Hacker News Reader

Comment by mixmastamyk | Hacker News Reader

The job was always very easy, fire all of the pure managers and sock the google money into an endowment before it runs out. Then focus on privacy as you mentioned.

They’ve taken in several billion dollars by now. Let that sink in. They're supposedly a non-profit, so this plan is the well-trodden playbook.

But of course no Manager instance could imagine such a thing. Cue Upton Sinclair quote.

View on HN

Indeed - Google successfully undermined Mozilla here. It was a huge mistake to get addicted to the Google money; now it is too late to change it.

Technically the foundation could still change the direction. But they won't because leadership is essentially shared between the corp and foundation.

>sock the google money into an endowment before it runs out.

They did that! Why are people proposing that like it's a new idea?

If they were on a sustainable trajectory they wouldn't be selling their soul for advertising money and other ill-advised revenue projects that contradict their stated mission.

They could be on a sustainable trajectory and still sell their soul purely out of greed. I'm not suggesting that Mozilla is actually doing that, I just wanted to point out the possibility.

Okay, but now you're changing the subject. The claim was that they don't have an endowment or that they're not investing it. But they are.

The truth is the vast majority of organizations with an endowment are not able to rely on it in perpetuity, I think there's a small subset of organizations that basically amounts to a bunch of elite universities. So it's not the intended or functional or actual purpose of any endowment to be permanent firewall against any conceivable financial hazard for all eternity. Having at one point worked for a non-profit myself that had an endowment, generally, what you do is you calculate how long an organization's operations could be funded by that endowment, and is one of a portfolio of metrics for gauging the financial health of a non-profit. It's more properly understood as a firewall to create some breathing space in the face of financial uncertainty. Again, reaching back to my limited stint at a non-profit, they withdrew a little bit from their endowment during the 2008-2009 financial crisis, as well as during covid. It's rarely the case that an endowment can fund an organization in perpetuity.

And maybe I'm crazy but if someone falsely accuses Mozilla of not maintaining an endowment, it seems relevant to point out that they do actually have one.

No—they did not cut costs enough to build a sufficient endowment. Again, income of several billion dollars.

That is plenty for an endowment to build a browser+ in perpetuity... like an order of magnitude in excess. Ladybird/servo are successfully building on perhaps 1% of that?

I'm sure they have some money in the bank and it gets interest, but obviously not enough or handled well enough to avoid the temptation to start an advertising project due to their unsustainable spending rate.

You keep trying to make it sound like they "did everything they could." No, they did not by a long shot.

Yep. Mozilla is effectively just a tax dodge for Google anymore.

Heck, this AI first announcement was probably strongly influenced behind the scenes by Google to create an appearance of competition similar to Microsoft's and Apple's relationship in the 1990s.

Also, ironically, I just switched full time to Brave only yesterday.

Care to explain how would they get the money in the process you described? Selling privacy to Google or someone is the only money maker they have.

There is no reason to believe manager pay is even 10% of the total expense.

Google (currently) pays Mozilla $400-500 million a year to be the default search engine in firefox.

edit: in 2023 they took in $653M in total, $555M of which was from Google. They spent $260M on software development, and $236M on other things.

The "other things" is what most people seem to have problem with.

Mozilla burns a batshit amount of money on feel good fancies.

If it were focused on its core mission -- building great software in key areas -- it would see it can't afford this, because that's the same money that if saved would make them financially independent of Google.

> Mozilla burns a batshit amount of money on feel good fancies.

How much?

>$236M on other things This is from another poster. I'm guessing stuff not related to Firefox development.

$236M included facilities, administration, marketing, and so on.

Yes, they should trim most of that fat.

How much is fat?

  > In 2018, Baker received $2,458,350 in compensation from Mozilla.
  > In 2020, after returning to the position of CEO, Baker's salary was more than $3 million.
  > In 2021, her salary rose again to more than $5.5 million,
  > and again to over $6.9 million in 2022.
  >
  > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker#Mozilla_Foundation_and_Mozilla_Corporation

And what percent of revenue was this?

0.55% in 2018, rising to 1.1% in 2022

Saving 1.1% of revenue would make them financially independent of Google?

Mozilla took in the money from the distant past all the way into the present. They have leaned into privacy the whole time, while not being perfect.

At some point they ease off the google money or it goes away itself. And they move forward on privacy.

Google was less demanding in the past as well; they continue to give Apple billions each year.

There are a number of privacy-oriented business models, as listed here: https://aol.codeberg.page/eci/status.html - while not as lucrative as some, combined with an endowment its a good living that many companies would envy.

What's the quote?

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

I agree with the person you're responding to. Decades of funding and they have zero savings to show for it.

Though it's questionable as to how much big players like Google would have continued to fund Mozilla if they had seen Mozilla making the financial moves that would have made it an independent and self-sufficient entity.

Well, they have over a billion in the bank. Which is both a ton of money, but also goes away quickly when you're a large company paying lots of money to salaries.

So if you have a billion in the bank, you can collect 5% return and never touch the money. So you get $50m a year to pay enough engineers to make a browser.

That's plenty of money if they recognize they need a super lean company with 0 bloat and a few highly paid experts who focus on correctness and not bullshit features.

How many engineers are enough to make a browser? How do you know?

Vivaldi employ 28 developers and 33 others to make an unstable Chromium fork and email program.[1]

Bloat and bullshit features to you are minimum requirements to someone else.

[1] https://vivaldi.com/team/

Brave has about 300 employees and don’t break out engineers [0]. One of them is Brandon Eich so that counts for a bunch.

Their revenue is only $52M so kinda what Mozilla would earn off their endowment.

[0] https://getlatka.com/companies/brave.com

Brave doesn't make their own browser engine.

Latka are not reliable. And you assumed Brave were profitable?

Brave make a Chromium fork and a search engine. Does a search engine or a web browser engine require more people?

That's all b.s. of the ripest kind.

Ladybird had fewer devs, so what were these devs at Vivaldi doing?

I don't think your argument has a lot of merit. 28 is not a magic number.

> Ladybird had fewer devs, so what were these devs at Vivaldi doing?

The Ladybird developers have not produced a browser comparable to Firefox or Vivaldi. Vivaldi have not produced a browser engine comparable to Ladybird of course.

> I don't think your argument has a lot of merit. 28 is not a magic number.

28 is a magic number was not a reasonable interpretation of my comment.

Yet.

Yes. This discussion is now. Not in a future which may not arrive.

There are about 800 unique weekly committers to the Chromium project, so that's a start at gauging the number for that project. A little harder to find that same figure for Firefox, but Wikipedia says Mozilla Corp had about 750 employees as of 2020.

Anyway, if you have $50M, you can afford 500 people at $100k, or 250 people at $200k. So you simply declare, this is how many people it takes to make a browser, and set your goals and timetables accordingly. I feel like the goals and direction might be more important than the number of bodies you throw at it, but maybe that's naïve. But when the product is mature like Firefox (or Chrome for that matter) you do have some flexibility on the headcount.

You're significantly underestimating fully-loaded cost per person + other expenses. An engineer making a $200k salary is going to cost the company something like $300k, and there are some additional fixed overheads. And $200k is quite a bit less than your competitors are paying.

So you're looking at something more like 150 employees total of which <100 are going to be pure engineers, and that's stretching your budget and operations pretty aggressively while also fighting an uphill battle for recruiting skilled and experienced engineers. (And browser development definitely needs a core of experienced engineers with a relatively niche set of skills!)

Working at Mozilla should be more than money. $200k/year is more than enough to be happy in most of the world. You don't need to compete on rock stars that must live in San Francisco, and focus on people that are happy with a high paying job and have enough idealism to accept "only" $200k/year.

Exactly. One of the biggest problems with Mozilla is that they see themselves as akin to Google et al.

None of those figures are what the engineer makes, they're costs. And they're illustrative, not literal. You won't pay everyone at the same rate either for example, and not all will be engineers either, and I totally left both those facts out of it. Oh no! And also omitted the fact that a company whose vision and ideals people agree with can hire said people for less money, which again brings us back around to the point that the vision might be more important.

Maybe they should quit their presence in the Bay Area. The rent is insanely high. Not just of an office, also the workers. Besides, freedom of speech, liberty, DEI are each under pressure in USA. Mozilla is very much welcome here in Europe :-)

Another comment observed your cost estimates were low.

> But when the product is mature like Firefox (or Chrome for that matter) you do have some flexibility on the headcount.

Google could reduce Chrome development to maintenance and remain dominant for years. It would be much like Internet Explorer 6. Firefox falling too far behind in performance or compatibility would be fatal.

That isn't really the best way to think about not-for-profit schemes like Mozilla. Every organisation eventually becomes corrupted (as in fact we see with Mozilla), so creating an eternal pot of money for something is not strategically sensible.

If good people are in charge, they'll just spend everything and rely on ongoing donations. If nobody thinks it is worth donating too then it is time to close up shop. Keep a bit of a buffer for the practical issue of bad years, sure, but the idea shouldn't be to set up an endowment.

>So if you have a billion in the bank,

I just want to note that this is what is sometimes called carouseling. Which is, instead of acknowledging the original accusation was not correct, which is what should be happening, this comment just proceeds right on to the next accusation.

What is happening, psychologically speaking, that is causing a mass of people to spew one confidently wrong accusation after another? They don't have an endowment (they do!). Well they're not investing it! (they are). Well they're not working on the browser! (they shipped 12 major releases with thousands of patches per release with everything from new tab grouping and stacking to improved gpu performance to security fixes)

This is like a dancing sickness or something.

> "...if they had seen Mozilla making the financial moves that would have made it an independent and self-sufficient entity."

Does their endowment fund enable them to be an independent and self-sufficient entity?

In other words, Can they live off it in perpetuity?

The question is if their endowment can fund a competitive independent web browser in perpetuity. Looking at other web browsers suggests no.

Let's start with the acknowledgement of carouseling.

I don't understand how what you're accusing me of pertains to anything I've written here today.

There's nothing to acknowledge. You're asking everyone to accept the presumption embedded in the statement that a billion dollars "goes away quickly when you're a large company paying lots of money to salaries", namely that Mozilla should be a large company and should rely on a steady stream of outside money instead of seeking sustainable financial independence. But Mozilla's lack of focus and excessive spending on side projects is a major part of the complaints against Mozilla, and you aren't even trying to make a reasonable case that Mozilla needs to be spending money like that.

Exactly! With such an endowment they should be able to develop a browser and maybe some other stuff with a small team that’s focused on tech and not social justice.

But then they can't LARP as a silicon valley tech giant with million dollar CEO salaries.

> Though it's questionable as to how much big players like Google would have continued to fund Mozilla if they had seen Mozilla making the financial moves that would have made it an independent and self-sufficient entity.

Look at how much money Google gave to Apple (Safari) vs Mozilla (FireFox) per year.

The CEO has unarguable been doing a poor job. Losing market share has lost them more potential revenue than any of their pet projects raised.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com