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Mozilla Corporation, which develops Firefox, is a for-profit business. It just so happens that 100% of its shares are owned by the Mozilla Foundation, a non-pro

Mozilla Corporation, which develops Firefox, is a for-profit business. It just so happens that 100% of its shares are owned by the Mozilla Foundation, a non-profit.

coldtea 6y ago
The sooner the profit corp dies off and eats humble pie then, the better. An actual community project should rise from this state of affairs, with tanginble, browser-oriented goals, not something dependent on Google's money... Here's the person who announced the firings... Nothing to do with development or FOSS, some laywer ex-Netscape employee: Winifred Mitchell Baker (born 1959) is the Executive Chairwoman and CEO of the Mozilla Foundation and of Mozilla Corporation, a subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation that coordinates development of the open source Mozilla Internet applications, including the Mozilla Firefox web browser. Baker was trained as a lawyer. She coordinates business and policy issues and sits on both the Mozilla Foundation Board of Directors and the Mozilla Corporation Board of Directors. It's like the leeches that hang on to NGOs for a salaried office career, and don't do activism themselves... For all his faults, at least Brendan Eich was an actual developer, and with important contributions to the web and Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox.
- nicoburns 6y ago
  > Nothing to do with development or FOSS Not exactly nothing to do with FOSS. She wrote the MPL. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker Having said that, I do think these recent layoffs reflect badly on her if she is indeed responsible for them.
- The_Colonel 6y ago
  > An actual community project should rise from this state of affairs This is just so naive view ... it's always the abstract "community" which should step in and save the day. Recently it was LibreOffice too where people got all mad due to proposed branding and again "community" superhero was expected to step in, fork it and carry on the whole development. In reality these projects are far too huge to be purely community projects. They require full time paid developers and not few of them. They won't be able to survive without corporate sponsorship (and thus influence).
  - coldtea 6y ago
    >In reality these projects are far too huge to be purely community projects. Mozilla is far too huge to not have money. Just 200M from those 600 million per year it took from Google, put in the bank, could pay for 50 developers/graphic designers/ $200K per year to work on it for 20 years. That would have taken care of the engine for 2 decades... Instead they burnt money in BS ventures, Cxx salaries, events, and so on...
    - fabrice_d 6y ago
      You're delusional if you think you can maintain a competitive browser runtime with 50 employees.
      - coldtea 6y ago
        I think you can maintain it with even less... KHTML was done by a tiny KDE team. After Apple adopted it, Webkit/Safari only had a small team of people working on it. A good team of 12-20 devs is better than some BS team of 250 with politics, communication overhead, lack of coherence etc that comes with scale...
        The_Colonel 6y ago
        > KHTML was done by a tiny KDE team. Yes, 20 years ago. Fortunately, web technology did not evolve and grow at all since so it should be doable now too, right?
        coldtea 6y ago
        > Yes, 20 years ago. So? 20 years ago Netscape still had a much larger team, Microsoft too, and Webkit with its small team still beat them in their own game. Small teams can build whole OSes, browsers, compilers, and whatever they put their mind too. Given good devs/experts, they can do so even better/faster than bigger teams. P.S. 1 Not that a 50-strong team is small. P.S. 2 Plus, way of missing the point. The team-of-50, 200K, 20 years = 200M was just an example. 200M is 1/3rd of what Mozilla made in a year for decades. And even those 200M would just be the raw money spent, not invested or anything. They could afford to support a 300-strong team of 20 years with 2 years of their revenue un-invested. And that's with a $200K/year salary, which doesn't have to be...
- scott_s 6y ago
  Not only did I not know that a non-profit could wholly own a for-profit, not only did I not know that they could share executive leadership, I certainly did not know this was the case for Mozilla.
  - nicoburns 6y ago
    Note that a for-profit owned by a non-for-profit is really a not-for-profit. Because the only things that the for-profit company can do with it's profit are reinvest it, or give it to the non-for-profit.
    - scott_s 6y ago
      Then what is the benefit of this arrangement? That is, based on what you said, it sounds like there is no meaningful difference between having a non-profit do all the work, and a for-profit doing work on behalf of the non-profit that owns it. But if that was the case, why would anyone bother with the extra layers? I'm inclined to assume there is some reason for the extra layers, and I have difficulty believing those differences are in society's best interest.
      - nicoburns 6y ago
        I think the difference is mainly in restrictions on what kind of activities a non-profit can participate in. I'm not sure on the details.
        doteka 6y ago
        Taxes are a big reason. In many countries you can save quite a lot on revenue tax this way.
    - coldtea 6y ago
      >Because the only things that the for-profit company can do with it's profit are reinvest it, or give it to the non-for-profit. It can also pay it's Cxx's nice salaries and hefty golden parachutes, which makes it a for profit for them...
- tannhaeuser 6y ago
  > community project ... rise from affairs By the looks of it, Servo is a project that failed to deliver a new browser engine after years of work. If there were a chance that the project could be turned around to result in usable software, I'm sure Moz wouldn't have killed it. Is it worth the effort to pickup the project rather than starting from scratch? I don't know, and would appreciate if contributors share their opinion, or come up with a roadmap. By the reaction of some devs here on HN ("don't worry, Rust is safe; no really!") unfortunately I got the impression that the project was treated more as a showcase for Rust rather than a serious attempt at a new browser engine (please don't take it personally; I know this attitude from the "100% Javs" days and consider it a junior dev trait). Also, the "rise from ashes"/Phoenix metapher is no stranger to Mozilla, only that Moz picked the remains from Netscape; the effort to code a browser from scratch (in Java) had failed as well; it resulted in the Rhino JavaScript engine which is still heavily used.
  - Crespyl 6y ago
    Servo wasn't intended to build a full engine to replace Gecko, just to prove out components (Stylo, WebRender, etc) that could be integrated back into Gecko proper, built in a way that takes full advantage of Rusts strengths, and it's been pretty successful by that measure, IMO. There was plenty more work to do (other commenters have mentioned a new layout engine), and I'm disappointed to see Mozilla abandoning such a core next-gen R&D project that has already brought substantial improvements to their main product.
    - SamReidHughes 6y ago
      > Servo wasn't intended to build a full engine to replace Gecko, just to prove out components That's really not a true reflection of prior communications about Servo's goals.
  - notriddle 6y ago
    Parts of Servo succeeded, like the webrender GPU stack and the CSS selector engine. The parallel layout engine failed. It just kept running into corner cases that didn't handle parallel layout well. If you look in the layout_2020 folder in the source repository, you can see an in-progress pivot to a new approach that would hopefully have less problems, but now we'll never know. This isn't a surprise. It was supposed to be a research project; if parts of it didn't fail, that would be a surprise.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

Mozilla Corporation, which develops Firefox, is a for-profit business. It just so happens that 100% of its shares are owned by the Mozilla Foundation, a non-profit.

coldtea 6y ago

The sooner the profit corp dies off and eats humble pie then, the better. An actual community project should rise from this state of affairs, with tanginble, browser-oriented goals, not something dependent on Google's money... Here's the person who announced the firings... Nothing to do with development or FOSS, some laywer ex-Netscape employee: Winifred Mitchell Baker (born 1959) is the Executive Chairwoman and CEO of the Mozilla Foundation and of Mozilla Corporation, a subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation that coordinates development of the open source Mozilla Internet applications, including the Mozilla Firefox web browser. Baker was trained as a lawyer. She coordinates business and policy issues and sits on both the Mozilla Foundation Board of Directors and the Mozilla Corporation Board of Directors. It's like the leeches that hang on to NGOs for a salaried office career, and don't do activism themselves... For all his faults, at least Brendan Eich was an actual developer, and with important contributions to the web and Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox.

nicoburns 6y ago
> Nothing to do with development or FOSS Not exactly nothing to do with FOSS. She wrote the MPL. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker Having said that, I do think these recent layoffs reflect badly on her if she is indeed responsible for them.
The_Colonel 6y ago
> An actual community project should rise from this state of affairs This is just so naive view ... it's always the abstract "community" which should step in and save the day. Recently it was LibreOffice too where people got all mad due to proposed branding and again "community" superhero was expected to step in, fork it and carry on the whole development. In reality these projects are far too huge to be purely community projects. They require full time paid developers and not few of them. They won't be able to survive without corporate sponsorship (and thus influence).
- coldtea 6y ago
  >In reality these projects are far too huge to be purely community projects. Mozilla is far too huge to not have money. Just 200M from those 600 million per year it took from Google, put in the bank, could pay for 50 developers/graphic designers/ $200K per year to work on it for 20 years. That would have taken care of the engine for 2 decades... Instead they burnt money in BS ventures, Cxx salaries, events, and so on...
  - fabrice_d 6y ago
    You're delusional if you think you can maintain a competitive browser runtime with 50 employees.
    - coldtea 6y ago
      I think you can maintain it with even less... KHTML was done by a tiny KDE team. After Apple adopted it, Webkit/Safari only had a small team of people working on it. A good team of 12-20 devs is better than some BS team of 250 with politics, communication overhead, lack of coherence etc that comes with scale...
      - The_Colonel 6y ago
        > KHTML was done by a tiny KDE team. Yes, 20 years ago. Fortunately, web technology did not evolve and grow at all since so it should be doable now too, right?
        coldtea 6y ago
        > Yes, 20 years ago. So? 20 years ago Netscape still had a much larger team, Microsoft too, and Webkit with its small team still beat them in their own game. Small teams can build whole OSes, browsers, compilers, and whatever they put their mind too. Given good devs/experts, they can do so even better/faster than bigger teams. P.S. 1 Not that a 50-strong team is small. P.S. 2 Plus, way of missing the point. The team-of-50, 200K, 20 years = 200M was just an example. 200M is 1/3rd of what Mozilla made in a year for decades. And even those 200M would just be the raw money spent, not invested or anything. They could afford to support a 300-strong team of 20 years with 2 years of their revenue un-invested. And that's with a $200K/year salary, which doesn't have to be...
scott_s 6y ago
Not only did I not know that a non-profit could wholly own a for-profit, not only did I not know that they could share executive leadership, I certainly did not know this was the case for Mozilla.
- nicoburns 6y ago
  Note that a for-profit owned by a non-for-profit is really a not-for-profit. Because the only things that the for-profit company can do with it's profit are reinvest it, or give it to the non-for-profit.
  - scott_s 6y ago
    Then what is the benefit of this arrangement? That is, based on what you said, it sounds like there is no meaningful difference between having a non-profit do all the work, and a for-profit doing work on behalf of the non-profit that owns it. But if that was the case, why would anyone bother with the extra layers? I'm inclined to assume there is some reason for the extra layers, and I have difficulty believing those differences are in society's best interest.
    - nicoburns 6y ago
      I think the difference is mainly in restrictions on what kind of activities a non-profit can participate in. I'm not sure on the details.
      - doteka 6y ago
        Taxes are a big reason. In many countries you can save quite a lot on revenue tax this way.
  - coldtea 6y ago
    >Because the only things that the for-profit company can do with it's profit are reinvest it, or give it to the non-for-profit. It can also pay it's Cxx's nice salaries and hefty golden parachutes, which makes it a for profit for them...
tannhaeuser 6y ago
> community project ... rise from affairs By the looks of it, Servo is a project that failed to deliver a new browser engine after years of work. If there were a chance that the project could be turned around to result in usable software, I'm sure Moz wouldn't have killed it. Is it worth the effort to pickup the project rather than starting from scratch? I don't know, and would appreciate if contributors share their opinion, or come up with a roadmap. By the reaction of some devs here on HN ("don't worry, Rust is safe; no really!") unfortunately I got the impression that the project was treated more as a showcase for Rust rather than a serious attempt at a new browser engine (please don't take it personally; I know this attitude from the "100% Javs" days and consider it a junior dev trait). Also, the "rise from ashes"/Phoenix metapher is no stranger to Mozilla, only that Moz picked the remains from Netscape; the effort to code a browser from scratch (in Java) had failed as well; it resulted in the Rhino JavaScript engine which is still heavily used.
- Crespyl 6y ago
  Servo wasn't intended to build a full engine to replace Gecko, just to prove out components (Stylo, WebRender, etc) that could be integrated back into Gecko proper, built in a way that takes full advantage of Rusts strengths, and it's been pretty successful by that measure, IMO. There was plenty more work to do (other commenters have mentioned a new layout engine), and I'm disappointed to see Mozilla abandoning such a core next-gen R&D project that has already brought substantial improvements to their main product.
  - SamReidHughes 6y ago
    > Servo wasn't intended to build a full engine to replace Gecko, just to prove out components That's really not a true reflection of prior communications about Servo's goals.
- notriddle 6y ago
  Parts of Servo succeeded, like the webrender GPU stack and the CSS selector engine. The parallel layout engine failed. It just kept running into corner cases that didn't handle parallel layout well. If you look in the layout_2020 folder in the source repository, you can see an in-progress pivot to a new approach that would hopefully have less problems, but now we'll never know. This isn't a surprise. It was supposed to be a research project; if parts of it didn't fail, that would be a surprise.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]