Mozilla Foundation lays off 30% staff, drops advocacy division | Hacker News Reader

Mozilla Foundation lays off 30% staff, drops advocacy division

techcrunch.com

189 pointsatestu67 comments

This is largely in anticipation of the devastating drop in revenue if Google can no longer pay them to be the default search engine. That's where they get 86% of their revenue [0].

[0] https://fortune.com/2024/08/05/mozilla-firefox-biggest-poten...

I wonder if Firefox will even survive this. Maybe the main FOSS browser will be a Chromium fork so it's cheaper to maintain?

How about it becomes a squeaky clean non-profit, gets classified as a digital public good and gets funded by the widest collection of public sector / ngo's.

We are talking about the literal window to the digital world, with potentially billions of users. Its a dysfunctional world that cant sort out funding for such a super-critical software piece and has let adtech have this charade and fig leaf of "browser competition" going on for so long.

A chromium based solution would double down on the monoculture. If anything now is the time to envision what a users-first browser should be like, not what adtech wants it to be. From wasm to fediverse and (dare I say) AI, its a good time to snap out of the stagnation.

Please, please please make it happen.

Checks welcome

Are they? AFAIK there is still no way to fund Firefox the browser.

Problem is that they've told for too long that they didn't want money or people who didn't align with one specific USA political party so I can understand if people don't come rushing in to try and contribute.

It's unfortunate since Firefox is key to an open internet but at some point, they lost their true way and now it's going to take a lot of effort to regain it.

> It's unfortunate since Firefox is key to an open internet

Was. A long time ago. Now it is only an extension of Google ("safe" browsing) used by enthousiasts (who do not want to hear that Mozilla is now an advertising company).

> ...didn't want money or people who didn't align with one specific USA political party...

Was it ever about party? I thought it was more about executives who donated to bigoted causes.

And even then, wasn't it just one guy (who's long gone)?

Brendan Eich is a fundamental guy, maybe read his contribution to the space and, I love how you support injustice by trying to downplay the targets of said injustice.

Yes. 100% purely about party since that party calls their opponents bigots no matter what. The hypocritical response and blame game after the US elections shows that calling others bigot is projecting more than anything else.

> Maybe the main FOSS browser will be a Chromium fork so it's cheaper to maintain?

Likely not. If the fork would need to fight against any privacy-threatning actions, it will start to be quite different. It can be cheaper to maintain your own browser than massive, very diversed fork. And Google would get all power over web standards. You would need to fight them too if there is something controversial, and the code is getting different, again.

> It can be cheaper to maintain your own browser than massive, very diversed fork.

That's an extraordinary claim.

We have a base assumption that they would continue with the Firefox as own browser as an alternative. The most work has been already done. The assumption is that they would want to keep going with more privacy-friendly alternative that also try to avoid web standards that would be harmful for the end-user (tracking, specific kind of remote attestation, e.g.).

If they would fork Chromium, they likely want to redo the GUI. This is the easy part and that does not likely need upstream updates. That's what most forks do, and that is why they are maintainable.

However, if you start changing core, extension interface e.g., and if these browsers starts go different ways due to conflicts of interests, then the challenges and extra work start appearing.

Especially because of the security updates. Not all of them are CVEs, you need to look every possible bug fix if that introduced an additional issue if you used that part of the code differently. That must happen almost immediately as it is merged/notified in the upstream, or you might give too much time for someone to exploit it. The more different your fork is, the more challenging it is to get any update from the upstream. What if the upstream makes breaking internal API changes and you must adapt it, before you can merge new things. What if new CVEs are discovered after this API change that you are already lacking, and the fixed code goes for the code that has this API change? And so on.. and you can't stop merging upstream because reported bugs are much easier to exploit than discovering new ones from the new code.

The above is all extra work. You still want to test your own code. Even if you had more bugs in your own browser code, you have better control them and the process is always faster.

I can't really estimate the difficulty, but are you sure about that? There's dozens of Chromium forks, would it be that hard to maintain one with a fraction of the development capacity that goes into developing an entire browser with its own rendering engine etc?

At that point Web developers can update their CVs as ChromeOS developer.

There are multiple FOSS Chromium forks already, e.g. Brave.

Yes, what I meant is that if Firefox development starts lagging too much to be a real competitor to Chrome one of those forks, or a new one will start becoming the main FOSS competitor and the default in Linux distros.

> Maybe the main FOSS browser will be a Chromium fork so it's cheaper to maintain?

Firefox is more or less a Chrome fork. /s

Wouldn't that affect their for-profit company arm, not the non-profit Mozilla Foundation?

Or does the for-profit arm fund the non-profit?

>Revenue consists of the following: x Royalties - Mozilla provides the Firefox web browser, which is a free and open- source web browser initially developed by Mozilla Foundation and the Corporation. Mozilla incorporates search engines of its customers as a default status or an optional status available in the Firefox web browser. Mozilla generally receives royalties at a certain percentage of revenues earned by its customers through their search engines incorporated in the Firefox web browser.

[0] https://stateof.mozilla.org/

Based on the audit numbers I a bit puzzled about the reported amount of staff. Maybe I am reading it completely wrong

The foundation is not funded from the google money, you're thinking of the corporation.

Doesn't the corporation fund the foundation as well though?

Yes, the Mozilla Corporation paid US$19.1 million in trademark royalties to the Mozilla Foundation in 2022, per their most recent annual report. Also, the Corporation is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Foundation.

And a lot of people don't realize that "wholly owned" is just a legal construction, it does not mean that they have any say over what the corporation does, how the corporation does that, or that they have any kind of access to any money in the corporation's accounts. The foundation owns the corporation, part of that ownership is that they can't run it. If they did, they'd no longer be a separate non-profit.

But it does mean that the Corporation's dividends all go to the Foundation, its sole shareholder. It has paid such dividends in the past, though as far as I can tell, dividends have been replaced by royalty payments in more recent years.

I think that's page 61, 2.1 in this PDF. https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2022/mozilla-fdn-990...

Do funds go from the Corporation to the Foundation exclusively, or is it ever bidirectional? Common knowledge is "If you donate to the Foundation, the Corporation will never see a penny of it for browser development."

> ruled that the tech giant has illegally maintained a monopoly through the billions of dollars in annual payments it makes to partners

Wow. Are they serious? that’s illegal?

Cutting the source off mid-sentence is disingenuous.

Fine, I thought the context was obviously Google's search engine monopoly.

> ruled that the tech giant has illegally maintained a monopoly through the billions of dollars in annual payments it makes to partners to secure the default search engine position on popular web browsers and mobile phones

It's still a stretch by the judge, and this article is a good hint that the ruling may be weak: https://itif.org/publications/2024/08/23/six-weak-spots-judg...

The same argument that they used against Microsoft 20 years ago is a "stretch?"

Google search is about to be made irrelevant by AI, and yes I believe it is a stretch to compare Google's search "monopoly" to Microsoft's browser monopoly of yore.

Not surprising as the CEO and board prevented the should=be-CEO from having the position because that person was recovering from cancer treatment.

He should go start a competitor. I have a company name suggestion for him, maybe he can call it "Courage", it's a very cool hipster name for a browser startup.

All they had to do was to focus on doing the best browser, and email client.

Unfortunately in the world of OSS, neither of those are enough to pay the bills unless you have a lucrative partnership (i.e. Google paying to be the default search engine in Firefox, which is now no longer the case).

Fully agree, that is why I usually put money on the software I care about, it isn't about using stuff from others freely while expecting to be paid myself.

However, there is the whole issue about the money that they were spending on CEO salary, the related bonus, and all the activities about who knows what, instead of Firefox and Thunderbird.

I would gladly pay $2-$5 a month without thinking for ff/tb if they committed to open accounting with user voting and a ruling council headed by devs and technical thought leaders. I think at least 1-10 million other people would too!

The empowered userbase would then direct Mozilla to make other solutions for their most pressing needs (maybe search or email or anti tracking) instead of the lame ideas they have wasted resources on

That is more or less how Thunderbird works. Donations fund a development. Members of the community elect the Thunderbird Council. It would take a huge rework of MoCo (Firefox, Sync, VPN, etc) to function in that way.

Does advocacy pay better?

Mozilla management had friends that needed the money so they created those jobs, in my mind they should have donated it to EFF instead.

Advocacy doesn't pay at all, it's a 100% money pit.

(You might wonder why they spent so much money on it. A lot of people wondered that, and apparently Mozilla itself has now wondered about it too.)

They aren't a business trying to maximize profit. The idea of being a non-profit is to invest in things that are important but not profitable. Should all non-profits drop everything that's ... not profitable?

> A lot of people wondered that

It seems pretty obvious why they would do it, and it has been widely admired. I hadn't heard comments like yours until the pile-on in on this page.

If Mozilla cares about their pocketbook, they could reevaluate how much they are spending on their CEO and AI companies. The victims of their monetary incompetence are always their own employees. I'd say Mozilla is just another company now, but even the average for-profit will lower the CEO salary if the company underperforms.

We will see if this statement is valid or not depending on how Ladybird works out.

I don't know why they chase other products when they could take both of those and have some sort of premium additions to charge for. I pay for my mail clients, my calendar clients, and would pay for a browser with extra features / extensions.

Focus on the things people are using and not on becoming a VPN provider.

That said I like, and use, Firefox for all of my work related tasks. And I have nothing against them having "too many employees". A non-profit providing jobs is not a bad thing and feels like the best of both worlds.

Why would that define their mission? It never has; they've always been a leading adovcate for freedom, privacy, and openness on the Internet.

Then don't complain when Firefox goes away, it hardly matters anyway.

That comment seems so loaded, it's hard for me to make sense of it. Maybe that's the idea? Why attack me, Mozilla, and Firefox? Is it just stylistic?

Lots of people confusing the Mozilla Foundation, the non-profit that "steers" the Mozilla mission, with the Mozilla Corporation, which is the for-profit that makes Firefox. They're two different organizations: the Foundation has literally nothing to do with Firefox.

The Foundation is a tiny org that until yesterday I'd have described as "working on living the Mozilla manifesto through advocacy and programs". How it's going to stay relevant without its advocacy staff is a complete mystery to me.

The Foundation has lots to do with Firefox; it literally owns the corporation that develops it.

That said, agreed, I'm not sure what's left for the foundation to do without advocacy staff.

Exactly, I would even say the foundation has not only lots, but everything to do with Firefox. I don't understand how there are so many "ackshually" guys in this thread. It is all the same thing, Mozilla, and the separation is and has always been only a technicality, nothing more. It is exactly the same as saying The Walt Disney Company has nothing to do with Disney+.

Maybe looks at someone's bio?

I worked there for a decade, so I'm pretty confident when I say "no, it has literally nothing to do with Firefox". They are two completely different orgs with different execs, different boards, working on completely different things. The Foundation has no say over what happens on the corp side.

I wouldn't call getting the profits from the corporation (whether through dividends or "royalties"), and having the power to choose the board of directors as "nothing". And the stated purpose of the corporation is to further the "public benefit" of the foundation.

Sure they are separate organizations, but they are at least a little related.

They don't, though. The only money they get from corp is the brand license fee, which in good "we have a corp and non-profit" tradition is fluid but can't exceed a specific amount, and they only "have the power to choose the board" on paper. In reality, the only thing that ties the two orgs together are Surman and Baker.

The corp is a subsidiary. It is irrelevant if and how long you worked there for, the parent company has the financial and legal control over all the subsidiaries. The foundation literally owns the corporation, no need for quotation marks. If they have not or do not exercise that control or interfere in the day-to-day life today, that does not mean they will not do it tomorrow or whenever it becomes necessary. When shit hits the fan all that matters is what's on the paper.

I can also say, that my hypothetical landlord has nothing to do with the place I have lived in for 10 years. So therefore they do not "own" it.

First of all, I'm not that young and naive to appeal to authority any more after having met too many so-called experts why have only succeeded by the "fake it til you make it" technique. So checking someones bio is unnecessary.

"The Mozilla Foundation will ultimately control the activities of the Mozilla Corporation and will retain its 100 percent ownership of the new subsidiary. Any profits made by the Mozilla Corporation will be invested back into the Mozilla project. There will be no shareholders, no stock options will be issued and no dividends will be paid. The Mozilla Corporation will not be floating on the stock market and it will be impossible for any company to take over or buy a stake in the subsidiary. The Mozilla Foundation will continue to own the Mozilla trademarks and other intellectual property and will license them to the Mozilla Corporation. The Foundation will also continue to govern the source code repository and control who is allowed to check in."

https://web.archive.org/web/20060907025204/http://www.mozill...

If this is wrong, please remove it from Wikipedia too, or add an explanation why this plan failed.

Also, if this is wrong, we cannot trust what anyone from Mozilla has to say, including you since they can say one thing and do another.

Also, if this is wrong, why are there consolidated financial statements of "MOZILLA FOUNDATION AND SUBSIDIARIES (Mozilla)" https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2021/mozilla-fdn-202... According to the report, Mozilla foundation (and its subsidiaries) had a revenue of $600M in 2021. If the foundation has no control over the corporation, how can it include the revenue of the corp in its financial report? Is something fraudulent going on in Mozilla?

Having worked for the Foundation for a decade: it has nothing to do with Firefox, and it does not "own" the corporation in any practical sense of the word. It has no say over what happens on the corporate side.

How sad. Who will pickup the baton for the advocacy that Mozilla is abandoning, Internet Archive may have to forfeit ...

Why are all these projects having problems at the same time, as the economy booms?

> “Navigating this topsy-turvy, distracting time requires laser focus — and sometimes saying goodbye to the excellent work that has gotten us this far because it won’t get us to the next peak,” wrote Syed

What is topsy-turvy for Mozilla?

I'd say the electronic frontier foundation is the best candidate. They have been exclusively doing advocacy since forever

They opened up Mozilla VPN to Australians overnight. 50% off opening special so only AUD7.50 per month on the annual plan...

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