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That's not true, Mozilla also exist to pay Mitchell Baker and her cronies fat salaries. In 2020, she got paid $3MM. In 2021, after an incredible year which sa

• maverick74 3y ago
  Thats not all!!! I was really amazed with this post I found here the other day: https://lunduke.locals.com/post/4387539/firefox-money-investigating-the-bizarre-finances-of-mozilla https://lunduke.locals.com/post/4387539/firefox-money-invest... maybe they should think better where they put their money!!! If servo ever gets into a decent independent browser I will let go of Firefox the second its released!!! I do not support a donation-based tech company spending money in other places not related to tech!
  • phero_cnstrcts 3y ago
    Wow. If that’s all true then that’s really disconcerting but hardly surprising in this corrupt-to-bone world. Every single choice we have to make boils down to taking the lesser evil.
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  • dralley 3y ago
    Bryan Lunduke is a terrible source for anything. You'd do better ignoring what he has to say and interpreting the source documents yourself.
    • cmcaleer 3y ago
      Lunduke has his issues but I don't actually think there's are massive issues with this post. He clearly has idealistic issues with the political spending but it's hard to disagree that $500k on McKenzie Mack Group is probably not the best way to spend money... FWIW I think a few of these likely have perfectly reasonable innocent explanations like consultants having a company they don't bother branding rather taking payments personally (hence hard to find specifics on them - they brand themselves rather than their company) and I find it hard to believe that Lunduke didn't consider this possibility, but he asks nothing that doesn't deserve an answer. What's specifically wrong with this post besides the author?
      • dralley 3y ago
        One example is that he first explains that there are two different Mozillas, the corporation and the foundation, and then proceeds to ignore that for the rest of the peice when it's rhetorically convenient to do so. He bags on "Mozilla" for claiming that they relied on donations to function on a Foundation donation page, using the total revenue from both orgs as proof that wasn't true, but didn't bother to drill down into the Foundation's income specifically to see if the statement was true in the actual context that it was being made. Which is a common theme in a lot of his work. If he has an axe to grind (and he clearly does if you're familiar with his comments about Mozilla going back like 5+ years), his journalistic integrity takes a nosedive. Remember when he claimed that Mozilla funded terrorists because they donated to a privacy focused email service, and some antifa group he disliked used that email service? I do. Mostly, knowing how completely insane he has been on this and similar topics in the past makes me assume that he's probably as least being misleading now.
• walteweiss 3y ago
  I have been liking Mozilla for a very long time, and even has thoughts of applying to work there. Now I read about that woman and I’m not so sure any longer. Now I see it all as some kind of politics, when you say so beautiful and shiny words, but in truth your actions are the opposite to all that.
  • kaba0 3y ago
    Do you approve, or even know about your current company’s CEO?
    • insanitybit 3y ago
      "Other person is bad" is not an excuse, especially when your entire company's position is "we're not those guys".
      • kaba0 3y ago
        My point was - the vast majority of people don’t care or even know about their CEO. Why is it suddenly a problem with Mozilla?
        • raincole 3y ago
          OR bad leadership is a problem with a lot of companies, but this thread just happens to be about Mozilla?
        • insanitybit 3y ago
          That's a bad point for a lot of reasons. 1. It's irrelevant, as I pointed out. 2. It's a false premise. We talk about bad CEOs all the time, especially egregiously bad ones. I saw only just the other day comments on the Yahoo CEO.
        • omginternets 3y ago
          That doesn’t track with my experience at all, so it seems like the kind of place where hard numbers would help you make your point.
• OfSanguineFire 3y ago
  Interesting, I didn’t know that Baker was paid by the corporation. American 501c3 non-profit law is deeply flawed and, though orgs aren’t allowed to generate profit per se, they can pay their staff salaries as high as they want. If the board consists of the staff’s friends, eventually the staff view their positions as a sinecure and put in the minimum effort necessary to keep their jobs. So, I assumed that what happened with Firefox's director was the same corrupt non-profit thing.
  • swores 3y ago
    Is there any evidence that's a problem that actually happens often, as opposed to just being something you can easily imagine happening? I've known quite a lot of CEOs, of small and big for-profits and charities too, and anecdotally they've all been some of the hardest working people I know. There's many complaints to make against many CEOs (including some of the ones I've known), often including taking obscene salaries while under-paying workers, or other problematic management decisions, but in my experience laziness just doesn't seem common - in exec levels generally as well as chief ones. If you want to be lazy and paid well, there are easier jobs with less constant security than being a CEO!
    • OfSanguineFire 3y ago
      It happens often enough. I don’t want to give exact names, as that would possibly dox me, but 1) as an idealistic young person I worked for a time in the central office of an org where both ordinary staff and management admitted that they had long since lost interest in the mission, but the position was comfortable and required little actual work, and since the board consisted of some pretty acquiescing and clueless people, they were able to ensure regular pay increases. 2) One 501c3 I have been active in, dedicated to a certain hobby, is currently riven by scandal because the board hired a new director who, according to tax filings, gets a big salary for only a few hours of work a week, and this is only one of several business ventures she has going on, and the others look like outright grifts.
      • warkdarrior 3y ago
• moritonal 3y ago
  I think the biggest mistake they made was not succeeding in convincing edge to use Firefox's backend. It was such an obvious move but Microsoft instead have opted for the embrace technique.
  • bad_user 3y ago
    Microsoft wouldn't have anything to gain by forking Firefox, as Chrome was already dominant and Chromium is open source, with more resources going into its development. Microsoft dropped IExplorer because they were far behind in their implementation and by embracing Chromium they short-circuited the development needed to produce a credible alternative. They had nothing to gain from Firefox and everything to lose, actually.
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    • moritonal 3y ago
      Never said Microsoft would benefit. I said it was Firefox's failing to convince them of that direction.
• hef19898 3y ago
  But isn't 3M the normal SV FAANG salary?
  • gwervc 3y ago
    Excluding Netflix as it's irrelevant technology-wise and including Microsoft, the difference is that those companies are offering a wide array of core products (operating systems, developer tools, server hosting, smartphones, etc) which most people on earth consume. They make a lot of money and continue to do so. On the other hand what is Mozilla offering? A (now) obscure web browser that has run an Google charity for decades. It's painfully obvious that Mozilla isn't playing in the same category.
    • trimethylpurine 3y ago
      >On the other hand what is Mozilla offering? Mozilla makes and manages many other software titles besides Firefox. Rust, NSS, etc. Just think about all the current software built on Rust. That alone is a huge contribution to the tech industry and to society, more indirectly.
      • vlovich123 3y ago
        Rust hasn’t been managed by Mozilla for a long time. It got spun out years ago and Mozilla laid off all the people working on Servo
      • xedrac 3y ago
        Unfortunately Mozilla has little input on Rust these days. They fired nearly everyone working on it.
      • ww520 3y ago
        Rust got kicked out of Mozilla long time ago. The developers were let go.
    • PedroBatista 3y ago
      Mozilla is providing a defense card for Google's lawyers when the anti-thrust sharks circle around..
• kossTKR 3y ago
  Straight up wicked! I'm absolutely disgusted every time i'm reminded of just how obscene the yearly pay for that class of people, and how often they are just straight up psychopaths. They rely on nepotistic networks of power, scamming, and straight up financial crime. Unless you yourself built the company, or pulled some rare actually great scheme to elevate it, everything above 1MM a year is stealing from other peoples wages, especially in orgs like this. I wonder why people haven't pulled a french revolution when there's countless examples of this type of siphoning everywhere these days. These people don't give a fuck, they are twofaced, they lie all day long while they take your money and use it to buy wine cellars, yachts and propaganda to keep everyone down - all disguised by buzzwords like "open", "green", "patriotic" or whatever while they tank the great work done non psychopaths.
• insanitybit 3y ago
  Mozilla is a case study in how damaging a CEO can be. She is truly a disaster and I have literally zero confidence in the company's success (or its ability to effect its mission) under her leadership.
  • dgb23 3y ago
    That comes off as too targeted. This instance shows a few _general_ problems: 1. Compensation is a function of power, not merit. Merit is a secondary, indirect factor that _can_ have an effect on power, but it's not a necessary condition. Power often comes from social currency, negotiation, manipulation, wealth and ownership. 2. Power and responsibility are at best loosely correlated. Often those in power try excuse their obscene privileges by pointing to responsibility. According to this idea, their decisions are force multipliers and they carry a huge risk. But reality shows time and time again, that this isn't true outside of the most extreme cases. They accumulate power and wealth to an irresponsible degree and make irresponsible decisions all the time without being held accountable. In fact, many get _rewarded_ instead. --- I want a Mozilla that is the steward of the fastest, most advanced, secure and user respecting browser. I want the best in class dev tools. I would gladly pay good money for that and I 100% bet that there would be enough people who would too.
    • AnthonyMouse 3y ago
      What I don't understand is why someone doesn't just, essentially, fork the browser and take over for them. You'd either need someone with enough name recognition that the people tired of Mozilla's incompetence would switch to their fork (and thereby give them the search revenue), or a donation from someone to get them off the ground, but nobody even wants to make the attempt?
      • paulryanrogers 3y ago
        There are several Firefox forks of some note: LibreWolf, Palemoon, etc. I think you'll find that maintaining a huge, legacy codebase that supports a rapidly expanding API is significantly more costly than a single engineer's salary.
• lamontcg 3y ago
  Clearly time to switch back to Chrome, where Sundar Pichai made $226 million last year, and fired 12,000 people back in Jan.
• neilv 3y ago
  Mozilla has occasionally seemed to have inconsistent values/behavior, for a long time, which has made me nervous. But some of their stuff is still the best starting point for some public interest technology goals. So I keep working with it, and promoting it (though not as strongly as I have in the past). I've suspected that their mix of people includes (but not limited to): * many very capable true-believers in their ostensible mission, like we'd expect of Mozilla (though they can't all have perfect morale right now); * some people who've gone through, or are going through, a rough time, and are trying to use Mozilla to solve problems that they see elsewhere in the world (even if off-mission, but other people are sympathetic and want to help, so it's complicated); * maybe some true-believers who have to make hard compromises to keep Mozilla alive, somewhat quietly (and maybe it's hard to know which compromises to make, and to not lose the way at some point); and * people who'd actually much rather have their counterpart roles at a FAANG or other prestitious tech company (and so aren't true-believers in the mission, and will tend to think and act with their true thinking, with impact to vision and decisions, and to leadership of the true-believers). Maybe some key people span multiple categories. This isn't a satisfying grand unified theory of all of Mozilla's behavior, and I'm sure there's insiders with better insights.
• paulryanrogers 3y ago
  How does Sundar or Eich compare?
  • xnx 3y ago
    GOOG stock is up 300% under Sundar.
    • paulryanrogers 3y ago
      Yet how much of Sundar's time is spent on Chrome? Then what's that percentage of his compensation? My guess is it's likely millions more than any Mozilla CEO. Google is also under investigation for buying browser defaults and probably should be under investigation for bundling.
• bigtex 3y ago
  Maybe getting rid of Brendan Eich wasn’t the best idea.