5 ms·

There are plenty of open source companies. The company I founded is built on open source principles many of them inspired by Mozilla. It's a bigger challenge, b

There are plenty of open source companies. The company I founded is built on open source principles many of them inspired by Mozilla. It's a bigger challenge, because it restricts your freedoms as a company in favour of the user's freedoms. However Mozilla's mistakes are not due to the open source nature of the company at all, they are due to mismanagement. They are due to poor understanding of your own userbase. Poor communication with users and employees. Complete lack of judgement. These are sticks Mozilla puts in its own wheels. It's hard to make money, but it's easy to know what not to do. Simply asking your employees: "Is this a good idea?" would have yielded a clear "Fuck no". That they did not do that (or did, but chose to ignore it) is a terrible sign, open source or not.

TAForObvReasons 9y ago
https://twitter.com/dherman76/status/433320156496789504 https://twitter.com/dherman76/status/433320156496789504 exemplifies the poor misunderstanding of the userbase: > Excited to share the launch of @mozilla @firefox Tiles program, the first of our user-enhancing programs To call advertisements "user-enhancing" is an affront and betrays values like privacy that Mozilla claims to espouse
- dleslie 9y ago
  Time to do away with whoever led the charge on this one.
- ubernostrum 9y ago
  betrays values like privacy I do not (now -- at the time that person made that tweet, I did, but not on the browser) work at Mozilla. However. The "tiles" concept was literally an experiment in whether it's possible to construct an ad system that does respect privacy. The basic idea was: * Advertisers submit their ads to Mozilla. Mozilla wraps them up into "bundles", made up of a bunch of different ads along with metadata to use in determining which to show. * The browser downloads the "bundles" from Mozilla, and caches them locally. * The browser, based on local data only it has access to, and the metadata in the bundles, decides which ads to show. In other words, unlike a Google-style model where the ads are stored remote, loaded on demand, and the decision of what to show is made on the server side, this stored all ad content locally and the decision of what to show was also made entirely locally. So neither the advertiser nor the distributor could know whether a particular person saw an ad or (if they happened to) why the decision was made to show them that ad rather than a different one. You may not like that, and you're free not to like it. But to argue that it "betrays" privacy is simply factually false. And Mozilla's mission is, in large part, to find ways to advance and sustain the web in ways that respect the users. Trying to develop a privacy-respecting way to deliver ads -- since so much of the web is dependent on ads -- is entirely within that mission.
enraged_camel 9y ago
Most open-source software companies that are profitable rely on a consulting model. They develop and open-source the software, then work with clients to implement, customize and support it for them. This clearly wouldn’t work for a consumer product like a web browser.
- Y7ZCQtNo39 9y ago
  Thank you for this reply -- it illustrates why the model that works for other companies doesn't apply here.
ksk 9y ago
>Simply asking your employees: "Is this a good idea?" would have yielded a clear "Fuck no". That they did not do that (or did, but chose to ignore it) is a terrible sign, open source or not. Running a company by polling random employees is not an established successful management style. Its only you who is suggesting it, and then claiming that because they didn't do it, its a bad sign.
- OrderlyTiamat 9y ago
  > Running a company by polling random employees is not an established successful management style. Its only you who is suggesting it, He's suggesting that the most simple, stupid check one could think of (polling random employees) would already have shown this to be a terrible idea. They didn't even go that far. That is indeed a bad sign.
  - ksk 9y ago
    >would already have shown this to be a terrible idea. What are you basing this on? I'm just a FF user, and I don't think it was a terrible idea, even though I personally wouldn't have gone that route.
- ekianjo 9y ago
  its not polling for running the company, its a disaster check. If most of your employees hate the idea, it should be a sign of something wrong because I would expect Mozillians to be also users of Firefox.
- stevew20 9y ago
  You inserted the word "random" into the OP's statement in order to support your position. Your employees will ALWAYS have a better understanding of the state of affairs of projects they are developing, simply because they are the ones developing them. You cannot fully understand the complexities without doing the work yourself. Not factoring opinions about a product from the employees who are making it is incredibly irresponsible, and makes those employees much more likely to find an employer who will value them as subject matter experts.

TAForObvReasons 9y ago

https://twitter.com/dherman76/status/433320156496789504 https://twitter.com/dherman76/status/433320156496789504 exemplifies the poor misunderstanding of the userbase: > Excited to share the launch of @mozilla @firefox Tiles program, the first of our user-enhancing programs To call advertisements "user-enhancing" is an affront and betrays values like privacy that Mozilla claims to espouse

dleslie 9y ago
Time to do away with whoever led the charge on this one.
ubernostrum 9y ago
betrays values like privacy I do not (now -- at the time that person made that tweet, I did, but not on the browser) work at Mozilla. However. The "tiles" concept was literally an experiment in whether it's possible to construct an ad system that does respect privacy. The basic idea was: * Advertisers submit their ads to Mozilla. Mozilla wraps them up into "bundles", made up of a bunch of different ads along with metadata to use in determining which to show. * The browser downloads the "bundles" from Mozilla, and caches them locally. * The browser, based on local data only it has access to, and the metadata in the bundles, decides which ads to show. In other words, unlike a Google-style model where the ads are stored remote, loaded on demand, and the decision of what to show is made on the server side, this stored all ad content locally and the decision of what to show was also made entirely locally. So neither the advertiser nor the distributor could know whether a particular person saw an ad or (if they happened to) why the decision was made to show them that ad rather than a different one. You may not like that, and you're free not to like it. But to argue that it "betrays" privacy is simply factually false. And Mozilla's mission is, in large part, to find ways to advance and sustain the web in ways that respect the users. Trying to develop a privacy-respecting way to deliver ads -- since so much of the web is dependent on ads -- is entirely within that mission.

enraged_camel 9y ago

Most open-source software companies that are profitable rely on a consulting model. They develop and open-source the software, then work with clients to implement, customize and support it for them. This clearly wouldn’t work for a consumer product like a web browser.

Y7ZCQtNo39 9y ago
Thank you for this reply -- it illustrates why the model that works for other companies doesn't apply here.

ksk 9y ago

>Simply asking your employees: "Is this a good idea?" would have yielded a clear "Fuck no". That they did not do that (or did, but chose to ignore it) is a terrible sign, open source or not. Running a company by polling random employees is not an established successful management style. Its only you who is suggesting it, and then claiming that because they didn't do it, its a bad sign.

OrderlyTiamat 9y ago
> Running a company by polling random employees is not an established successful management style. Its only you who is suggesting it, He's suggesting that the most simple, stupid check one could think of (polling random employees) would already have shown this to be a terrible idea. They didn't even go that far. That is indeed a bad sign.
- ksk 9y ago
  >would already have shown this to be a terrible idea. What are you basing this on? I'm just a FF user, and I don't think it was a terrible idea, even though I personally wouldn't have gone that route.
ekianjo 9y ago
its not polling for running the company, its a disaster check. If most of your employees hate the idea, it should be a sign of something wrong because I would expect Mozillians to be also users of Firefox.
stevew20 9y ago
You inserted the word "random" into the OP's statement in order to support your position. Your employees will ALWAYS have a better understanding of the state of affairs of projects they are developing, simply because they are the ones developing them. You cannot fully understand the complexities without doing the work yourself. Not factoring opinions about a product from the employees who are making it is incredibly irresponsible, and makes those employees much more likely to find an employer who will value them as subject matter experts.