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Comment by hutzlibu | Hacker News Reader

"Mozilla is competing for the same talent as Google, Microsoft, and Apple."

Not exactly the same. Many are willing to accept less pay, to work on meaningful open source and not for advertisement.

From another point of view, our society has major market inefficiencies around resource allocation that we need to figure out. As a society, we absolutely need a free and open web (modern telecommunications). We also need other things like agriculture, energy, medical tech, sanitation, transportation, and education. Yet we pay people the most to work on ad tech. This is a major, generational problem.

Edit: I think we may be starting to figure this out. Google is slowly starting to charge for more services. Even Facebook is looking to introduce paid products (Quest). People are also learning from Elon Musk how much wealth can be generated by working on major human problems like transport, energy, and space access.

Maybe 10-20% less, but it’s not enough to meaningfully make a difference.

20% less would be already quite meaningful. Add to that volunteers who work completely for free, and this could give an edge and I would argue, that this is mainly what keeps firefox alive. Despite their management increasingly acting like a ordinary company.

"In 2018 she received a total of $2,458,350 in compensation from Mozilla, which represents a 400% payrise since 2008.[14] On the same period, Firefox marketshare was down 85%. When asked about her salary she stated "I learned that my pay was about an 80% discount to market. Meaning that competitive roles elsewhere were paying about 5 times as much. That's too big a discount to ask people and their families to commit to." "

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker#Mozilla_Foundat...

> That's too big a discount to ask people and their families to commit to.

And she said that while laying off 250 people, imposing a 100% discount on them and their families.

To work on an open source browser instead of apps yes, but how many people would take a significant pay cut to work on Firefox instead of Chrome?

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