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Comment by drenvuk | Hacker News Reader

Shit like this pisses me off. I care for Firefox and the team behind it but how do you get rid of these vampires sucking the company dry? You've got executive pay going up, usage going down. Pivotal leaders being ousted, good workers being released, good features being removed and shit features being added. It's like managers and executives somehow dig their bureaucratic teeth into a successful company/project and then suck it dry while proclaiming "It's ok, everything will be alright. Here, have some AVX-512 or some MEGA OMNIBAR." As if this shit actually matters.

Why is there no system for calling them out on this, swiftly kicking them out and staunching the bleeding?

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The tale is as old as time, something starts out as open source, gets popular, gets bought and is drained by the "corporate vampires" you're alluding to, either through acquisition or other means.

The only silver lining here compared to any other type of software, is that legally, this software can never be anything but open source -- so we are all free to fork and attempt to do a better job, and make a valiant try in not repeating history.

The desire to see consistent behavior as incompetence is a shield. Firefox was intentionally destroyed, and gets all of its revenue from the company who replaced it.

It's like Nokia all over again; the plurality of people who are watching this failure predict every step of it, but are denigrated as antisocial, selfish, mentally-ill trolls. As they leave, the ones who remain are attacked more, because now they're outnumbered in every conversation. Then the company fails.

Of course, in this case firefox will never disappear, but stumble along like a zombie, forever, because google needs it for antitrust purposes. Mozilla will do anything but work on its browser, at high salaries, rife with self-dealing and cush jobs handed out to the most connected, while claiming the languishing firefox as its emotional core and charitable mission. The work done on firefox will consist of tests for things that chrome is thinking of doing, or the non-disableable incorporation of acquired companies or partners into its functionality.

There's no system for calling them out on this other than just calling them out on this. They don't have any duty to us.

Lots of people on this thread are complaining about Mozilla doing too many "unrelated side projects".

Honestly as a dev that sounds to me like a culture where engineers are too able to run free. If anything.

But of course swiftly kicking people out to staunch the bleeding - as happened recently - can cause a lot of pain and backlash too. New executives usually cause strategy/org thrash which sucks for everyone at the bottom.

Just saying these things are hard. Executives have to make decisions that suck, doesn't mean they're vampires. May be very painful for them too.

This is not a case of gallivanting engineers running free.

All of the moonshot projects are done at the direction of executive leadership in the hopes to open new profit streams.

In fact some of the more technically promising projects (like Servo) had their whole entire team laid off recently to "refocus" on more of these executive-sourced profit grab moonshots

No incentive, I guess, is the explanation for any stagnant system.

Why bother trying to build a successful business if Google is just going to keep bailing you out with their charity?

"charity"

Why would there be a way to force a private company to do something they don't want to? How would that even work.

As a private company it is their right to fail.

no money in anything but parasitism.

IMO We desperately need socialism and an end to rent-collection in totality.

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