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handsclean

You’re twisting what people ask for. The real versions are not contradictory.

- Mozilla should develop revenue independent of Google.

- Mozilla should respect Firefox’s users.

- Mozilla should focus mainly on Firefox.

- Mozilla should not kill wildly successful side projects, especially when they complement Firefox.

- Mozilla should be well run.

- Mozilla should not let a few extremely rich executives loot the business.

This is a company that has repeatedly refused actual begging to accept payment for things, then killed those things for lack of funding. They defined themselves as the advocate for users on the web, then started selling user data and lied about it. Sure there’s a grey area, but Mozilla is far from it.

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Points 3 and 4 are contradictory, or at least, very difficult to reconcile. The use of "mainly" means you can technically say it's possible to achieve both but I doubt any of Mozilla's critics will ever be happy with their attempts to do so.

Points 1 to 3 also seem very difficult to reconcile. If they need to develop revenue independent of Google, and they need to focus mainly on Firefox, then at some stage they need to monetise other aspects of the browser. How do they do that in a way that is respectful to its users? What is the way for Mozilla to develop a new revenue stream, via Firefox (their main focus), that everyone is happy with?

Points 5 and 6 are too vague, I don't see how they could ever objectively be measured against those principles (other than by looking at the other principles).

All of this is to say that they can't win. They launch new products to try and make money, they are selling out and abandoning their core mission. They try instead to make money from their main product, they are selling out and betraying their users. They try to increase Firefox's mass appeal, they are dumbing it down and letting down their power users. They don't try to increase Firefox's mass appeal, they are failing to stay relevant.

Remember when Mitchell Baker was the problem?

Isn’t she still pulling the strings?

Baker resigned as Mozilla Corporation CEO last year. She resigned from all remaining Mozilla positions this year.

>You’re twisting what people ask for.

I've seen the comments they are talking about, so I don't agree they are twisting anything. Your aspirationally consistent restatement of the case is vague, and the contradictions are specific. Does the existence of the investment fund count as failing to focus on Firefox or succeeding at developing revenue independent of Google? How about the VPN, another potential revenue source?

Is advocating for open web standards (as mentioned in the article as an example of a good thing) a distraction from Firefox (as I've seen commenters here suggest), or respecting users by giving a voice to their users in standards deliberation where their voice would otherwise be excluded?

And how confident are you that your answers are the unique and consistent representation of what users really want, and that I won't be able to quote half a dozen commenters coming to completely different diagnoses of the same questions?

> Mozilla should develop revenue independent of Google

And then you get articles like these complaining about Mozilla re-selling a VPN service.

(I agree with your points.)

> And then you get articles like these complaining about Mozilla re-selling a VPN service.

Not only that, but their competitors are also selling - or at the very least promoting - VPN services.

> repeatedly refused actual begging to accept payment for things

I don't claim to know Mozilla's internal workings, but my wife works for an education-space 501c3, and there are very strict rules about how they can fundraise, how they can spend money that's been donated, etc. I'm sure Mozilla Foundation is large enough to manage this stuff, but things like per-project bank accounts and tax records are still overhead they would have to deal with. I know one of their (my wife's org's) thorniest areas is around what money can be spent on non-"core mission" expenses.

Tried to provide insight into this, but apparently they just wanted to hate on Mozilla. xD

Alternative view-point: the Mozilla Corporation exists, which is not bound by these rules.

(I did not downvote you. The HN users who did so without explanation are lamers.)

There are strict rules for businesses soliciting donations. Mozilla Corporation would have to be more careful than most because of confusion between the non profit Mozilla Foundation and for profit Mozilla Corporation. And many people who claim they would donate to Mozilla Corporation demand per project accounting if they don't demand elimination of all projects they dislike.

> refused actual begging to accept payment for things, then killed those things for lack of funding

Those were which things?

> - Mozilla should develop revenue independent of Google. > - Mozilla should respect Firefox’s users.

These are contradictory, because how, exactly, do you expect them to make money?

They push and advertise a paid VPN service and everyone loses their minds and acts like Mozilla is the evilest company there ever darn was. But they do nothing, and then they "respect users", but they rely on Google for revenue.

> - Mozilla should focus mainly on Firefox. > - Mozilla should not kill wildly successful side projects, especially when they complement Firefox.

These are also contradictory and even contradict the first two. These side projects were not very successful, they were just well-liked. There's a difference.

If they push these side-projects, they're not focusing on Firefox, and they're disrespecting users, AND they're irresponsibly using their revenue. Oops.

And, on the topic of side projects, it seems to me that everyone rallies around them and calls them stupid and unnecessary... until they're killed. Then suddenly, magically, everyone and their Mom was using them. Really? Where was this support before? Are the supporters just unusually silent?

Like Pocket. I heard nothing, NOTHING, but ridicule for Pocket. Until it got discontinued. Then everyone loved it, it was the darling child of Mozilla, it was the best, and everyone used it. Really? Yeah, okay.

> And, on the topic of side projects, it seems to me that everyone rallies around them and calls them stupid and unnecessary... until they're killed. Then suddenly, magically, everyone and their Mom was using them. Really? Where was this support before? Are the supporters just unusually silent?

> Like Pocket. I heard nothing, NOTHING, but ridicule for Pocket. Until it got discontinued. Then everyone loved it, it was the darling child of Mozilla, it was the best, and everyone used it. Really? Yeah, okay.

I agreed with you before this. I saw positive comments about Pocket before Mozilla announced they would shut it down. And HN comments after the announcement were more mixed than your summary.

Few complaints about Pocket were about the reading list service. They were about Mozilla integrating it. Or buying it. Or breaking their promise to open the source. Or lying about privacy. Or trying to hide Pocket paid them. Or the chum box on the new tab page. Almost any discussion of Mozilla or Firefox would prompt 1 or more of these complaints.

Frankly I think people are going to be mad at Mozilla no matter what, and at this point I treat the discourse like a psyop.

Does Mozilla make mistakes? Of course. But when their competitors, Chrome, make the same mistakes but orders of magnitude worse, and nobody says anything, I can't take it seriously.

Does Mozilla disrespect their users? A bit, sometimes, in specific circumstances. Google's entire business model is disrespecting their users. So, if that's your gauge, then you're actually arguing in favor of Firefox. Same thing goes for ads. Same things go for shady payments.

This is not to say that we shouldn't critique Mozilla or Firefox. We should. But, I can't help but feel that the critique is disproportionate. And, it makes me wonder how much of it is critique, and how much of it is suspicious praise towards Google.

It's this sort of expectation problem. Maybe there's a word for it. But, since Google has shown so much bad behavior, they've set that expectation for themselves. And now, they're off the hook. They're playing a different game all together. Mozilla has one set of standards, and Chrome has another.

In this universe, Mozilla is a PhD student and Chrome is a toddler. We don't knock the toddler for shitting their pants because it's what we expect. And, we certainly wouldn't expect the toddler to construct a bibliography!

> - Mozilla should not let a few extremely rich executives loot the business.

The problem is, when searching for high-level executives, you're not competing against other NGOs, you're competing with the wide free market - and salaries there are, frankly, out of control and have been so for decades [1]. Either Mozilla Foundation plays the dirty game just like everyone else does, or they go out of business.

It's the system that's broken at a fundamental level, not individual actors.

[1] https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-pay-in-2023/

One might ask why Mozilla needs to search for a high-level executive in the first place. Most open source projects, even very large ones, function reasonably well without a hired executive - so what makes Mozilla different such that it requires this luxury good?

> Most open source projects, even very large ones, function reasonably well without a hired executive - so what makes Mozilla different such that it requires this luxury good?

For a certain definition of "reasonably well", that is.

And often enough, big money is at play, it's just hidden from the public eye - just look how much money IBM, RedHat, Google, Meta and other very large players spend on salaries for kernel and other OSS developers - and their managers in turn are paid the usual ridiculous executive salaries. That just doesn't show up on any public finance report.

Thank God for Linus.

> or they go out of business.

How does "failing to attract an executive whose primary differentiating characteristic is demanding exorbitant amounts of money" lead to them going out of business?

The name for the effect you are describing is Baumol’s cost disease

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect

Widen the hiring pool then. I'm sure there are plenty of competent people who do care deeply to keep an alternative browser in the market.

Maybe they should ditch the corposuits and let the engineers run the company à la Valve.

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