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Comment by sbahr001 | Hacker News Reader

I find this sad, Mozilla is really an advocate for the open web and web standards. Since web browsers are free, they can't make much. They might be able to sell something like Thunderbird; if they improve it and make it more into a service, like Hey! for example. They could also try the sponsorship model that a lot of open source projects are doing. They already have sponsors, but maybe sponsors for their open source frameworks might be better than asking for donations at a company level.

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If downsizing the organization and bringing some revenue in from a VPN service helps them be less financially beholden to Google, I think that's a net positive.

I don't know that they would need to sell Thunderbird as a whole bundled product/service like Hey; they could launch a paid email service (in the "it's not Gmail" market occupied by Proton, FastMail, Posteo, etc.) and use that money for work on Thunderbird.

Not so different from having a VPN service and using it to bring in money for Firefox.

At the end of the day, money is money, at least to a point. Unless the search deal funding is drying up in the background, this will be nickels and dimes on top of that.

I was at Mozilla for a few years. I'm quite sure there was ideological tension with some around accepting Google's money, but I think the bigger issue was not having a diversification of funding and feeling like that one pillar could bring things down. In theory the changes in the mid-2010s to multiple international search providers should have helped with that, but the American pillar was Yahoo. I don't think that did Mozilla a lot of good after the Verizon buyout.

(All said, seems every time I comment something Mozilla, ex-upper management makes it clear in thread that the view from the ranks or my five-years-gone memory is incomplete, so take with as much salt as you need.)

Thing is, Mozilla's been talking service focus and funding diversification for awhile now. I'm not sure what they expect to change to make it more successful this time. Cutting payroll is an extension, not a solution.

Too late to edit window, so adding a note here from ZDnet coverage: https://www.zdnet.com/article/mozilla-lays-off-250-employees...

> Furthermore, Mozilla's contract with Google to include Google as the default search provider inside Firefox is set to expire later this year, and the contract has not been renewed. The Google deal has historically accounted for around 90% of all of Mozilla's revenue, and without it experts see a dim future for Mozilla past 2021.

If that's the case, I doubt they have another option.

>beholden to Google, I think that's a net positive

For the Mozilla Management, not the Company itself.

For anyone worried about what will happen to Mozilla if Google decides they don't want to pay for being the default search engine in Firefox anymore. Their current arrangement is a lot of eggs in one basket.

Was about the net positive, if you trow out all the developers and just hold the highly paid management, firefox will loose even more % and not even google will care if the default search engine google is.

Mozilla made over $500M revenue in 2017 and $451M in 2018. Apparently the decline has continued, but it should still be enough to develop a browser. I would guess that Firefox is profitable but all of Mozilla's other things are dragging them down.

classic story of envy driving you to be worse than that what you envy - was shocked to get to know some Mozilla folks and find out that they _fly everyone to week-long "offsites" at resorts_. Because something something gotta be competitive...

>but it should still be enough to develop a browser

Yes, but not enough to pay the management staff (whatever they do)

the American system of employment is demonstrably broken; Mozilla in SF is bound by hundreds of contradictory and expensive rules for employment, originally designed to make safety and stability for workers, that are now spaghetti-code and are routinely worked around using international channels

Is there any evidence anywhere that Mozilla's decline is caused by labor regulation?

probably not directly, no.. but the expense of employees and the pressures within management, I would expect, are a factor on why 250 responsible adults had jobs last week, but next week, they will not, in High-cost of Living SFBay Area

But they haven't said where the jobs are being eliminated and not all are coming out of the Bay ARea. The article mentions they are closing a center in Taipei. They also have a pretty distributed workforce with only part of it being in the Bay Area.

The US has a generally simple set of employment rules compared to the rest of the world. Most of which you outsource to some third party company and pay them a fixed fee per employee. The cost of employment comes from capitalistic competition for talent. Also, the fact that so many minimum wage workers exist in the US (at a minimum wage below most developed nations) is direct contradiction to your point. Employees are cheap in the US, engineers are expensive everywhere.

They aren't hurting for money: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#Affiliatio...

They get a fortune from Google and still don't let me customize the controls except by a new API that doesn't take effect in a tab until the document has loaded. They just need to manage what they have better.

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