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Comment by cubefox | Hacker News Reader

They need new revenue sources. Their current Google deal was declared illegal by an antitrust ruling.

Well they need a new strategy for finding that. Continually creating half-baked side projects then dropping them after a few years clearly, and unsurprisingly, isn't working.

Which alternative strategy do you propose?

If that is truly the impetus behind this ridiculous crap, I hope they purge whoever is behind these ideas quickly before they waste any more money.

This may be a silly question, but why does an open source project need revenue? Or employees? Couldn't Mozilla's few core projects run on volunteers?

Because there aren't enough volunteers willing to put enough time in.

You may be right, but I'm not sure we actually have strong evidence for that. Mozilla has run like a bigtech firm for so long that it's not really clear whether the open-source portion thereof could survive without.

$500 million in annual revenue and $6 million CEO compensation packages are well in excess of what other similar-scope projects get by on. Mozilla accounts for somewhere between 30-50% of all funding in open-source - if you sum up the Linux foundation, the Wikimedia foundation, the Apache foundation, KDE e.V, the Gnome foundation... it's still less than Mozilla

Honestly, good luck with that. Mozilla spent past 15 years or so creating and killing new projects over and over. Right now I'd be hard-pressed to try anything they create because they would inevitably shut it down next year.

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