Comment by NoboruWataya
3 years ago
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