Comment by cxr
3 years ago
You seem to have fallen into a time machine where it's not 2023 but instead... I dunno... 2010? (I'd have said 2013, but even that would still have been too generous; there's no defensible reason for crediting 2013-era Mozcorp as deserving of the warm fuzzies involved here, either. By then, it had managed to do what Netscape failed at—consolidating power within the distributed and independent mozilla.org project and assuming control for itself.)
No warm fuzzies here - just a factual summary of Mozilla's legal status and ownership. The boards of most tech companies today have fiduciary duties to shareholders who expect a significant return on their investment, which is not the case for Mozilla.
It's not an explicit part of your comment, but the thread where this interaction is taking place contains a suggestion much stronger than a mere "factual summary of Mozilla's legal status and ownership" (and with all conclusions then left to be drawn by the reader). Viz:
> because it's owned by Mozilla, users don't have to worry about a bait and switch at the end of the growth phase
And with regard to your words on their own, the fact that "Mozilla"* "does not require outsized returns" is a separate matter from whether it is, in practice, "less inclined to place profit above mission or user experience". History has shown—in this decade, at least—that prioritizing mission (and/)or user experience is not actually part of its current MO.
Mozilla Corporation* is a fully taxable company. It has indisputably made exactly the sorts of business deals that anyone would expect from one (and would expect not to be planned let alone executed by a purely principles-based organization). There are ordinary businesses—i.e. companies that don't even have the sort of affiliation with a non-profit parent company the way that the Mozilla-the-corporation has with the foundation—that behave more ethically and more consistent with a principles-first approach than the way that Mozcorp does things in its current incarnation and has been doing for the last 10+ years.
* it's good to be specific