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Having worked for a non-profit many years ago as an office monkey who, among other things, took notes on finance committee meetings, it's typical to have some o

Having worked for a non-profit many years ago as an office monkey who, among other things, took notes on finance committee meetings, it's typical to have some operating reserves that you can measure in terms of how many months or years of your operating expenses they could cover. This is a common financial stress test used to assess the financial health of organizations. Given Mozilla's singular dependence on Google search and pressure to diversify income streams, it's their firewall in case of emergency. And frankly the simple return on investment from their endowment year to year is one of the strongest non-Google revenue streams at their disposal right now. If armageddon came and they no longer had their search revenue, they could cover 2 years of their operational costs. Many organizations have endowments that cover them for anywhere from 5 to 20 years. What I understand off the top of my head is that their major spending categories are software development, "operations" which is largely infrastructure to support that development, legal, and marketing. I could see the case for not spending so much on marketing, but it would be organizational suicide to deficit spend away their endowment, their one firewall against existential threats, on "engineering" without a credible road map to long-term sustainable income that's better than what they're already doing. In fact if you catch the HN comment section on the right say, such behavior would probably be pointed to as yet another example of wasting money on unfocused side bets, because at the end of the day the mob truly can't decide what it wants. And who knows maybe this "spend it all down on engineering + ??? + profit" plan could work, but that would be extremely risky and would hinge on the details of a plan. But I don't feel like I'm hearing a plan so much as vibes. I would actually turn the tables on this whole entire interpretation and say what they spend relative to their market share, they're actually punching above their weight compared to Google, and that this criticism of "hoarding" is not grounded in financial literacy.

yencabulator 1y ago
The whole argument is that Mozilla is using their money incredibly inefficiently, and a good chunk of that is putting money into the pockets of the people managing it. They claim to be putting $220 M/year into software development, but can't sponsor Servo even at $1 M/year? I call bullshit.
- glenstein 1y ago
  Well I did just give you four paragraphs extensively elaborating on the strategic value of having an endowment, and how strategically fundamental it is to the long-term health, health of any organization and how it's consistent with financial management you see at typical Western non-profit institutions. I actually think you're right that they should have kept Servo, but that doesn't sustain the charge that is smart to not have an endowment or spend down their endowment for no reason. Most of your questions are financial literacy issues in response to standard non-profit disclosures rather than legitimate critique of strategy.
  - yencabulator 1y ago
    Sure, let them hold on to that cool $1B, and live off the interest. Now, how come they burn $220+ M/year into software development and $0 on Servo?
    - glenstein 1y ago
      They're maintaining 32 million lines of code, same as Chrome, on dramatically less resources. So if the question is how they manage to be so much more efficient in terms of ratio of resources invested to production capability (or insert preferred metric, LoC, market share, code line commits, security updates etc), I think it likely comes down to the breakthrough efficiencies of Rust, which they developed. Rust was the backbone of Quantum, their monumental overhaul and modernization of the Gecko engine. Mozilla is way ahead of competitors in shipping production Rust code. Google is in C++, but taking baby steps toward also implementing Rust in bits and parts but with lots of security containering and interfacing with C++.
      - yencabulator 1y ago
        You seem to be describing a project that was abandoned by Mozilla and what resulted in what is today known as Servo. Firefox contains not-so-much Rust and Servo would have been the road there. Mozilla is specifically not developing Servo, and thus mostly not getting the benefits you state. (The major exception being Stylo.)

yencabulator 1y ago

The whole argument is that Mozilla is using their money incredibly inefficiently, and a good chunk of that is putting money into the pockets of the people managing it. They claim to be putting $220 M/year into software development, but can't sponsor Servo even at $1 M/year? I call bullshit.

glenstein 1y ago
Well I did just give you four paragraphs extensively elaborating on the strategic value of having an endowment, and how strategically fundamental it is to the long-term health, health of any organization and how it's consistent with financial management you see at typical Western non-profit institutions. I actually think you're right that they should have kept Servo, but that doesn't sustain the charge that is smart to not have an endowment or spend down their endowment for no reason. Most of your questions are financial literacy issues in response to standard non-profit disclosures rather than legitimate critique of strategy.
- yencabulator 1y ago
  Sure, let them hold on to that cool $1B, and live off the interest. Now, how come they burn $220+ M/year into software development and $0 on Servo?
  - glenstein 1y ago
    They're maintaining 32 million lines of code, same as Chrome, on dramatically less resources. So if the question is how they manage to be so much more efficient in terms of ratio of resources invested to production capability (or insert preferred metric, LoC, market share, code line commits, security updates etc), I think it likely comes down to the breakthrough efficiencies of Rust, which they developed. Rust was the backbone of Quantum, their monumental overhaul and modernization of the Gecko engine. Mozilla is way ahead of competitors in shipping production Rust code. Google is in C++, but taking baby steps toward also implementing Rust in bits and parts but with lots of security containering and interfacing with C++.
    - yencabulator 1y ago
      You seem to be describing a project that was abandoned by Mozilla and what resulted in what is today known as Servo. Firefox contains not-so-much Rust and Servo would have been the road there. Mozilla is specifically not developing Servo, and thus mostly not getting the benefits you state. (The major exception being Stylo.)