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It seems a bit awkward to me when Mozilla keep asking for contributors. They're profiting from Firefox (via the huge search engine deal), it's in really poor ta

by foobar20198 9y ago

It seems a bit awkward to me when Mozilla keep asking for contributors. They're profiting from Firefox (via the huge search engine deal), it's in really poor taste when such organisations then beg for contributors. They have enough money to employ people to keep their product going... Kinda the same with e.g. Facebook's open source projects, although I guess there are worse places to contribute (and FB's projects might actually be useful for other companies work - hence contributing isn't a complete waste of time). My only exception would be scratching my own itches, but here they're asking for help with company goals.

imtringued 9y ago
Companies like Facebook publish their libraries so they can hire people who are already familiar with the libraries they internally use. As an outsider you can't be an expert in <company internal library> if you don't even whether it exists.
Sylos 9y ago
Mozilla is a non-profit organization. Any money that they make, they have to reinvest into Firefox or other Mozilla projects. There's not some guy getting rich from you helping them out. All the help that you invest will eventually fall through to users in some way.
- chappi42 9y ago
  They could be more frugal. And imo a lot of money has been wasted for bad projects. Rust is very nice though.
  - foobar20198 9y ago
    To be completely fair: many projects at many companies turn out to be failures. Rust could've been bad and Firefox OS could have ended up ruling the world, and suddenly your comment would look very different. There's just a fundamental risk in projects, and viability often only becomes later in hindsight. (Most other companies failures just happen to be a lot less visible since they're not developing in the open.)
- fabrice_d 9y ago
  Mozilla Foundation (MoFo) is non-profit. Most of the employees work for Mozilla Corporation, which is owned 100% by MoFo. It's very clear the MoCo doesn't reinvest all the money they make (they have a lot in the bank). And some are getting rich from it, but that's a different topic.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - Sylos 9y ago
    I don't consider getting paid your wage as "getting rich", if that wage is within industry standards for the job that you're doing. And yes, the MoCo is not reinvesting all money all the time right away, but they'll have to reinvest it or use it to pay wages at some point. They have no reason to just amass money senselessly. If they make a surplus, have all wages paid, and don't save it up nor reinvest it, then they can only pay it out to the Mozilla Foundation, where it's again in nonprofit hands.
zbraniecki 9y ago
Hi! I'm the author of the post. So, it's not "asking for help", it's informing how you can help. I'm also not "begging for contributors" or asking to help with "company goals", I'm suggesting ways to help with our current major release. If we're successful, it should make the whole Web better thanks to bringing more competition and choice to the user. Major open source projects are actually fun to work with for many people. They're very challenging not just because of problems you solve, but also because of the massive project culture and technical infrastructure in place that you learn in the process. That learning helps people grow as engineers. Also the feeling that you made an impact on the lives of millions of users is quite awesome. For others, they're already Firefox users and it's just about fixing a bug that was itching them. So, generally speaking, there are reasons to help major open source projects, even if they can afford to hire full time engineers as well. Two side notes: 1) We're way, way smaller than all our competitors. The number of engineers that Google, Apple and Microsoft can hire to work on their browser engines is significantly higher than what Mozilla can do. We can't compete and never will be able to. That's why, beside of our culture and Mozilla Manifesto, we rely on our ability to attract contributors. 2) It's a chicken and egg. Keeping the project really open (not technically open as in - we'll dump the source code to github every once in a while), requires continuous effort. Having a healthy community of contributors is important for our project culture to stay open. If people stop contributing, some things will naturally decay into less open state making it harder in the future for new contributors to come in. And I'm not even talking about code only. Mozilla's marketing, engineering, privacy, security, UX and other projects are working in the open.
- throwaway2048 9y ago
  If attracting contributors was such a priority for mozilla, you would think that so many screw-the-users-we-are-doing-this-anyways decisions wouldnt come to pass. Tons of decisions mozilla makes are taken dispite generally negative outside feedback, usually with a vauge convoluted justification with some metric. Its ok to do what you think is best and right, but if you want an open participation from the outside, its best to not to ignore the feedback users give (note telemetry metrics arnt feedback, especially when interpreted with an agenda, stuff dosent always measure what you think it does). The entire conversation process around mozilla products is ridiculously straight jacketed, and unless you agree with what they have already decided prepare to be ignored, or have your points moderated out of existence. A good example of this tendancy is the conversation surrounding the proposal to track visited urls[1], you either accept that differential privacy is information theoretically secure (it isnt), and you accept that mozilla should have this information (metrics are an unqualified good), or your posts will be removed. Nobody is enthusiastic about contributing to a project that ignores what they care about, even if the people ignoring you think its for the greater good. It seems to be the general conclusion inside mozilla is that Chrome is winning because of x, we need more x, for any value of x (including values of X which are in direct opposition to an open, free internet), while ignoring the strengths that firefox has and why people are actually choosing to use it over chrome. As you say, it is 100% hopeless to try to be a better chrome than chrome is, Google outresources you 1000 to 1. I wish that firefox cared more about being firefox, and less about becomming a worse version of chrome. [1] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.governance/81gMQeMEL0w https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.governance/8... feedback here is virtually 100% negative, but I gaurentee this change is going in anyways.

imtringued 9y ago

Companies like Facebook publish their libraries so they can hire people who are already familiar with the libraries they internally use. As an outsider you can't be an expert in <company internal library> if you don't even whether it exists.

Sylos 9y ago

Mozilla is a non-profit organization. Any money that they make, they have to reinvest into Firefox or other Mozilla projects. There's not some guy getting rich from you helping them out. All the help that you invest will eventually fall through to users in some way.

chappi42 9y ago
They could be more frugal. And imo a lot of money has been wasted for bad projects. Rust is very nice though.
- foobar20198 9y ago
  To be completely fair: many projects at many companies turn out to be failures. Rust could've been bad and Firefox OS could have ended up ruling the world, and suddenly your comment would look very different. There's just a fundamental risk in projects, and viability often only becomes later in hindsight. (Most other companies failures just happen to be a lot less visible since they're not developing in the open.)
fabrice_d 9y ago
Mozilla Foundation (MoFo) is non-profit. Most of the employees work for Mozilla Corporation, which is owned 100% by MoFo. It's very clear the MoCo doesn't reinvest all the money they make (they have a lot in the bank). And some are getting rich from it, but that's a different topic.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- Sylos 9y ago
  I don't consider getting paid your wage as "getting rich", if that wage is within industry standards for the job that you're doing. And yes, the MoCo is not reinvesting all money all the time right away, but they'll have to reinvest it or use it to pay wages at some point. They have no reason to just amass money senselessly. If they make a surplus, have all wages paid, and don't save it up nor reinvest it, then they can only pay it out to the Mozilla Foundation, where it's again in nonprofit hands.

zbraniecki 9y ago

Hi! I'm the author of the post. So, it's not "asking for help", it's informing how you can help. I'm also not "begging for contributors" or asking to help with "company goals", I'm suggesting ways to help with our current major release. If we're successful, it should make the whole Web better thanks to bringing more competition and choice to the user. Major open source projects are actually fun to work with for many people. They're very challenging not just because of problems you solve, but also because of the massive project culture and technical infrastructure in place that you learn in the process. That learning helps people grow as engineers. Also the feeling that you made an impact on the lives of millions of users is quite awesome. For others, they're already Firefox users and it's just about fixing a bug that was itching them. So, generally speaking, there are reasons to help major open source projects, even if they can afford to hire full time engineers as well. Two side notes: 1) We're way, way smaller than all our competitors. The number of engineers that Google, Apple and Microsoft can hire to work on their browser engines is significantly higher than what Mozilla can do. We can't compete and never will be able to. That's why, beside of our culture and Mozilla Manifesto, we rely on our ability to attract contributors. 2) It's a chicken and egg. Keeping the project really open (not technically open as in - we'll dump the source code to github every once in a while), requires continuous effort. Having a healthy community of contributors is important for our project culture to stay open. If people stop contributing, some things will naturally decay into less open state making it harder in the future for new contributors to come in. And I'm not even talking about code only. Mozilla's marketing, engineering, privacy, security, UX and other projects are working in the open.

throwaway2048 9y ago
If attracting contributors was such a priority for mozilla, you would think that so many screw-the-users-we-are-doing-this-anyways decisions wouldnt come to pass. Tons of decisions mozilla makes are taken dispite generally negative outside feedback, usually with a vauge convoluted justification with some metric. Its ok to do what you think is best and right, but if you want an open participation from the outside, its best to not to ignore the feedback users give (note telemetry metrics arnt feedback, especially when interpreted with an agenda, stuff dosent always measure what you think it does). The entire conversation process around mozilla products is ridiculously straight jacketed, and unless you agree with what they have already decided prepare to be ignored, or have your points moderated out of existence. A good example of this tendancy is the conversation surrounding the proposal to track visited urls[1], you either accept that differential privacy is information theoretically secure (it isnt), and you accept that mozilla should have this information (metrics are an unqualified good), or your posts will be removed. Nobody is enthusiastic about contributing to a project that ignores what they care about, even if the people ignoring you think its for the greater good. It seems to be the general conclusion inside mozilla is that Chrome is winning because of x, we need more x, for any value of x (including values of X which are in direct opposition to an open, free internet), while ignoring the strengths that firefox has and why people are actually choosing to use it over chrome. As you say, it is 100% hopeless to try to be a better chrome than chrome is, Google outresources you 1000 to 1. I wish that firefox cared more about being firefox, and less about becomming a worse version of chrome. [1] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.governance/81gMQeMEL0w https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.governance/8... feedback here is virtually 100% negative, but I gaurentee this change is going in anyways.