4 ms·
What's the quote?
by tectec 10mo ago
What's the quote?
- Teever 10mo ago"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." I agree with the person you're responding to. Decades of funding and they have zero savings to show for it. Though it's questionable as to how much big players like Google would have continued to fund Mozilla if they had seen Mozilla making the financial moves that would have made it an independent and self-sufficient entity.
- gkoberger 10mo agoWell, they have over a billion in the bank. Which is both a ton of money, but also goes away quickly when you're a large company paying lots of money to salaries.
- zug_zug 10mo agoSo if you have a billion in the bank, you can collect 5% return and never touch the money. So you get $50m a year to pay enough engineers to make a browser. That's plenty of money if they recognize they need a super lean company with 0 bloat and a few highly paid experts who focus on correctness and not bullshit features.
- pseudalopex 10mo agoHow many engineers are enough to make a browser? How do you know? Vivaldi employ 28 developers and 33 others to make an unstable Chromium fork and email program.[1] Bloat and bullshit features to you are minimum requirements to someone else. [1] https://vivaldi.com/team/ https://vivaldi.com/team/
- prepend 10mo agoBrave has about 300 employees and don’t break out engineers [0]. One of them is Brandon Eich so that counts for a bunch. Their revenue is only $52M so kinda what Mozilla would earn off their endowment. [0] https://getlatka.com/companies/brave.com https://getlatka.com/companies/brave.com
- FooBarWidget 10mo agoBrave doesn't make their own browser engine.
- pseudalopex 10mo agoLatka are not reliable. And you assumed Brave were profitable? Brave make a Chromium fork and a search engine. Does a search engine or a web browser engine require more people?
- BrendanEich 9mo agoThat's all b.s. of the ripest kind.
- shevy-java 10mo agoLadybird had fewer devs, so what were these devs at Vivaldi doing? I don't think your argument has a lot of merit. 28 is not a magic number.
- pseudalopex 10mo ago> Ladybird had fewer devs, so what were these devs at Vivaldi doing? The Ladybird developers have not produced a browser comparable to Firefox or Vivaldi. Vivaldi have not produced a browser engine comparable to Ladybird of course. > I don't think your argument has a lot of merit. 28 is not a magic number. 28 is a magic number was not a reasonable interpretation of my comment.
- gsich 10mo agoYet.
- pseudalopex 10mo agoYes. This discussion is now. Not in a future which may not arrive.
- rdiddly 10mo agoThere are about 800 unique weekly committers to the Chromium project, so that's a start at gauging the number for that project. A little harder to find that same figure for Firefox, but Wikipedia says Mozilla Corp had about 750 employees as of 2020. Anyway, if you have $50M, you can afford 500 people at $100k, or 250 people at $200k. So you simply declare, this is how many people it takes to make a browser, and set your goals and timetables accordingly. I feel like the goals and direction might be more important than the number of bodies you throw at it, but maybe that's naïve. But when the product is mature like Firefox (or Chrome for that matter) you do have some flexibility on the headcount.
- tikhonj 10mo agoYou're significantly underestimating fully-loaded cost per person + other expenses. An engineer making a $200k salary is going to cost the company something like $300k, and there are some additional fixed overheads. And $200k is quite a bit less than your competitors are paying. So you're looking at something more like 150 employees total of which <100 are going to be pure engineers, and that's stretching your budget and operations pretty aggressively while also fighting an uphill battle for recruiting skilled and experienced engineers. (And browser development definitely needs a core of experienced engineers with a relatively niche set of skills!)
- tigroferoce 10mo agoWorking at Mozilla should be more than money. $200k/year is more than enough to be happy in most of the world. You don't need to compete on rock stars that must live in San Francisco, and focus on people that are happy with a high paying job and have enough idealism to accept "only" $200k/year.
- account42 10mo agoExactly. One of the biggest problems with Mozilla is that they see themselves as akin to Google et al.
- rdiddly 10mo ago
- roenxi 10mo agoThat isn't really the best way to think about not-for-profit schemes like Mozilla. Every organisation eventually becomes corrupted (as in fact we see with Mozilla), so creating an eternal pot of money for something is not strategically sensible. If good people are in charge, they'll just spend everything and rely on ongoing donations. If nobody thinks it is worth donating too then it is time to close up shop. Keep a bit of a buffer for the practical issue of bad years, sure, but the idea shouldn't be to set up an endowment.
- glenstein 10mo ago>So if you have a billion in the bank, I just want to note that this is what is sometimes called carouseling. Which is, instead of acknowledging the original accusation was not correct, which is what should be happening, this comment just proceeds right on to the next accusation. What is happening, psychologically speaking, that is causing a mass of people to spew one confidently wrong accusation after another? They don't have an endowment (they do!). Well they're not investing it! (they are). Well they're not working on the browser! (they shipped 12 major releases with thousands of patches per release with everything from new tab grouping and stacking to improved gpu performance to security fixes) This is like a dancing sickness or something.
- Teever 10mo ago> "...if they had seen Mozilla making the financial moves that would have made it an independent and self-sufficient entity." Does their endowment fund enable them to be an independent and self-sufficient entity? In other words, Can they live off it in perpetuity?
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- pseudalopex 10mo agoThe question is if their endowment can fund a competitive independent web browser in perpetuity. Looking at other web browsers suggests no.
- glenstein 10mo agoLet's start with the acknowledgement of carouseling.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- vjvjvjvjghv 10mo agoExactly! With such an endowment they should be able to develop a browser and maybe some other stuff with a small team that’s focused on tech and not social justice.
- account42 10mo agoBut then they can't LARP as a silicon valley tech giant with million dollar CEO salaries.
- lesuorac 10mo ago> Though it's questionable as to how much big players like Google would have continued to fund Mozilla if they had seen Mozilla making the financial moves that would have made it an independent and self-sufficient entity. Look at how much money Google gave to Apple (Safari) vs Mozilla (FireFox) per year. The CEO has unarguable been doing a poor job. Losing market share has lost them more potential revenue than any of their pet projects raised.