeeded in their privacy marketing, I'd argue, because they already have a huge number of casual users.
Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products
#600Earlier quoted context omitted.
I may be rapidly downvoted but what strikes me as an outsider (reading most of the comments in this thread) is the collective psyche in the US is viscerally against any entity rising to the top that does not have profit as its sole goal. What they want is for Mozilla to solely focus on Firefox, on the technicalities, and shut up about everything else. And yet no one will actually pay for it as a product. The tragedy…
How do I pay for Firefox directly? Donating to the foundation seems noble, but like other commentators have mentioned it all gets absorbed into the foundation or is part of a 'bonus product' bundle that (in my mind) overvalues a service I don't want (VPN, Pocket, whatever.) I don't think Mozilla/Firefox is failing because no one will pay for it, but, because it won't take money for Firefox directly.
This.
Mozilla is misaligned incentives all the way down.