Oh, and I would happily pay/donate to Mozilla for Firefox and Thunderbird, but not for all the other "adventures" they went after. VPN service... As if there were not enough of those already...
And are they a corporate, a charity, or a corporate non-profit? Charities very often pay substantially lower salaries, the tradeoff being you feel you contribute to a greater good. That's how I thought of them, but the wage bill doesn't match up.
They started with Firefox, and they should have stopped with Thunderbird.
Plus, their main competitors are Google, Microsoft, and Apple. They do pay their executives a substantially lower salary.
How much does the team lead for Safari or Edge make? They're competing with a team in Google, Microsoft, and Apple, not with the company as a whole.
not-for-profit organization:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Foundation
and the Mozilla Corporation, "established on August 3, 2005, to handle the revenue-related operations of the Mozilla Foundation":
No they are not. People seem to not understand that there is Mozilla Corporation, the one who pays the salaries, and Mozilla Foundation.
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/ puts it like this:
there’s a non-profit Foundation at the heart of our enterprise...
The Foundation is also the sole shareholder in the Mozilla Corporation, the maker of Firefox and other open source tools. Mozilla Corporation functions as a self-sustaining social enterprise – money earned through its products is reinvested into the organization.
With over 1,000 full-time employees worldwide, Mozilla Corporation employee compensation is benchmarked to market by role and level balancing total compensation between individual and company performance with a pay-for-performance compensation model...
For VPs and above, we benchmark compensation against a blended peer group comprised of 70% similarly-sized public and private tech companies and 30% non-profit organizations.
Mozilla Foundation non-profit programs are carried out by 80 employees and thousands of volunteers around the world.
Unlike the Mozilla Foundation, the Mozilla Corporation is a tax-paying entity, which gives it much greater freedom in the revenue and business activities it can pursue.
More information about revenue:
Today, the majority of Mozilla Corporation revenue is generated from global browser search partnerships, including the deal negotiated with Google in 2017 following Mozilla’s termination of its search agreement with Yahoo/Oath
And:
The Mozilla Foundation is funded by donations and 2% of annual net revenues from the Mozilla Corporation, amounting to over US$8.3 million in 2016.
And Google, at least in the early years, seems to have controlled as much as 90% of the Mozilla Corporation Revenue. I couldn't find the current figure, but the above links mention Google as currently a major financer still.
>And Google, at least in the early years, seems to have controlled as much as 90% of the Mozilla Corporation Revenue. I couldn't find the current figure, but the above links mention Google as currently a major financer still.
Google paid most of their corporate revenue. The last reported year, 2018, was the first under the new contract, and looking at revenues you can guess how much smaller it was then the Yahoo one. If I remember correctly, the contract information will be on the detailed financial report released this year.
To build a browser capable of taking any market share away from Google and Microsoft, available in 90 languages with regular updates, you probably do need numbers around there.
For comparison, I repeated the experiment with Mozilla's gecko-dev repo, and got 480 people committing - still a lot more than I'd thought. I guess I'll see how this holds up with the downsizing in a month.
[edit] Though - only 199 with a Mozilla email address. Though I don't have a Chromium comparison here.
git log --oneline --pretty=format:'%ae' |sort |uniq |wc -l
The job was also different. Compare someone trying to get into shape with someone trying to maintain their current body weight.
Early Mozilla did a lot of good work. Leadership during the 2010s undid almost all of it in ways that were predictable.
It may not require 1000 employees, but 100 is probably not enough. And that is still not easy to fund with volountary donations.
(2) You are assuming a technical level of competence that most people don't have. Even if they do, they often would rather just pay for something simple that works rather than have yet another thing to maintain.
(3) Yeah, Apple would be as trustworthy to most people. But they aren't doing it. A service that doesn't exist isn't a real competitor. I think there's a real potential in this space for a non-shady company, and Mozilla seems like the best candidate.
So what benefit do you get by purchasing VPN access from Mozilla vs. directly from mullvad? I don´t see any from a security/trust perspective.
Also everyone is writing Mozilla wrong around here. It´s not Mozilla. They changed it to Moz://a. How much did that rebranding cost? Was that money well spent? So many bad decisions.