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Comment by UmmNope | Hacker News Reader

Well it is - one could expect this sort of crap pushed by marketing/bizdev via management but the fact that Mozilla engineers actively collaborated on this is a sign of deep normative inadequacy among the people who are supposed to be the last line of defense against this sort of thing.

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You seem to either not understand or ignore that even in a company like Mozilla, there are decisions made by marketing that end up having to be implemented by engineers. It might be a non-profit, but it's a non-profit corporation with salaried employees, not a loose assembly of people purely in it for the love of a browser. If the incredibly high up people say X needs to happen, you make X happen.

I understand it all too well, but when Mozilla is posing as a public benefit company with the "good of the Internet" as its mission this kind of stuff is inexcusable and should be called out all the louder.

It's a non-profit with a duty specifically different from "make profits" and there are consequences to this.

To quote an ex-mozilla employee:

Because the Mozilla Foundation is a nonprofit corporation, it has a specific legal purpose for existing spelled out explicitly in its articles of incorporation: "The specific purpose of the Corporation [here meaning the Foundation] is to promote the development of, public access to and adoption of the open source Mozilla web browsing and Internet application software." If Mozilla Foundation were to ignore this mandate, it would jeopardize the nonprofit, tax exempt status of the foundation

In this case they are definitely ignoring the mandate, and this should never remotely have happened.

Source of the legalese: https://static.mozilla.com/foundation/documents/mf-articles-...

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