Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Firefox Money: Investigating the Finances of Mozilla

lunduke.locals.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–69 of 69 posts

Re: Firefox Money: Investigating the Finances of Mozilla

#61

Post by BrendanEich »

evasb wrote: post #34
emptysongglass wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How has she not been ejected after so many years of falling market share? I have a really hard time understanding the business sense of a board that hasn't taken a very hard look at Mozilla's leadership.

She is an old timer that is with Mozilla since the beginning. Should be pretty hard to challenge her from the inside after Brendan Eich departure. What I have to say is that Brendan Eich lost his respect with hia peers inside Mozilla after donating for the campaign against gay marriage, so it was entirely his fault.

Mitchell was a Netscape lawyer who wrote the NPL and MPL. She was not part of mozilla dot org from the beginning.

Your irrational animus toward me may be making you sloppy with that false claim about Mitchell in your first sentence, but your second paragraph just makes stuff up out of whole cloth. Lying, in a word. Mozilla rank and file as far as I know wanted me to stay. I have many letters and emails testifying to this.

It doesn't do you any credit to fulfill wishes this way, even on HN where a noisy but surprisingly small cohort do it vs. me, endlessly.

Re: Firefox Money: Investigating the Finances of Mozilla

#62

Post by BrendanEich »

emptysongglass wrote: post #30
evasb wrote: post #27

Mitchell Baker needs to go and let people do their job.

How has she not been ejected after so many years of falling market share? I have a really hard time understanding the business sense of a board that hasn't taken a very hard look at Mozilla's leadership.

I couldn't possibly say, but one might suspect she has old connections with early Googlers, and Mozilla is still (at ever lower revshare rates in successive deals) a cheap source of search traffic for Google, and good PR aka "antitrust repellant". At $5.6M/year comp, wouldn't you sell your soul this way? https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2021/mozilla-fdn-990...

Re: Firefox Money: Investigating the Finances of Mozilla

#63

Post by autoexec »

airhangerf15 wrote: post #24
constantcrying wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Mozilla should convert to a worker owned enterprise and stop giving all of that money to execs. The compensation to execs seems irrelevant. That is almost literally just a Google bribe. Mozilla pays 200M for software development, from that I can only assume that they pay quite generously and they seem to have absolutely no issue with money, as they are funded by Google. To me it seems hey have more money than they k…

Mozilla literally forced out the creator of Javascript, Brendan Eich, because of his religious and political views. They're funded by Google because Alphabet doesn't want another IE6/MS anti-trust case. They are planned/fake competition. The fact that there are privacy aware forks of Firefox (like Librewolf) speaks volumes.

> Mozilla literally forced out the creator of Javascript, Brendan Eich, because of his religious and political views.

That's inaccurate and unfair. He resigned (was not forced out) and the backlash he faced wasn't because of his religious and political views, but because he was working to impose his religious and political views on others. Nobody was demanding that Brendan get gay married, but he wanted to prevent others from getting gay married if they wanted to.

Re: Firefox Money: Investigating the Finances of Mozilla

#64

Post by zaphirplane »

st3fan wrote: post #47
zaphirplane wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their revenue is 800 million. It sounds like a lot of money for a browser Over the last 10 years their revenue would?? say 5 billion. That is a lot

What the hell is this? Has HackerNews now turned into a site where ACTUALLY GENERATING GREAT REVENUE WITH YOUR PRODUCT IS FROWNED UPON!? I don't understand this comment at all. Is making money a bad thing now? I thought that was the whole point of being a hacker and starting a bsiness and then getting funding and doing hard work and then boooom .. revenue, money, profit! Success! No? Not anymore? Or is Mozilla specia…

Sounds like a lot of money to develop a browser. Who should they distribute the profits to ? and are donations share holders profit

Obviously the don’t have share holders

Re: Firefox Money: Investigating the Finances of Mozilla

#65

Post by Rocoli »

st3fan wrote: post #37

What a dumb hit piece. The author Cherry picked things to politicize. How about the many millions of dollars the Mozilla Foundation spends on grands and research supporting so many individuals and organizations that help make the world a better place. The full list can be found at https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2021/mozilla-fdn-990...

1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

2) They still have no job focusing on these things when their browser, their main product, is loosing market share like crazy. Why not spend all that money on Servo and Oxidation instead?

3) It's not politicizing to say that a software developer is using money for political purposes instead of making software. You are the one politicizing this because you deflect from this valid criticism into a discussion about the author's politics.

Re: Firefox Money: Investigating the Finances of Mozilla

#66

Post by aleph4 »

herczegzsolt wrote: post #18

I sort of understand that Mozilla wants to care for the concept of an open internet which requires a lot more than just software development. I don't particularly understand or like the exact things they finance, but politics is a complex game in which you loose if you don't play. What I absolutely fail to understand though is why they don't have long-term focus on diversifying income? All their alternative revenue s…

They do have a focus on that, it just hasn't really panned out. To be fair, you're talking about the billion dollar question. It's not exactly an easy problem.

Re: Firefox Money: Investigating the Finances of Mozilla

#67

Post by billiam »

evasb wrote: post #34
emptysongglass wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How has she not been ejected after so many years of falling market share? I have a really hard time understanding the business sense of a board that hasn't taken a very hard look at Mozilla's leadership.

She is an old timer that is with Mozilla since the beginning. Should be pretty hard to challenge her from the inside after Brendan Eich departure. What I have to say is that Brendan Eich lost his respect with hia peers inside Mozilla after donating for the campaign against gay marriage, so it was entirely his fault.

Was there. Baker has constructed (and deconstructed) Mozilla to provide her with money and power. Full stop. The Google search deal is an easy way to keep Brussels off Google's back. Any normal Board would have fired her many years ago for non-performance. Brendan was popular with most engineers but a small but vocal minority had problems with a single political contribution he made years before and his somewhat cavalier way of explaining it. IMHO he was unsuited as a Mozilla CEO but he has made Brave what he wanted Mozilla to be, so happy ending.

Re: Firefox Money: Investigating the Finances of Mozilla

#68

Post by [deleted] »

dralley wrote: post #12
constantcrying wrote: post #3

As with Wikipedia, what I assumed how the organization operated and how it does is vastly different. Basically everything here seems biazarre and makes trusting Mozilla very hard. Does anybody believe that they can stand up against Google, when Google, at any point they want to, could crash their whole operation? I think it is quite likely that Google is keeping Mozilla afloat to avoid anti-trust allegations. Mozilla…

HN loves to simultaneously criticize Mozilla for 1) being financially dependent on Google 2) spending resources on literally anything except Firefox 3) doing anything that smells like monetizing Firefox, no matter how innocuous Spoiler alert: They have essentially no hope of avoiding 1 without doing at least a little bit of 2 or 3. Unlike Google, Apple, and Microsoft, they don't have billions of dollars coming throug…

[deleted]

Re: Firefox Money: Investigating the Finances of Mozilla

#69

Post by vntok »

st3fan wrote: post #54
matheusmoreira wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Developing Firefox.

Nope. Not correct.

How is it not correct? Have you read the original statements by Netscape and Mozilla?

Fortunately, they are very easy to read if you haven't done so yet, thanks to Archive.org.

1. Here is the first statement by Netscape, clearly showing Mozilla's original intent to help develop Netscape's client: (https://web.archive.org/web/20021004080737/http://wp.netscap... )

> NETSCAPE ANNOUNCES MOZILLA.ORG, A DEDICATED TEAM AND WEB SITE SUPPORTING DEVELOPMENT OF FREE CLIENT SOURCE CODE

> Netscape Communications Corporation (NASDAQ:NSCP) today announced the creation of mozilla.org, a dedicated team within Netscape with an associated Web site that will promote, foster and guide open dialog and development of Netscape's client source code.

2. Here is the second statement by the newly formed entity, clearly showing its goal to "lead open-source browser efforts": (https://blog.mozilla.org/press/2003/07/mozilla-org-announces...)

> Mozilla.org announces launch of the Mozilla Foundation to lead open-source browser efforts

There's even a side paragraph "About mozilla.org and the Mozilla Foundation" that states the following mission statement:

> Mozilla.org (www.mozilla.org) is the group that exists to make Mozilla a successful open source project. Mozilla.org provides open source Internet client software that includes a browser, mail and news functionality, and a toolkit for developing web-based applications. Mozilla.org was founded by Netscape Communications Corporation.

Post reply on HN