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Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

Mozilla's board are basically Google yes-people.

I'm convinced Mozilla is purposefully engineered to be rudderless: C-suite draw down huge salaries, approve dumb, mission-orthgonal objectives, in order to keep Mozilla itself impotent in ever threatening Google.

Mozilla is Google's antitrust litigation sponge. But it's also kept dumb and obedient. Google would never want Mozilla to actually be a threat.

If Mozilla had ever wanted a healthy side business, it wasn't in Pocket, XR/VR, or AI. It would have been in building a DevEx platform around MDN and Rust. It would have synergized with their core web mission. Those people have since been let go.

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> If Mozilla had ever wanted a healthy side business, it wasn't in Pocket, XR/VR, or AI. It would have been in building a DevEx platform around MDN and Rust[…] Those people have since been let go.

The first sentence isn't wrong, but the last sentence is confused in the same way that people who assume that Wikimedia employees have been largely responsible for the content on Wikipedia are confused about how stuff actually makes it into Wikipedia. In reality, WMF's biggest contribution is providing infrastructure costs and paying engineers to develop the Mediawiki platform that Wikipedia uses.

Likewise, a bunch of the people who built up MDN weren't and never could be "let go", because they were never employed by Mozilla to work on MDN to begin with.

(There's another problem, too, which is that addition to selling short a lot of people who are responsible for making MDN as useful as it is but never got paid for it, it presupposes that those who were being paid to work on MDN shouldn't have been let go.)

So the idea is that some group has been perpetuating a decade or so's worth of ongoing conspiracy to ensure that Mozilla continues to exist but makes decisions that "keep Mozilla itself impotent"?

That seems to fail occam's razor pretty hard, given the competing hypotheses for each of their decisions include "Mozilla staff think they're doing a smart thing but they're wrong" and "Mozilla staff are doing a smart thing, it's just not what you would have done".

You're not wrong.

And where philosophical razors are concerned, the most apt characterization of the source of Mozilla's decay is the one that Hanlon gave us.

Can you say more about the teams let go who worked on MDN and Rust? Wondering if I can read anything on it to stay up to speed.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24143819

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