Comment by WoodenChair | Hacker News Reader

Comment by WoodenChair | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

This sounds like corporate speak covering up for a forced resignation. The red herring of the interim CEO doing anything serious on privacy is not real since:

> Chambers says she won’t be seeking a permanent CEO role because she plans to move back to Australia later this year for family reasons.

Here's my optimistic educated guess: The board finally caught on to the fact that Mitchell is an overpaid failed CEO for a "company" (e.g. weird for-profit entity that runs a "non-profit") propped up by its largest competitor to avoid anti-trust accusations. Its only real product has dwindling, barely mattering, marketshare (<5%)^. Chambers, being from the board and not the executive structure, is obviously a caretaker "for cover" while the new CEO search goes on.

^If you're curious about an expansion on this, my opinions on it based on their financial statements are in our podcast episode "How Does Mozilla Make Money?" from a year ago: https://pnc.st/s/kopec-explains-software/bdecab32/how-does-m...

Finally a comment that mentions the obvious.

As an outside observer, I don't know the company culture directly, but I have to assume Baker is not the type of person to just leave that role. If she wanted to leave, she could stay until a permanent CEO has been found.

It must have become obvious by now, even to the board, that Mozilla has been a sinking ship under the destructive influence of Baker.

Growing dissatisfaction within the employee base could play a role. But judging from the comfortable bubble they live in due to google money coming in regardless of performance, it seems this is more about the board seeing the stagnation that endangers their own future income as well.

I would not be surprised if, internally, the resignation was planned together with Baker already 2-3 years ago, and her pay rise was part of the internal deal to compensate her.

I helped create Librewolf, which originally was still called Librefox. Mozilla complained about the "fox" part of the name. While that behavior is probably understandable, it shows the type of company Mozilla has become, where a small irrelevant open-source skin of Firefox is seen as a threat. Mozilla, unfortunately, has long been a wolf in sheeps clothing, working together with Google behind the scenes to harm the open non-commercial internet.

> Mozilla, unfortunately, has long been a wolf in sheeps clothing, working together with Google behind the scenes to harm the open non-commercial internet.

That's a pretty strong claim, probably one that requires providing further proof of that happening, than just pointing to "comfortable bubble due to google money" and Mozilla defending their trademark.

It's self-evident. I'm not talking about some shady conspiracy. Google has been keeping Firefox alive. Thus the incentives for Mozilla have been aligned with Google, which has an interest to plaster everything with ads, thus commercialize everything. Mozilla had to hide this obvious incentive and pretend it was on the side of the user, thus it became a wolf in sheeps clothing.

Mozilla started to implement some nice privacy-preserving features, all the while knowing that including a google search with search suggestions as you type means that literally everything people type into the address bar gets send to google, making privacy impossible.

The almost endless money flow from google, independent from performance, led to a strange company culture where nothing mattered anymore except having a good time with co-workers. Without the correct (monetary) incentives, there is no pressure to innovate.

> strange company culture where nothing mattered anymore except having a good time with co-workers.

You can see how Ex-Mozilla people try to cover up their CEO's bad leadership in these comment threads alone. Apparently the CEO being nice to them and championing their pet social causes is enough to earn their loyalty.

> Mozilla started to implement some nice privacy-preserving features,

They try their best all the time not to do what actually improves users privacy and hurts Google the most, blocking admob.

They do everything but that, while also using Google analytics for most of their products.

I'd wager forced too.

She didn't blog about this in https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/. Given that the last 3 blogposts are about company changes, the lack of a post about this event smells of resentment.

or NDAs and gag clauses on the golden parachutes - which surely exists.

Well said.

> (e.g. weird for-profit entity that runs a "non-profit") propped up by its largest competitor to avoid anti-trust accusations.

Not totally unheard of. Sounds a bit like OpenAI for the most part.

> Its only real product has dwindling, barely mattering, marketshare (<5%)^

While competing with browsers bundled with operating systems. A bit of nuance.

Because OpenAI has such a great track record of never having anything nutty happen as a direct result of a bizarre governance structure.

> While competing with browsers bundled with operating systems. A bit of nuance.

Chrome too competes with browsers bundled with operating systems (Edge, Safari). It seems to be doing okay, even on desktop.

Chrome comes bundled with Android.

Of course but my point is that it is also successful on desktop where it competes with bundled browsers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com