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Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

They have a billion dollars in assets and are making $600 million/annum if I'm reading their financial statement correctly. That is well into the 'corrupt until proven otherwise' range of wealth. Firefox's development needs orders of magnitude less than that, the browser's market share collapsed and it is notable that Eich [0] of all people went on to develop a browser based on Chrome after thinking about what would be the best base for a company. And Brave is at least trying things - it probably won't work but there is a vision there of reshaping the internet and toppling Google's advertising model. That could be Mozilla. It isn't.

There is a lot of room here to criticise this project. It seems to be off the rails, and it is likely to go further off the rails.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_Eich

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$600 million in revenue (across all subsidiaries), $200 million on software development, $100 million on management, are you upset at Mozilla for running a healthy balance sheet? I'm confused about your complaint. Should Mozilla be packing itself to the gills with software developers for Firefox? It seems like they are trying to broaden their holdings and assets to build wealth for the company and Foundation so that they can become less reliant on Google.

Eich chose Chromium because Webkit is dominant and was in a better position in 2015. I'm not seeing how this is can be made to an indictment of Mozilla corruption.

> ...are you upset at Mozilla for running a healthy balance sheet...

Charitable foundations aren't supposed to be corporations. If we've got an entity like Mozilla running a healthy balance sheet it should be a public corporation that we can all be shareholders in. So yes, I am upset by that too although that wasn't the point I was trying to make.

They've set up a situation where they are going to be corrupted. A billion dollars in assets attracts charlatans and they won't have sufficient defences to stop the money being siphoned off into pet projects and general shenanigans. There will probably turn out to be fraud involved sooner or later.

> ... Eich chose Chromium because Webkit is dominant and was in a better position in 2015...

As far as I care, their purpose is to make a good web browser. This is absolutely an indictment of Mozilla.

>Charitable foundations aren't supposed to be corporations. If we've got an entity like Mozilla running a healthy balance sheet it should be a public corporation that we can all be shareholders in. So yes, I am upset by that too although that wasn't the point I was trying to make.

>They've set up a situation where they are going to be corrupted. A billion dollars in assets attracts charlatans and they won't have sufficient defences to stop the money being siphoned off into pet projects and general shenanigans. There will probably turn out to be fraud involved sooner or later.

It is very confusing what you want - you want Mozilla to be publicly traded so that you can share in its success (and open itself up to being corrupted), yet have an issue with it not being publicly traded?

Do you just want to be upset?

I don't want anything in particular, I walked away from Firefox a while ago so the failures of the Mozilla corporation don't affect me. Most former Firefox users are in the same boat if the stats are accurate. They could wind the whole foundation up and almost nobody would need to notice.

But I don't think you can dispute the basic point here - there is a huge honeypot here to attract people with bad intentions, and they have failed to use it to promote any useful aims given the magnitude of the amount involved.

> Do you just want to be upset?

You've got me, I was bluffing. I'm not really upset. I just think it is bad form, philosophically. The foundation is failing at its goals, they shouldn't be trying to make a profit. If they want to make money they should start a normal company and have shareholders.

> But I don't think you can dispute the basic point here - there is a huge honeypot here to attract people with bad intentions, and they have failed to use it to promote any useful aims given the magnitude of the amount involved.

They may attract people with good intentions as well - or do you have to be starving to be pure of heart?

PS: I don't see how they haven't promoted "any useful aims" - Firefox continues to exist, Rust exists, Let's Encrypt exists, and they are healthy. Those seem like promotions of useful aims.

>The foundation is failing at its goals, they shouldn't be trying to make a profit.

Profit is just what is left over after what needs to be paid for is spent. Would you rather they have no money left at the end of every day? How do you imagine that that works?

> They may attract people with good intentions as well - or do you have to be starving to be pure of heart?

In the open source world? If they needed a billion dollars to get people doing good work the whole thing would have collapsed in the 90s. That is the theme I'm going with - order of magnitude 3 OSS projects for a billion dollars is such a bad project/$ ratio that there is no way the Mozilla Foundation will turn out to be competent and honest. If you go to the wiki page [0] you can see a somewhat limp list of second rate projects that nobody uses. They are lousy stewards. They started with an impressive product.

Firefox with 30% market share and enough money was much more effective at getting useful results than the Mozilla Foundation with a billion dollars. People with good intentions will be trying to copy that old project that worked, not the modern Foundation that is floundering. It is unlikely they are attracting competent well-intentioned people or we'd be seeing better results. Their management is no good.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Mozilla_products

That's exactly what the government wants a charity to do not create reserves. It would make sense to spend that money on increasing market share through advertising.

Do you have any guidance on this?

The UK seems to disagree, for example: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/charities-and-res...

You'll notice that that document has a concept of reserves that are 'too high' - see for example section 4.2 the heading "Where a charity’s reserves appear to be too high ".

I looked up Let's Encrypt on Wikipedia by the way because I didn't remember that being a Mozilla thing - they don't appear to come under the umbrella of the Mozilla Foundation financially and their budget is $3.6 million according to the sidebar, and a literal rounding error if we stick to integer percentage points of Mozilla's revenue.

> Eich chose Chromium because Webkit is dominant and was in a better position in 2015.

Actually they chose Gecko in 2015. Chromium came later on.

https://brave.com/the-road-to-brave-one-dot-zero/

>That is well into the 'corrupt until proven otherwise' range of wealth.

What is your best argument for why others should accept such a standard?

> Firefox's development needs orders of magnitude less than that,

Any link to data justifying such a claim?

Compare it to operating finances of other open source projects, run by foundations, within a similar complexity (possibly lower, but within order of magnitude):

Blender: ~1 million (2020) Libreoffice: ~1.3 million (2021) Apache: ~900k (2017) Debian: ~340k (2019)

One can argue that browsers are exceptionally complex (even linux distros like Gentoo that build everything - including the kernel - make exceptions for firefox due to its complexity) but even considering that, the figures are staggering by comparison.

To be absolutely clear on this we have a situation where:

- most Mozilla advocates & supporters are so because of Firefox

- most of Mozilla's income comes from Firefox

- most of Mozilla's income does not go towards Firefox development

- Mozilla continue to provide financial supporters with no means to donate directly to the Firefox project

- Mozilla's income is 2 orders of magnitude higher than any comparable charitable foundation

Add to that the decline in Firefox's userbase & the stewardship of the project becomes really difficult to justify/defend

Coming back to the point being discussed - Where exactly does wastage occur inside Firefox's development team? Specifics and data are very persuasive!

Firstly noone has mentioned anything about wastage within the Firefox project - this thread is about Mozilla as a whole, not just Firefox. Not sure what point you're "coming back to" specifically.

Secondly, I don't work for Mozilla, so unless you know of some source more granular than their very high-level annual reports, the specific & data you're talking about would need to be sourced internally. Mozilla don't publish any breakdowns on a per-project basis: for all I know the Firefox team may well be operating at peak financial efficiency.

If we're to speculate, the closest thing Mozilla publish to a per-project breakdown is under activities in their expense report where they have a "software development" category costing ~250 million (not Firefox software development, all general software development). That's still very high compared to other similar open source projects, but it's just over a third of the gp's quoted income figure. So you've got 2/3rds of that figure to look at before you even get near the idea of Firefox dev wastage.

>Firstly noone has mentioned anything about wastage within the Firefox project - this thread is about Mozilla as a whole, not just Firefox. Not sure what point you're "coming back to" specifically.

I was responding to this line - "> Firefox's development needs orders of magnitude less than that,". It's in my earlier comment. Its fine to criticize, but at some point you have to "provide the goods", so to speak.

If the line were "Firefox's development needs orders of magnitude less than it's current budget" your reply would make sense, but it didn't. It's merely stating Firefox's development needs orders of magnitude less than Mozilla's budget (which is explicitly not equivalent to Firefox's budget - that budget isn't public knowledge)

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