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Comment by pbhjpbhj | Hacker News Reader

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Uh yeah .. Michelle Baker, who is one of the founders of Mozilla, the writer of the MPL and who played a role (for a time as the volunteer general manager of the mozilla org, then later again as an employee) in everything from Mozillas rise to - unfortunately - now its decline by being part of the org had "insinuated" herself into Mozilla. You obviously lack the knowledge about Baker and Mozilla to have any business making statements on this topic.

(If you wanna tell me that Michelle Baker recognized before mozilla.org even existed that it will have a meteoric rise, that the person who would have been CEO instead of her took himself out of the race and that that would allow her to make millions as CEO of Mozilla, all I can say is: I doubt that she has a crystal ball that good.)

A lawyer working for a large organization wrote a license that nobody needed or wanted. Amazing.

See [1]. There very clearly are many people who wish to use the MPL.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Public_License#Notable...

She is literally a co-founder of the project, foundation and corporation, was the original CEO of the corporation (before stepping down in 2008 before coming back in 2019 as CEO) and has been executive chairwoman of the board for both the foundation and corporation for as long as Mozilla has existed, so you can call her a bad CEO, but diminishing her as “a lawyer working for a large organization” is pretty dismissive for a person who was one of the first lawyers for what became a large corporation (she joined Netscape in 1994 IIRC), co-founded the open source project, led that open source project at AOL, continued to run the open source project after AOL laid her off, and is the person who is probably more than any other figure, directly responsible for the charitable organization even existing to begin with.

I’m not going to argue that Baker was a good CEO, because I honestly don’t know. And I won’t say that Firefox’s languishing isn’t in some ways a reflection of her leadership because she’s been executive chairwoman of the foundation (which the corporation reports to) basically since its inception, but she’s also for better or worse, synonymous with Mozilla. You don’t have Mozilla in any form without her and she’s been there from the beginning.

You don’t have to like her, but this attempt at diminishing her role as a foundational leader of Mozilla is off base and weird.

Not the best look to be telling other people that they aren't positioned to make comments on the topic when you repeatedly get their name wrong.

The idea that Mitchell Baker "insinuated herself" into Mozilla is ridiculous. She was an early Netscape employee, one of the original creators of the Mozilla project, and a founder of the Mozilla Foundation.

> Are you sure that what you're calling "shallow attacks" aren't just statements of truth that show someone to be an awful person?

I believe that is something that can only be said by Baker, or people who know her sufficiently well. I assume most of the commentors here who are criticising Baker do not fall in either of those categories.

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