False equivalence is the moral reasoning du jour, didn't you hear?

The original comment seemed to be “sure, some people working for Mozilla are bad, but some are good, and some people working for their competitors are also bad.”

My points were (1) the statement didn’t actually say anything interesting because it only talked about some of the people working at each company (i.e., it was just as true if you switched the company names around), (2) all companies are made up of people, so it’s hardly a surprise that some of those people have admirable motives and others don’t, and (3) “nonprofit” doesn’t necessarily mean “good,” or “pure in heart,” or whatever people seem to think it does.

My original comment was ambiguous: (1) I didn’t predict Firefox OS, Rust, the current branding push (moz://a), cancelation of particular projects, the switch to Yahoo search and the recent switch back to Google, etc., and (2) I didn’t expect any of Mozilla’s political activity, including this lawsuit. Knowing that Mozilla qualifies as a nonprofit in the US doesn’t make its behavior any easier to predict.

I believe that Mozilla’s nonprofit status requires it to show “community support” in the form of donations from a lot of people, so the tax status does influence the foundation’s policies in some way (e.g., policies can’t upset too many donors), but I think that influence is pretty limited.

Mozilla has to make do with the same imperfect people as everyone else.

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Even though I’m bad at it, I will make one prediction: suing the federal government is expensive. Obviously Mozilla will use the lawsuit as a fundraising opportunity. If the suit is successful, they will have another reason to be mentioned in history books. But if the suit fails, or if the fundraising doesn’t work out, this might end up as a very costly mistake.

Plenty of bad decisions from Mozilla were the results of conflicts of interest - between their desire to be useful to users in the immediate term and their desire to push for a better web in the long term, or between individual employees' views and the organisation's interests, or even between their users' interests and the organisation's desire for money (the default search provider) - being a nonprofit doesn't mean you don't want money, it just means you spend everything you get, managers who want to empire-build still want to increase their revenue even in a non-profit.

Mozilla is exempt from one very specific set of interests that other web organisations have. They still have a vast number of competing interests to consider in their decisionmaking. Indeed Google's controlling shareholders, being mostly billionaires, may well exert less pressure in practice than Mozilla's donors.