Comment by quesera | Hacker News Reader

Comment by quesera | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

You're missing a critical part.

Eich's donation was well-known. The lists are public. Lots of Mozilla folks were aware and unimpressed, but they tolerated it because Eich (CTO) was a respected member of the corp with a long history of technical excellence. As well as no workplace hostility etc.

Then Eich was to be promoted to CEO, which is a nontechnical job that involves being the public face of the corporation and speaking on behalf of all employees.

A substantial portion of Mozilla employees felt that this new expanded role would not be appropriate for Eich or anyone who had expressed hostility to a marginalized group, that Eich did not represent the values of Mozilla, and that they did not want to promote him or to be led by him.

So they created an internal stir which gathered a lot of internal support, bled into public forums, and led Eich to back out of the CEO role. He probably could have gone back to CTO, but he decided to resign from the organization instead.

Andreas Gal was already CTO after I got the CEO appointment. No "gone back to CTO" and stomp on Andreas in that role. I had been SVP Engineering too, but that was not in the new org chart I set up as CEO. As I've written elsewhere, I left to help Mozilla, not hurt it.

What happened after I left is not in any way on me. I'm not a slave, serf, indentured servant, or lifelong mandatory employee-subject of Mozilla, and I thank God every day for this.

Resigning may have been the only honorable option under those circumstances, to be fair. But I don't think the Org would have spit you out at the CTO or SVP level, even after the controversy.

The boneheaded move was elevating you in the first place. Not that you didn't deserve it or were not capable! Just that it was doomed to create extreme conflict with a large portion of the Mozilla community, which has always had a much broader mission than "simple" excellence.

There's a good argument that this breadth often manifests as a lack of focus, and that anything other than excellence should be secondary at best. But that's not how Mozilla was built or staffed or marketed.

And here we are.

I wish it was otherwise -- and of course I agree that it is absolutely not on you -- but I do sometimes wonder what Mozilla would be like today if not for that Prop 8 donation.

I'm a co-founder (for real, from the start; not someone who did critical legal work creating the MPL and then joined in 1999) of mozilla dot org. We didn't found it or get to Firefox 1.0 by lack of focus or mediocrity.

The breadth or lack of focus you describe is a bug, not a feature.

OK, I apologize for being sloppy there. Strike the "always" from my "broader mission" sentence.

But Mozilla became something else, and staffed itself accordingly, and marketed itself accordingly. The culture evolved to be broad and inclusive.

Some people would argue (as I think you have) that broad inclusivity is, at best, a distraction from technical excellence.

Others would say that inclusivity / diversity is a strength, and Mozilla is an experiment in demonstrating that.

I don't think we can draw any conclusions on that argument from the Mozilla example either way, honestly.

And of course I don't know how you viewed the Org when you left -- did it need a recalibration toward excellence with the accepted risk of alienating 30% of the staff and volunteers? Or did it just need better leadership to get more focused results out of the existing team?

I don't know, and I'm sure you won't want to say! But clearly what has happened in the last ten years has been unproductive.

I'm sure you'd have done a better job at Mozilla than the MOFO BOD has. And I suspect you'd have been able to do a much better job with Mozilla's trust fund disbursement resources, while avoiding the (frankly, obvious) mistakes made at Brave.

No disrespect intended. Seeking revenue is hard, and "obvious" from the outside doesn't map precisely to "not even worth a try" on the inside. I also wonder if the outside view was wrong, and that if you had pushed through the initial negativity, whether people would have acclimated to the novel revenue models, and you could pour more resources into the technology. People put up with worse in other browsers.

Anyway -- I appreciate your conversation here and all of your years at Mozilla. I hope something sustainable and good can come from Brave. I remain a Firefox user, pending further developments. :)

It's hard to know what would have happened had I stayed. Mozilla had a number of late layoffs, some cut good people, none helped. Cutting earlier could have helped more.

The "NGO" die was cast in 2003 when we spun out of AOL as a 501c3. I didn't get a say in that decision. It went poorly after the big Google default search revenue share turned on and the IRS reneged on their promise that we could take the $$$ tax-free as "sponsorship income".

This led to a battle where we ended up paying some back taxes, but contrary to the San Jose IRS agent's position, we did not have to go "be like Opera" and drop the 501c3. We rather used the typical (hospitals, universities, sports teams do it) non-profit parent of taxable for-profit subsidiary structure, with a trademark license fee kicked up to the parent.

The IRS rules governing nonprofits still required the Mozilla Foundation to beg big to go big: the parent had to go find big grants from Soros, Ford, Knight, MacArthur, and give smaller grants to many. This put it in the lefties-only-no-righty-Irish-need-apply revolving-door personnel sector of NGOs and nonprofits (too many glowies there for me, too). Which meant I had a hostile MoFo over my head the minute I got CEO appointment from the MoCo board.

I think looking back that the nonprofit spinout from AOL was a mistake. It didn't focus on either technical excellence or pure do-gooding. It was an uneasy mix of both, neither fish nor fowl.

Of course I can't comment on anything about my exit, for reasons that only the most loopy HN h8ers still can't figure out.

Thanks for the really interesting background!

If I may impose further: Can you opine on (or link to something intelligent which you agree with) the health of the browser engine ecosystem?

Obviously you've chosen Chromium/Blink, which I assume was for practical reasons in a fledgling startup. I.e. the relative simplicity of embedding vs Gecko, the at-the-time performance superiority, confidence in upstream maintenance, etc.

I was surprised initially, because obviously you knew Gecko better than anyone. You also know the arguments against a browser engine monoculture.

I'm coming around to the idea that (Blink has won, and) that's not so bad. Because there are so many browsers embedding Blink now (and V8, but no one complains about that!) ... some of which have serious development teams behind them. I remain concerned about a single steward of web standards, but I think that Blink is really good and I hope that there are enough other browsers that rely on it, so if Google were to push Blink in a direction that didn't match the broader goals of the web, that the individual browser teams could fork and maintain it cooperatively.

Is this a pipe dream? Am I bargaining with the reaper?

I've been a Firefox user since before Firefox was Firefox, and Mozilla and Netscape before that. I think I'm abandoning my opinion on the importance of browser engine diversity. Gecko-Quantum has some advantages still, but they're becoming less important -- and more relevantly, they might not matter if Firefox grows increasingly obscure.

(FWIW, every time I try Brave, I bounce off because of the way sidebar/vertical tabs are handled. I need layout density and memory-efficiency. It's been a while though, so I will try again.)

Blink is a fork (April 2013) of WebKit, and Apple keeps Google from monopolizing the engine market.

"If there's no solution, there's no problem." - James Burnham, IIRC (sounds cruel but it's a brutally pragmatic, no-moralizing, epigram about where to focus strategic attention)

https://cacm.acm.org/opinion/future-internet-architecture-cl...

New architectures will come. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39534595

What do you mean by glowies? In this context.

I mean both active NOCs and also those who (they cop to it later) "worked for the CIA" at some point.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com