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Comment by exikyut | Hacker News Reader

Wow, this is awesome.

- Mozilla engineering finally gets the green light to beat Chrome through a from-scratch rendering stack

- This skunkworks initative popularizes the world's first viable C++ contender and interesting "mainstreamable" programming language

- Manglement suddenly lays off the teams responsible for both projects (Rust and Servo)

- Some awesome person from the trenches convinces said manglement to release governance of the rendering engine so it can be developed independently ((of said manglement))...

- ???

- Profit...?

This is real engineering and strategic problem solving. It's inspiring to see.

What is very annoying is that a Mozilla-branded web browser already took the "Phoenix" product name. :(

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Why is Mozilla not betting on Rust anymore?

the CEO needs a new house.

She's hardly the most overpaid CEO in tech, but she seems to come up pretty often for some reason.

> for some reason

This isn't a mystery. Mozilla accept donations. It isn't an ordinary for-profit corporation.

Yes, they separate Mozilla Corporation from Mozilla Foundation, but the point stands. If Mozilla are going to claim to make browsers, apps, code and tools that put people before profit, [0] they should expect backlash when they lay off engineers while continuing to overpay their leadership, despite continuing poor outcomes under their stewardship. [1]

[0] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/

[1] http://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html

Some people have an axe to grind with Mozilla since that whole Brendan Eich thing, and on top of that there's just good old sexism.

This all contributes to create a very toxic subject that I generally tend to avoid, but I think that it's fair at this point to question Mozilla's execs results at this point. These past few years have been pretty brutal for Mozilla, and there's no clear path ahead from where I stand.

> good old sexism

The only comment mentioning her gender was someone defending her, you're pulling hair here

yes because one can only be sexist by explicitly mentioning gender

Mozilla has decided to move to a different mission less about improving the web and more about enacting things that make them money, so they can continue to pay a large CEO salary and push policy objectives against free speech.

Unfortunately Mozilla seemed to go from "awesome" to really disappointing in a very short time window.

Wow, that is a hugely loaded statement. Even if it is 100% true, the level of derision and bias should make any person not familiar with the situation question everything you say.

If you're going to be that biased, at least back it up. And by back it up, I mean at LEAST throwing in some statements of fact, if not URLs.

Every thread tangentially related to Mozilla has a bunch of people who don't understand how non-profits work come in and complain about executive compensation.

I'd say >$2.4M in exec comp[1] isn't just making up for a lack of stock options.

[1] - https://www.cnet.com/news/mozilla-cuts-70-staff-as-part-of-p...

The absolute number doesn't matter. Non-profits participate in the same labor market as for-profit companies. You have to compare it to executive salaries for other similarly sized companies in their market segment to make the argument that she is overpaid. Otherwise you're just arguing against income inequality, which is not a problem exclusive to Mozilla, and crippling Mozilla's ability to participate in that labor market will not fix it.

Does Mozilla compete with for profit companies for C suite market? Which technology intensive company hire a CEO who is lawyer by profession and hasn't had any redeeming resume for management and technology. If you look at firefox's market share, the only growth it had was when she was not a CEO. Seriously, Mozilla is not competing with for profit companies in C suite labor market.

Does Mozilla compete with for profit companies for C suite market?

Yes, Baker is CEO of the for profit corporation.

Which technology intensive company hire a CEO who is lawyer by profession and hasn't had any redeeming resume for management and technology.

Are you aware that she cofounded the project in the 90s? Mozilla (corporation) didn't just decide to hire a lawyer out of the blue in 2018.

> You have to compare it to executive salaries for other similarly sized companies in their market segment to make the argument that she is overpaid.

No, a non-profit does not need to attract someone who only cares about making money.

Hiring someone willing to work for less would ultimately be better for a non-profit, since it's an indicator that they care about the mission, and not purely about the money.

If you hire someone who wants over 2M, you hire someone who cares about your money, not your ideals, and will push the organisation in that direction.

> The pay for Mozilla Chair and longtime leader Mitchell Baker in 2018, the most recent year for which the organization released the information, surpassed $2.4 million.

Mozilla currently cares more about surviving than its main mission. And yes, it can't accomplish its mission if it dies, but don't they understand? If Mozilla falls, another will take its place.

The way to kill Mozilla is from the inside: to quash its soul.

> If Mozilla falls, another will take its place.

Yes, another chrome skin perhaps?

> Mozilla currently cares more about surviving than its main mission.

In the open market, any organization that doesn't cares more about its survival than its mission will eventually be replaced by one that does. This is fundamental to the definition of "survival".

> If Mozilla falls, another will take its place.

The one that will take its place will be an organization that prioritizes survival, not its mission.

Organisations are made of people. There are enough people who care about Mozilla's mission that they'd do the things even if Mozilla didn't, and if they got together they could get at least 10% of the funding from non-Google people who currently donate to Mozilla, if Mozilla ceased to exist.

The only real downside is that they wouldn't have a seat on the WHATWG.

> pay a large CEO salary

Sure, I’ll buy that.

> push policy objectives against free speech

Can people please stop this latent homophobia? Mozilla fired a person who donated money to a deplorable cause. You can try to hide behind free speech, but we all know what this is about.

> Can people please stop this latent homophobia? Mozilla fired a person who donated money to a deplorable cause. You can try to hide behind free speech, but we all know what this is about.

He quit. And I don’t agree with it, but I wouldn’t exactly call his cause deplorable. People with those views can believe they’re being completely ethical. That was also in 2008, a different political climate, and nobody allowed him to learn from it or to restitute.

Of course, I agree that wasn’t their downfall—it was simply misdirected goals and funding.

>He quit. And I don’t agree with it, but I wouldn’t exactly call his cause deplorable.

The purpose of Proposition 8 was to remove the right to marry from gay couples - yes remove - because the courts had already granted them that right.

If I was a gay Mozilla employee and I learned that my CEO wanted to remove rights which the legal system had already granted me, I would be so incredibly demoralized and pissed.

Regardless of personal beliefs, it's a bad thing for a leader of a tech company to be doing if they want to retain talent.

It was a really weird and messy situation, and unpleasant to live through.

I agree that Brendan's Prop 8 donation was bad. But he did it privately, and never (AFAIK) made anti-LGBT comments in public. People who had worked with him for many years were surprised to find he had these views. It was only found out because of political donation public disclosure laws.

Some Mozilla employees publicly criticized Brendan for the Prop 8 donation, but some defended him, because of the aforementioned privateness of it. A number of the defenses came from LGBT employees.

The pile-on at the time was intense. It lasted more than a week. It reached the front page of my local paper. Crazy stuff.

Brendan chose to stand down as CEO and also quit Mozilla. He wasn't fired, and Mozilla leadership asked him to stay.

All this nuance was lost. Lots of left-leaning people concluded that Mozilla had knowingly promoted a proudly anti-LGBT guy to CEO. Lots of right-leaning people concluded that Mozilla had fired their CEO for his political views. Both conclusions were greatly over-simplified. Almost everyone found a reason to hate Mozilla. Bad times!

What even is Mozilla betting on at this point?

It seems like they're just not placing big bets now. Creating an entire new programming language is a big bet, one that I'd argue already looks like it's paid off, but Mozilla has decided their future is as a much leaner company that does fewer experiments. It really is a shame.

IDK they put a lot of resources into the quantum project and it didn't really increase their market share, in fact in Germany it dwindled more quickly. Now it's stabilized again IIRC but which signal does that send to management? The market didn't reward Rust adoption, as successful as the language is outside of the browser.

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