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Exactly, and to your point, a lot of the charges against Mozilla are mutually exclusive, contradictory, or barely even half-made attempts at arguments. You've o
by glenstein 1y ago
Exactly, and to your point, a lot of the charges against Mozilla are mutually exclusive, contradictory, or barely even half-made attempts at arguments. You've outlined the make money/don't make money contradiction. But to add a few more of the crazy criticisms, sincerely made:
- Implying without evidence that the VPN is run at prohibitively massive cost and at the expense of other programs
- Claiming that Mozilla has "run out of money" (they have over $1 billion in assets)
- Overstating costs of Mozilla's dabbling in blockchain (they wrote a paper or two)
- Claiming the CEO pay has crippled Mozilla's ability to work on core browser (it's slightly more than 1% of their revenue)
- Claiming without any mechanism or argument that there's a missing feature Mozilla could have developed that would have restored all their market share
- Related to the above, completely ignoring that Chrome drove market share in its own proactive ways, leveraging its search and Android dominance, rolling out affordable Chromebooks and that these drove the market share more than anything specific to Mozilla
- Firefox has become bloated and slow (Outdated talking point, it was true for a time, but then they did the dang thing and delivered Quantum, which delivered the major advances in speed in stability that everyone asked for)
That's not to say there's no valid criticisms, there are plenty. There seems to be real cause and effect, for instance, on Firefox's investments in FirefoxOS and the ability to invest resources in the browser, and that did happen over a time where market share was lost. And the dabbling in ads risks compromising the soul of their mission in critical ways.
But meanwhile these (above) have all generally been basically misunderstandings or bad arguments with no internal logic, but claimed over and over again in the backwaters of internet comment sections with complete impunity. The case study in comment section hallucinations is as interesting to me as what is presently unfolding at Mozilla itself.
- LexiMax 1y ago> The case study in comment section hallucinations is as interesting to me as what is presently unfolding at Mozilla itself. I have long suspected that a good chunk of the controversy surrounding Mozilla that I've seen is...let's just call it motivated reasoning.
- jfengel 1y ago(it's slightly more than 1% of their revenue) In a lot of industries, 1% revenue is rather a lot. Many domains have profit margins of 5% or even less; that would be fully 20% of your earnings. Software development is not "many industries", and Mozilla isn't most software development companies. So it's hard for me to say whether that specific CEO salary is appropriate. But I'd rather see his salary described by earnings, rather than revenue, since revenue by itself could just be churn.
- NautilusWave 1y agoDon't you have to look at Mozilla CEO's salary in the context of that of other non-profits?
- fzzzy 1y agoMozilla Corp isn’t a non-profit. Mozilla org is, but the discussion is about the corp ceo.
- glenstein 1y agoIf it impresses you that the CEO pay is 20% of earnings, then, well, software development is going to be something like 500% of earnings, overhead will be 250%, and so on. The relative proportions of the different expenses will be the same. They just look bigger when you compare them to profits. The CEO pay certainly matters and it's more than I would like, but I don't see how considering it as 20% of profits rather than 1% of revenue demonstrates that it's taking more away from development than any other 1% of their spending.
- jfengel 1y agoYes, but now you're comparing the CEO to entire departments. Each individual software developer is receiving less than 1% of earnings. Is the CEO really 20 times more productive than they are? Would it be possible to increase net earnings with a CEO who took home only 19% of net earnings? Changing out a single developer for a cheaper one is not going to be meaningful. But a CEO who takes home a significant fraction of the profit could probably be replaced by somebody who does 99.9% as good a job for 95% of the salary. In fact, there's a good chance that one of those developers could do 50% as good a job for 1% of the salary. The shareholders would take home more money.
- jama211 1y agoWell said, and this applies to most armchair experts on most subjects on the internet.