4 ms·

Maybe ask yourself first, if you need 1000 employees and a CEO with a salary of 2.5 million/year to build a browser. That's the way to think about this. Oh, an

Maybe ask yourself first, if you need 1000 employees and a CEO with a salary of 2.5 million/year to build a browser. That's the way to think about this. Oh, and I would happily pay/donate to Mozilla for Firefox and Thunderbird, but not for all the other "adventures" they went after. VPN service... As if there were not enough of those already...

pbowyer 6y ago
Mission creep has been a fundamental Mozilla flaw for too long. And are they a corporate, a charity, or a corporate non-profit? Charities very often pay substantially lower salaries, the tradeoff being you feel you contribute to a greater good. That's how I thought of them, but the wage bill doesn't match up.
- boomboomsubban 6y ago
  They are a non-profit. Their main income had never been donations. Plus, their main competitors are Google, Microsoft, and Apple. They do pay their executives a substantially lower salary.
  - luckylion 6y ago
    > They do pay their executives a substantially lower salary. How much does the team lead for Safari or Edge make? They're competing with a team in Google, Microsoft, and Apple, not with the company as a whole.
    - boomboomsubban 6y ago
      Neither is a fair comparison, those team leaders don't need to manage all the other aspects of a company like Mozilla does.
  - acqq 6y ago
    There are two Mozillas: not-for-profit organization: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Foundation and the Mozilla Corporation, "established on August 3, 2005, to handle the revenue-related operations of the Mozilla Foundation": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation
  - brabel 6y ago
    > They are a non-profit No they are not. People seem to not understand that there is Mozilla Corporation, the one who pays the salaries, and Mozilla Foundation. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/ puts it like this: there’s a non-profit Foundation at the heart of our enterprise... The Foundation is also the sole shareholder in the Mozilla Corporation, the maker of Firefox and other open source tools. Mozilla Corporation functions as a self-sustaining social enterprise – money earned through its products is reinvested into the organization. This page (https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2018/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2018/) says that: With over 1,000 full-time employees worldwide, Mozilla Corporation employee compensation is benchmarked to market by role and level balancing total compensation between individual and company performance with a pay-for-performance compensation model... For VPs and above, we benchmark compensation against a blended peer group comprised of 70% similarly-sized public and private tech companies and 30% non-profit organizations. Also: Mozilla Foundation non-profit programs are carried out by 80 employees and thousands of volunteers around the world. Wikipedia explains a bit more: Unlike the Mozilla Foundation, the Mozilla Corporation is a tax-paying entity, which gives it much greater freedom in the revenue and business activities it can pursue. A tax-paying entity is a regular for-profit company. It's a basically a for-profit subsidiary of the non-profit Foundation, confusingly. More information about revenue: Today, the majority of Mozilla Corporation revenue is generated from global browser search partnerships, including the deal negotiated with Google in 2017 following Mozilla’s termination of its search agreement with Yahoo/Oath Source: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2018/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2018/ And: The Mozilla Foundation is funded by donations and 2% of annual net revenues from the Mozilla Corporation, amounting to over US$8.3 million in 2016. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Foundation And Google, at least in the early years, seems to have controlled as much as 90% of the Mozilla Corporation Revenue. I couldn't find the current figure, but the above links mention Google as currently a major financer still. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation
    - boomboomsubban 6y ago
      I was aware there was more complexity than I mentioned, I somehow missed that they mentioned a non-profit. >And Google, at least in the early years, seems to have controlled as much as 90% of the Mozilla Corporation Revenue. I couldn't find the current figure, but the above links mention Google as currently a major financer still. Google paid most of their corporate revenue. The last reported year, 2018, was the first under the new contract, and looking at revenues you can guess how much smaller it was then the Yahoo one. If I remember correctly, the contract information will be on the detailed financial report released this year.
- gjvc 6y ago
  > Mission creep has been a fundamental Mozilla flaw for too long. They started with Firefox, and they should have stopped with Thunderbird.
  - yyyk 6y ago
    They started with 'Mozilla', which was a combined suit including browser, mail, news and page editing.
boomboomsubban 6y ago
>Maybe ask yourself first, if you need 1000 employees and a CEO with a salary of 2.5 million/year to build a browser. That's the way to think about this. To build a browser capable of taking any market share away from Google and Microsoft, available in 90 languages with regular updates, you probably do need numbers around there.
- FeepingCreature 6y ago
  This sounded like a lot to me, so I looked through the last 4096 chromium commits and counted committer names. That is back until the beginning of August. In that time, remarkably, Chromium has indeed had 856 committers, most of which only made a few commits in that timespan. That is very much not what I would have expected. For comparison, I repeated the experiment with Mozilla's gecko-dev repo, and got 480 people committing - still a lot more than I'd thought. I guess I'll see how this holds up with the downsizing in a month. [edit] Though - only 199 with a Mozilla email address. Though I don't have a Chromium comparison here.
  - the-dude 6y ago
    Thanks for the actual research.
    - FeepingCreature 6y ago
      For repro: git log --oneline --pretty=format:'%ae' |sort |uniq |wc -l Add `grep mozilla` to filter for Mozilla emails.
- pwdisswordfish0 6y ago
  Someone did that 10–15 years ago, and they did it with a staff 1/10 the size and on a budget 10–20% the one that the current generation of executives are working with. The job was also different. Compare someone trying to get into shape with someone trying to maintain their current body weight. Early Mozilla did a lot of good work. Leadership during the 2010s undid almost all of it in ways that were predictable.
ChrisSD 6y ago
The VPN service was created to make money, not to spend it. They've been fishing for a new source of income for a long time, so far without much success. Pocket brings in some money but it can't sustain Firefox development on its own.
brazzy 6y ago
Mission creep is certainly a thing, but a fully featured web browser is a massively complex piece of software and most definitely not something you can do with a bunch of volounteers in their free time. It may not require 1000 employees, but 100 is probably not enough. And that is still not easy to fund with volountary donations.
- martin_a 6y ago
  Then take 300 developers, if you need them. Financing would probably be sufficient, if it wasn't spread amongst three times the employees and would have to take care of several other projects.
CydeWeys 6y ago
All the existing VPN providers are shady. I'd much sooner trust one from Mozilla. I don't think this is a priori a bad market for them to get into at all. It could even be a decent money maker for them, especially with seamless integration into Firefox. Unlike browsers, people are willing to pay for VPNs, so there's a good potential additional revenue source there.
- martin_a 6y ago
  Yeah, so just get your own VPN up and running in half an hour. Invite your family to use it, too. That's probably around 5-10 $/month with some cloud VPS thingy for everybody in your house. Did it myself, combined with a PiHole, and it worked like a charm. In regards of trust: Mozilla is just another big corporation, a VPN from some other big tech company (one that isn't into advertising - how about Apple?) would just be as trustworthy.
  - CydeWeys 6y ago
    (1) Where is your Internet traffic actually hitting the Internet? Is it emanating from your house? If so, that's not why most people get VPNs. If not, how many different countries can your endpoint be located in? Again, if you can't choose from a large list of arbitrary countries, then this doesn't satisfy many people's VPN use case. (2) You are assuming a technical level of competence that most people don't have. Even if they do, they often would rather just pay for something simple that works rather than have yet another thing to maintain. (3) Yeah, Apple would be as trustworthy to most people. But they aren't doing it. A service that doesn't exist isn't a real competitor. I think there's a real potential in this space for a non-shady company, and Mozilla seems like the best candidate.
- gmb2k1 6y ago
  From my understanding Mozilla VPN is just rebranded mullvad VPN. So what benefit do you get by purchasing VPN access from Mozilla vs. directly from mullvad? I don´t see any from a security/trust perspective. Also everyone is writing Mozilla wrong around here. It´s not Mozilla. They changed it to Moz://a. How much did that rebranding cost? Was that money well spent? So many bad decisions.

pbowyer 6y ago

Mission creep has been a fundamental Mozilla flaw for too long. And are they a corporate, a charity, or a corporate non-profit? Charities very often pay substantially lower salaries, the tradeoff being you feel you contribute to a greater good. That's how I thought of them, but the wage bill doesn't match up.

boomboomsubban 6y ago
They are a non-profit. Their main income had never been donations. Plus, their main competitors are Google, Microsoft, and Apple. They do pay their executives a substantially lower salary.
- luckylion 6y ago
  > They do pay their executives a substantially lower salary. How much does the team lead for Safari or Edge make? They're competing with a team in Google, Microsoft, and Apple, not with the company as a whole.
  - boomboomsubban 6y ago
    Neither is a fair comparison, those team leaders don't need to manage all the other aspects of a company like Mozilla does.
- acqq 6y ago
  There are two Mozillas: not-for-profit organization: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Foundation and the Mozilla Corporation, "established on August 3, 2005, to handle the revenue-related operations of the Mozilla Foundation": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation
- brabel 6y ago
  > They are a non-profit No they are not. People seem to not understand that there is Mozilla Corporation, the one who pays the salaries, and Mozilla Foundation. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/ puts it like this: there’s a non-profit Foundation at the heart of our enterprise... The Foundation is also the sole shareholder in the Mozilla Corporation, the maker of Firefox and other open source tools. Mozilla Corporation functions as a self-sustaining social enterprise – money earned through its products is reinvested into the organization. This page (https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2018/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2018/) says that: With over 1,000 full-time employees worldwide, Mozilla Corporation employee compensation is benchmarked to market by role and level balancing total compensation between individual and company performance with a pay-for-performance compensation model... For VPs and above, we benchmark compensation against a blended peer group comprised of 70% similarly-sized public and private tech companies and 30% non-profit organizations. Also: Mozilla Foundation non-profit programs are carried out by 80 employees and thousands of volunteers around the world. Wikipedia explains a bit more: Unlike the Mozilla Foundation, the Mozilla Corporation is a tax-paying entity, which gives it much greater freedom in the revenue and business activities it can pursue. A tax-paying entity is a regular for-profit company. It's a basically a for-profit subsidiary of the non-profit Foundation, confusingly. More information about revenue: Today, the majority of Mozilla Corporation revenue is generated from global browser search partnerships, including the deal negotiated with Google in 2017 following Mozilla’s termination of its search agreement with Yahoo/Oath Source: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2018/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2018/ And: The Mozilla Foundation is funded by donations and 2% of annual net revenues from the Mozilla Corporation, amounting to over US$8.3 million in 2016. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Foundation And Google, at least in the early years, seems to have controlled as much as 90% of the Mozilla Corporation Revenue. I couldn't find the current figure, but the above links mention Google as currently a major financer still. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation
  - boomboomsubban 6y ago
    I was aware there was more complexity than I mentioned, I somehow missed that they mentioned a non-profit. >And Google, at least in the early years, seems to have controlled as much as 90% of the Mozilla Corporation Revenue. I couldn't find the current figure, but the above links mention Google as currently a major financer still. Google paid most of their corporate revenue. The last reported year, 2018, was the first under the new contract, and looking at revenues you can guess how much smaller it was then the Yahoo one. If I remember correctly, the contract information will be on the detailed financial report released this year.
gjvc 6y ago
> Mission creep has been a fundamental Mozilla flaw for too long. They started with Firefox, and they should have stopped with Thunderbird.
- yyyk 6y ago
  They started with 'Mozilla', which was a combined suit including browser, mail, news and page editing.

boomboomsubban 6y ago

>Maybe ask yourself first, if you need 1000 employees and a CEO with a salary of 2.5 million/year to build a browser. That's the way to think about this. To build a browser capable of taking any market share away from Google and Microsoft, available in 90 languages with regular updates, you probably do need numbers around there.

FeepingCreature 6y ago
This sounded like a lot to me, so I looked through the last 4096 chromium commits and counted committer names. That is back until the beginning of August. In that time, remarkably, Chromium has indeed had 856 committers, most of which only made a few commits in that timespan. That is very much not what I would have expected. For comparison, I repeated the experiment with Mozilla's gecko-dev repo, and got 480 people committing - still a lot more than I'd thought. I guess I'll see how this holds up with the downsizing in a month. [edit] Though - only 199 with a Mozilla email address. Though I don't have a Chromium comparison here.
- the-dude 6y ago
  Thanks for the actual research.
  - FeepingCreature 6y ago
    For repro: git log --oneline --pretty=format:'%ae' |sort |uniq |wc -l Add `grep mozilla` to filter for Mozilla emails.
pwdisswordfish0 6y ago
Someone did that 10–15 years ago, and they did it with a staff 1/10 the size and on a budget 10–20% the one that the current generation of executives are working with. The job was also different. Compare someone trying to get into shape with someone trying to maintain their current body weight. Early Mozilla did a lot of good work. Leadership during the 2010s undid almost all of it in ways that were predictable.

ChrisSD 6y ago

The VPN service was created to make money, not to spend it. They've been fishing for a new source of income for a long time, so far without much success. Pocket brings in some money but it can't sustain Firefox development on its own.

brazzy 6y ago

Mission creep is certainly a thing, but a fully featured web browser is a massively complex piece of software and most definitely not something you can do with a bunch of volounteers in their free time. It may not require 1000 employees, but 100 is probably not enough. And that is still not easy to fund with volountary donations.

martin_a 6y ago
Then take 300 developers, if you need them. Financing would probably be sufficient, if it wasn't spread amongst three times the employees and would have to take care of several other projects.

CydeWeys 6y ago

All the existing VPN providers are shady. I'd much sooner trust one from Mozilla. I don't think this is a priori a bad market for them to get into at all. It could even be a decent money maker for them, especially with seamless integration into Firefox. Unlike browsers, people are willing to pay for VPNs, so there's a good potential additional revenue source there.

martin_a 6y ago
Yeah, so just get your own VPN up and running in half an hour. Invite your family to use it, too. That's probably around 5-10 $/month with some cloud VPS thingy for everybody in your house. Did it myself, combined with a PiHole, and it worked like a charm. In regards of trust: Mozilla is just another big corporation, a VPN from some other big tech company (one that isn't into advertising - how about Apple?) would just be as trustworthy.
- CydeWeys 6y ago
  (1) Where is your Internet traffic actually hitting the Internet? Is it emanating from your house? If so, that's not why most people get VPNs. If not, how many different countries can your endpoint be located in? Again, if you can't choose from a large list of arbitrary countries, then this doesn't satisfy many people's VPN use case. (2) You are assuming a technical level of competence that most people don't have. Even if they do, they often would rather just pay for something simple that works rather than have yet another thing to maintain. (3) Yeah, Apple would be as trustworthy to most people. But they aren't doing it. A service that doesn't exist isn't a real competitor. I think there's a real potential in this space for a non-shady company, and Mozilla seems like the best candidate.
gmb2k1 6y ago
From my understanding Mozilla VPN is just rebranded mullvad VPN. So what benefit do you get by purchasing VPN access from Mozilla vs. directly from mullvad? I don´t see any from a security/trust perspective. Also everyone is writing Mozilla wrong around here. It´s not Mozilla. They changed it to Moz://a. How much did that rebranding cost? Was that money well spent? So many bad decisions.