Comment by shiroiushi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by shiroiushi | Hacker News Reader

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>Really sad to see Firefox’s direction but also not sure how they should be funded to avoid these things.

I'm not sure there is an alternative. It's not just Firefox: other big projects like this already have foundations and lots of money in funding, but then spend the money on things not at all related to the core mission.

From what I've read, Mozilla won't even take your money to develop Firefox. They'll instead use it for the Mozilla foundation which funds a bunch of social causes.

Wikipedia has a huge endowment, so they really don't need money to keep the lights on, but if you donate, it'll similarly be used for funding social causes through the Wikimedia Foundation.

There's also a Linux Foundation for funding Linux-related stuff, but here again a lot of it is spent on social causes, not directly on development-related costs.

You'd think that if funding were really that tight, social causes would be cut and just keeping the servers running and essential personnel employed would be the highest priority, with SW maintenance and development a close 2nd. So, apparently, money must not be that tight. Or, if it is, it's being woefully mismanaged. But I think there's more to it: it seems like when times are too good (something gets popular and gets funding), then the people in charge expand the scope of the project to consume all the funding, adding on various pet projects (like those social causes), instead of saving the money in case of a funding downturn later. Wikipedia probably did it best by setting up an endowment so that everything else is just gravy, but even here they're constantly asking for more money on the site and acting like they really need it when they don't.

This is the case with most software "foundation".

As much as I disagree with Ayn Rand on a lot of things, she did make an important observation.

Parasites will be attracted to high value things in order to extract value, not to add to it. They climb the hierarchy of the organisation and then use it for their own benefit.

It is not only developers who do resume building oriented work. These people start social causes so that they can claim that they spearheaded this or that campaign. In order to gain prestige.

Engineers who only care about the product become the bottom of the hierarchy and the organisation becomes a reflection of the needs and wants of these parasites.

Yes, and it's not just non-profit foundations, or even social causes. I've seen it in big corporations too, where some "parasite" as you call them ascends the ranks and "spearheads" some new "initiative", that turns out to have really dubious value and is frequently just reinventing the wheel. For example, at a big tech company, instead of just using some ready-made off-the-shelf solution or using an established standard, pouring a ton of money into some new home-grown thing that does the same thing, perhaps with 5% better performance, but in the end isn't really worth it and cost a ton of money. But the guy who "spearheaded" it gets a big bonus and moves on to even higher roles in the company and leaving the fallout for someone else to deal with.

It’s depressing that anything moderately successful may be doomed to being taken over this way, by people looking to abuse the institution for their own political activism. I wasn’t aware that Wikipedia also had the same issue. Not using donations for the core thing donors think they’re supporting is so deceptive.

I think it's not just political activism, I think it's empire-building. Management people build their resumes by doing things, like starting big new projects or doing acquisitions, not by just keeping things lean and running properly. So it could be some social cause, or it could be some new technical project of highly dubious value. Does anyone use "Pocket" in Firefox, for instance?

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