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Comment by SXX | Hacker News Reader

> Firefox took a long time to catch up and their CEO was utterly incompetent, which seriously harmed Mozilla.

This is basically whole history of Mozilla and to be honest most of open source projects that dont have BDFL type of leadership.

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It is especially true for projects like Firefox which have access to massive funding since these attract the sort of people who consider those funds 'wasted' because they can be used to do so much for 'the common good'. Mitchell Baker - the utterly incompetent CEO - considered Firefox an afterthought because what the world needed was more NGO activism and what she needed was 400% more money for herself [1].

Wikipedia/Wikimedia is another example of a project with massive funding with similar problems even though the latter has a (not so) BDFL.

[1] https://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html

Wikimedia might be not perfect, but Wikipedia is still one of the most visited websites in the world and source of a lot of humanity knowledge in general.

Firefox on other hand is just something only nerds like us care about and only alive because Alphabet / Google is scared of antitrust legal action possibility.

And wikipedia runs off a tiny tiny fraction of what they raise. Almost all of the good on wikipedia comes in-spite of the organisation that owns it. Without the community pouring hundreds of thousands of hours into the project (unpaid) a year, wikipedia would be dead immediately. And if there was ever a time in its life that the project needed good leadership and innovative thinking, it would be now when AI is seriously threatening its survival. If people stop going to the site and instead go to the chat bots that scrape the site, there will be less and less incentive for the power users to continue maintaining wikipedia.

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