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Comment by digi_owl | Hacker News Reader

Fund a bunch of SJW projects that will never bring anything but grief?

Most Mozilla projects are senseless, and they are burning cash as if there were no tomorrow, but the SJW mention makes little sense to me.

I have to agree that there are ambitious projects did not turn out well (like FireFox OS, Persona and a few others) and there are ones still thriving but the community is not quite as impacting as the authors intended. There are also ones did make good impact with very little noise like django-secure got merged into Django 1.6.

Rust is probably the most notable project built by Mozilla after Firefox at this current stage.

They just gave up on Persona too soon. It was going to be an incremental change, not an overnight revolution, but I imagine they never each approached major juncture points for developers (github, stack overflow, etc) about adopting it.

I tried Persona, great concept, the adoption rate was differently very slow. I don't know if they ever reached out to large players and encourage them to adopt, but I think believe even if GitHub did, that wouldn't matter much. Mozilla did not want to keep running Persona as the sole IdP in the Persona platform, it did only to encourage development and early adoption. Even internally I don't think all sites went to Persona, but the large one differently did though. With that attitude I was fearing a major migration which could kill motivation.

Care to expand on that?

Mozilla spent $15k to remove the word slave from documentation.

"Buildbot: $15,000. Buildbot is a continuous build and integration system which has been immensely valuable to Mozilla over the past few years. Their award will be used to remove the term “slave” from all documentation, APIs and tests, and also to make improvements so Buildbot works better in the Amazon EC2 cloud."

I don't think the documentation part of that is gonna take 15k USD.

15k doesn't really go far when you're buying CI servers, colocation, and paying someone to watch them.

Mozilla fired CEO / Creator of JavaScript for donating money on anti-gay-marriage campaign.

They didn't fire him. Brendan Eich stepped back himself after public backlash for that anti-gay donation.

Eich resigned so that the Board wouldn't have to fire him. It wasn't really a voluntary withdrawal.

Really a PR move forced Eich to resign because he donated money to a charity that was against gay marriage.

When Eich did resign conservatives boycotted Mozilla with the Nozilla campain because they gave into Liberals.

So Mozilla got hit by both sides of politics.

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