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Growing Mozilla – and evolving our leadership

blog.mozilla.org

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Re: Growing Mozilla – and evolving our leadership

#61

Post by JohnFen »

28304283409234 wrote: post #46
28304283409234 wrote: post #26

Let. Me. Pay. For. Firefox. I pay for other services online. I pay for VPN, for ElementaryOS, for Fastmail. Paying is fine. I pay, you give me a service that does not spy on me. It is not that hard.

And now I just learned about NextDNS. I'm going to pay for that. Back in the day, people were unwilling to pay for Netscape, and Mozilla was born. Today, the world has shifted again, and there are more than enough people with enough money willing to pay for software. And again, Netscape^WMozilla is late to grok this.

> people were unwilling to pay for Netscape

To be fair, that was largely because Netscape was awful.

Re: Growing Mozilla – and evolving our leadership

#63

Post by 28304283409234 »

JohnFen wrote: post #61
28304283409234 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And now I just learned about NextDNS. I'm going to pay for that. Back in the day, people were unwilling to pay for Netscape, and Mozilla was born. Today, the world has shifted again, and there are more than enough people with enough money willing to pay for software. And again, Netscape^WMozilla is late to grok this.

> people were unwilling to pay for Netscape To be fair, that was largely because Netscape was awful.

Well. yeah - okay - granted. But still. People would not pay for Opera either. I'd pay for (the old) opera today. Times have changed.

Re: Growing Mozilla – and evolving our leadership

#64

Post by altairprime »

perihelions wrote: post #25

This isn't really "growing" Mozilla (they laid off 30% of their people a few months ago[0]); this is adding three people to their board of directors. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42054867 ( "Mozilla Foundation lays off 30% staff, drops advocacy division (techcrunch.com)" )

That’s 30% of Foundation, not Corporation.

Re: Growing Mozilla – and evolving our leadership

#65

Post by altairprime »

TheChaplain wrote: post #6

I've noticed Mozilla bringing a lot more behind closed doors, from BugZilla to their restricted Jira. Guess it is just a matter of time until Firefox is behind a walls too?

That tendency began after Gamergate made aggregate vitriol an acceptable persuasion technique and has been accelerating since, in parallel to the predictable decline of open source contributions as the first generation of mobile-first desktop-never people that don’t understand file folder storage hierarchies. When there’s no one left who wants to contribute code, there’s no point in investing further in community-accessible ticketing systems, and the vitriol outweighs diffs by a factor of ten thousand to one or more.

Re: Growing Mozilla – and evolving our leadership

#66

Post by altairprime »

jaredcwhite wrote: post #33

"While Firefox remains the core of what we do" Um excuse me? Mozilla has been asleep at the wheel for years, letting Firefox languish while Mozilla plays squirrel with a dozen other things nobody knows or cares about. In fact, I guarantee you that outside of nerd culture, nobody has any idea what Mozilla is . But maybe they have heard of Firefox. You should be shouting *Firefox Firefox Firefox!* from the rooftops wit…

The fanbase has no money to offer Firefox. As with all free products in today’s wage-inequality world, no one can afford to pay for a browser, so no one will voluntarily — and if they try to charge money, users will just switch to Chrome. So either the mission of “free open web” goes out the door or they end up sacrifice their Necko/Gecko clusterfuck in order to cut the hundreds of jobs it takes to maintain creaky old C++ browser engine. Ten bucks says they announce their intentions to migrate to WebKit or Servo in the next year.

Re: Growing Mozilla – and evolving our leadership

#67

Post by [deleted] »

28304283409234 wrote: post #44
ris wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever donated? What services do you want that shouldn't be available to non-paying users.

> Have you ever donated? To Mozilla? No. Donations are not the same as paying for a specific product or service. I do not want to support their other adventures. > What services do you want that shouldn't be available to non-paying users. Librewolf, but by Mozilla.

[deleted]

Re: Growing Mozilla – and evolving our leadership

#68

Post by mdaniel »

anotherhue wrote: post #62

If you're reading this and having the standard rage reaction to Baker's salary and the squandering of Firefox, instead consider donating directly to Ladybird. The community can solve for this. https://donorbox.org/ladybird https://ladybird.org/

What exactly would one get as return on that investment, given https://ladybird.org/#faq>:

- We are targeting Summer 2026 for a first Alpha version on Linux and macOS

- We don't have anyone actively working on Windows support, and there are considerable changes required to make it work well outside a Unix-like environment

- We don't have anyone actively working on an Android or iOS port

- now we have almost half a million lines of modern C++ to maintain

I wish them luck, but yikes what a very, very deep hole they are trying to dig themselves out of just to reach alpha that thumbs its nose at Windows and the entire mobile market

The hubris of writing a web browser in C++ after looking at Chromium and thinking, "pffft, those morons clearly don't know how to avoid UAF bugs"

Re: Growing Mozilla – and evolving our leadership

#69

Post by pjmlp »

exceptione wrote: post #43
rocmcd wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mozilla really is in a bad spot if advertising, AI, and fundraising are the only innovative ideas their leadership could come up with. I will begrudgingly still use Firefox as my daily driver, but the mismanagement being shown is really appalling and I worry about the future of a free and open Internet. Suffice to say that we all deserve better.

The internet and browsers are a public good, no society functions without. As the US has transitioned into a kleptocracy, it would be even more logical for the EU to financially support teams developing important open source projects. Same thing for Linux and Libre Office perhaps.

Agreed, even if I am quite vocal about the state of Linux Desktop, as ex-believer, european distributions of FOSS OSes are the only viable way from US tech stacks.

Yes, I am quite aware of the contributions they also make to those platforms, but at lease those can be forked from, that ain't happening with what Google/Apple/Microsoft are selling as mainstream OSes.

Re: Growing Mozilla – and evolving our leadership

#70

Post by bad_user »

exceptione wrote: post #43
rocmcd wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mozilla really is in a bad spot if advertising, AI, and fundraising are the only innovative ideas their leadership could come up with. I will begrudgingly still use Firefox as my daily driver, but the mismanagement being shown is really appalling and I worry about the future of a free and open Internet. Suffice to say that we all deserve better.

The internet and browsers are a public good, no society functions without. As the US has transitioned into a kleptocracy, it would be even more logical for the EU to financially support teams developing important open source projects. Same thing for Linux and Libre Office perhaps.

The idea of EU funding Mozilla is naive, and if this is the best people can come up with, I'm not blaming Mozilla going for ads.

For one, Mozilla is still a US entity. As an EU citizen, I'd rather have my taxes go towards funding EU entities, especially in this climate. And I'd rather have that EU entity fork Chromium, starting to contribute to its development, as that would be a wiser bet.

And also, governments funding projects such as Firefox is a bad idea because the citizens of those governments come first. As one example, many online BBC shows are geo-blocked in my country. The EU is meant to serve its citizens, not the world, and you don't want the open Internet to depend on whom people vote for in the following election cycle.

The only way to fund a project that has global reach is via a sustainable business model, not taxes.

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