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Comment by indubitable | Hacker News Reader

Things like this illustrate why it's a bit disingenuous to praise the nonprofit status of Mozilla as some huge distinguishing factor. Not only do the executives pay themselves more than generous salaries (1m for chair, 874k for director, 908k for treasurer) but nonprofit doesn't mean free from commercial concerns. They still need to make money to pay those salaries and support their projects. It seems wiser to judge the ethos of a company based on their actions and decisions instead of their corporate tax status.

[1] - https://static.mozilla.com/moco/en-US/pdf/2014_Mozilla_Found...

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While it's true that Mozilla pays its people well (necessary, to compete for high end tech talent) and we (I work for Mozilla) are in no way free from commercial concerns, I think you're missing a big piece of why being a nonprofit is a distinguishing factor: Mozilla doesn't have the insane pressure for growth that most startups and all publicly traded companies have to reckon with. Any company that has gone public, wants to go public, or wants to get acquired has a never ending pressure for user and/or revenue growth at all costs. Mozilla doesn't have that pressure for growth. Of course we need to maintain enough market share to stay relevant, and we'd love to have more and more and more users, but ultimately as long as we can make enough money to pay for our operations then we're golden. This gives us a lot more freedom of choice when making decisions about what and how to make money.

> This gives us a lot more freedom of choice when making decisions about what and how to make money.

I'd argue the opposite. Mozilla seem too scared to try anything substantial because they're scared of losing the money they do get (because they aren't actively going after other sources and not trying to grow into new revenue sources). Think of e.g. tracking protection - Apple are the ones actually making moves there, not Mozilla. I wonder why...

Mozilla created their own high performance programming language in order to build a faster web engine from scratch (all of which has been largely successful). They developed and shipped a mobile OS well into the reign of Android and iOS. You could argue about the placement of their priorities, but they have definitely thrown their weight behind ambitious projects.

Ambitious in a technical sense - yes. But not ambitious in a "protect the users" sense (see e.g. tracking protection/ad blocking), and also not ambitious in a business sense (i.e. try to do something beyond sell users/traffic to the highest bidding search engine).

(Perhaps they could have made money by selling devices with the OS, but that didn't seem to be the aim there, as far as devices being only sold by partners.)

This is very much the stereotypical engineer approach: trying to engineer your way into revenue. Yes you need strong technology to keep users, but there's a lot more to business than the tech stack and quality.

Why can't people get rich while making a difference? These same people could be working for other companies who are not fighting for our privacy and an open web.

I agree that what is considered high paying salary is completely insane these days with wealth inequality and the idea that such sum of money if more than an individual will ever have use for. But that is a different topic.

A non-profit status doesn't always mean charity. In Mozilla case they are a Foundation, another entity eligible for non-profit status. They have different goals than a charity.

One of the things they do to earn this status is grants. And they have lots of grants.

Now what is funny is you exclude the $0 the five Directors made. Also Mitchell Baker doesn't get their entire pay from salary. That why it is in the second column. Last salary report on her was $400k. Which is weird cause that was in 2014 the same as this public disclosure form. Not sure why you purposely left out the fact their salary isn't actually 1 millions. But total compensation.

So their 'disingenuous' nature isn't so black and white as a headline 'non-profit chair has a 1 million dollar salary'.

A company's priorities are defined by how it spends its money. Very high salaries are a sign that a company is prioritizing the personal enrichment of particular people.

> A non-profit status doesn't always mean charity.

Many unambiguous charities have salaries just as high, and the same rationalizations.

I think it only takes a small amount of experience working with or in charities and nonprofits to discover that offering noncompetitive salaries makes it near impossible for nonprofits to succeed in many sectors.

Nonprofits need experienced and skilled people to be successful, and experienced and skilled people demand high salaries. To take the stance (which I disagree with) that nonprofit administrators should be willing to sacrifice their salary to work in the nonprofit sector (consider that this means, basically, asking them to donate the difference in salary) just doesn't seem to work out well for technical employees in particular, with just about every nonprofit I've worked with seriously struggling with high turnover and low skill level amongst technical staff.

They just switched from Yahoo as the default. So it's not like there's only one company paying the bills (and pulling the strings).

> It seems wiser to judge the ethos of a company based on their actions and decisions instead of their corporate tax status.

I do. I judge them based off the tools they build and the fine line they walk between making boatloads of money and actually providing services for people who care about privacy. Sometimes they get this wrong, but they try really hard.

And, really, the alternative is Google. That's not to say Mozilla shouldn't strive to be the best that they can, but if they were to disappear, we'd be using a closed-source browser built by the biggest ad company in the world who has demonstrated over and over that your privacy is antithetical to their business.

If Mozilla fold, you could still use chromium. Effectively no privacy difference between chromium and firefox tbh. (Unless you use tracking protection in private browsing, but extensions let you do the same in chromium.)

Unless you use patched version like Ungoogled Chromium, not really.

https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium

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