As with Wikipedia, what I assumed how the organization operated and how it does is vastly different.
Basically everything here seems biazarre and makes trusting Mozilla very hard. Does anybody believe that they can stand up against Google, when Google, at any point they want to, could crash their whole operation?
I think it is quite likely that Google is keeping Mozilla afloat to avoid anti-trust allegations. Mozilla existing is worth a few hundred millions to Google. But Mozilla apparently has no real use for that money, they spend around 200M on software developmemt that means one thousand high paying software developer positions. And they could hire hundreds of more developers at any point.
2) spending resources on literally anything except Firefox
3) doing anything that smells like monetizing Firefox, no matter how innocuous
Spoiler alert: They have essentially no hope of avoiding 1 without doing at least a little bit of 2 or 3. Unlike Google, Apple, and Microsoft, they don't have billions of dollars coming through the backdoor from other business units.
As for "whether they can stand up to them", they can and do, all the time. Including _literally this week_ with Google's Web integrity bullshit. Whether it accomplishes much is a different matter, but it's not for lack of an attempt on their part.
>HN loves to simultaneously criticize Mozilla for 1...3
You summarise pretty much everything that is wrong with HN started appearing somewhere around 2013 before becoming mainstream in 2016+.
That is having zero understanding on business. Cash Flow, Revenue Generation, Sustainable business model, and market monetisation. Ironically on forum that is about startup and VC.
I do get that they aren't in a position where they have easy choices, but what they are currently doing is wrong. They need to be a much smaller and focused organization, which can generate funds from various sources and use them to do effective development. You don't need 200M to develop firefox.
In their current position they exist to give Google some protection against anti-trust allegations. That is about the worst spot for their organization to be in.
>As for "whether they can stand up to them", they can and do, all the time.
You are right. Google likely knows that they can completly ignore them, so they can say whatever they want.
Mozilla can explore turning Firefox freemium and cutting relience on Google.
At 10% conversion, and $20/year price point, Mozilla would be making the same money it now makes from Google, but it would be coming 100% from its users, aligning all incentives. Then it is a whole new reality regarding product and company decisions.
The browser is the most intimate product we spend hours in every day to access information. The age of paying for your browser and have it work in your interest should re-emerge.
I would gladly give five figures to Mozilla if I knew it would go, without replacement, to Firefox. They don't. So I won't. Nothing else they do is remotely offensive compared to the mission creep.
Bear in mind a lot of it is just concern trolling.
Many of the people saying this have as much interest in improving the things they complain about as anti-renewable comments have a genuine interest in reducing bird fatalities.
Mozilla (and Wikipedia as mentioned by the OP) have been subjected to a long running culture war boycott.
Similar to wind power, I'd guess their continued success in the face of this contributes to the feelings of anger towards them.
It is both, but Mozilla has never tried to hide it. Read their blog for a bit and you'll see ton of advocacy for various subjects.
Cherry-picking expenses that total barely 500k out of a 500M budget and hiding it behind "noooo we don't get political here promised" is also pushing an agenda.
The Mozilla Foundation does plenty of stupid shit. I don't agree with much of what they're doing, starting from Baker's insane pay for how terrible of a job she does. But 400k to an association... At best that pays for two rallies that total 500 people, at worst it's giving money to friends.
What a dumb hit piece. The author Cherry picked things to politicize.
How about the many millions of dollars the Mozilla Foundation spends on grands and research supporting so many individuals and organizations that help make the world a better place.
2) They still have no job focusing on these things when their browser, their main product, is loosing market share like crazy. Why not spend all that money on Servo and Oxidation instead?
3) It's not politicizing to say that a software developer is using money for political purposes instead of making software. You are the one politicizing this because you deflect from this valid criticism into a discussion about the author's politics.
Disgusting. I hope that Mozilla can re-focus on their original mission, and align their finances with building the best browser possible rather than wasting it on political activism.
Obviously relying on Google for money is fraught, but it isn't exactly clear where they'd get an equivalent source of income. Otherwise the subtext seems to be "I don't like their politics" which suggests maybe the author shouldn't donate any money to them. Personally I would be sad if Firefox was neglected, but that doesn't seem to be happening, as far as I can see.
I suppose Microsoft might be willing to broker a deal to have Bing as the default search, although that would probably attract similar levels of criticism from the same people.
DuckDuckGo would be the "obvious" choice, but I doubt they can come up with the same kind of numbers.
Brave Search might be an option, but unlike Google and Microsoft the browser is Brave's main product so they might not want to deal with a competitor, they probably have a lot less cash lying around, and they have some history with Mozilla.
Yahoo! Search is still around, maybe some others? I don't think anyone other than Microsoft and Google have a spare ~$500 million lying around for this though.
Wait what? "spare money lying around?" that is a complete misunderstanding of how this works. You make it sound as if that money is some kind of "donation". THat Google is doing Mozilla a _favour_ here. But nothing could be further from the truth: instead this is a business deal where everyone wins. (Read: generates a stupid amount of revenue)
Google probably makes at least 3x of what it pays Mozilla in search royalties. At least. Who knows what Google makes with what it does after Firefox has done its small part.
This is a hugely profitable business for Google. That has _nothing_ to do with "spare money lying around". This is a cash cow for Google. Specially since they do the same with other players like Apple. Many many billions of dollars are at stake.
From the report: During 2021, Mozilla paid $387 Thousand dollars to a Mckensie Mack Group whose LinkedIn page describes itself as “Black-led and nonbinary-led, MMG is a global social justice organization”.
And another $100K to an "Action research collaborative" that sounds like another social justice org?
WTF? This sounds like money laundering. I just want a good browser. I'm now regretful that I was donating regularly to Mozilla.
100% looks like money laundering. They paid six figure amounts to businesses that don't even have a website and are impossible to find any information on:
- "What, exactly, is “Action Research Collaborative”? That is a surprisingly difficult question to find an answer to, as they have no website whatsoever. One of the few references to it is in a Cornell newsletter from earlier this year..."
- "$30,000 to “MC Technical Inc.” in 2021. Who are they? Well, they don’t have a website, that’s for sure. The business registry listing is about the only thing of the company that seems to exist. The listed address is someone’s house."
- "Why do some of the recipients of Mozilla money appear to be nothing more than empty shells of companies — not even having a simple website?"
- "Why does Mozilla continue to take donations if it doesn’t need them?"
- "Where does Mozilla spend those donated dollars?"
- "Why is Mozilla decreasing software development funding when development of Firefox is the cash cow?"
And the author adds this update at the end of the article: "August 5th, 2023 Update: To date, no request for clarification or additional details has been answered."
This is extremely suspicious on Mozilla's part. I hope there is further investigation into all this wild spending they are doing using public donations without any accountability.
"$30,000 to “MC Technical Inc.” in 2021. Who are they? Well, they don’t have a website, that’s for sure. The business registry listing is about the only thing of the company that seems to exist. The listed address is someone’s house."
It is a nice round number so it is probably someone who did some work for them and sent them an invoice. There is nothing special about that. Unless you have an agenda to make it sound like something bad. Which I think the author does.
Many hacker news readers have their own incorporated with weird names that are registered to their home addresses. Because when you provide services to a company you ideally need a legal entity. Having an address is a legal requirement. And having a website is not.
It is that simple. The Mozilla Foundation probably has many contractors that do work for them.
Similar to "Why do some of the recipients of Mozilla money appear to be nothing more than empty shells of companies — not even having a simple website?" - it just shows the author has no idea how small non-profit / 501(c) world works. It is easy to make it sound like a headline but in reality it is probably just small non profits struggling to get funding to do interesting things.
"Why do some of the recipients of Mozilla money appear to be nothing more than empty shells of companies — not even having a simple website?"
This is exactly how many readers here at hacker news also run their business: you need an official entity to receive money.
And if you are doing something interesting that the Mozilla Foundation would like to support with a grand for example then you will need to have that "empty shell" because if you receive funding for a project personally you will be taxed the shit out of it and lose many benefits. There is literally nothing special about this.
"Where does the Mozilla Foundation spend those donated dollars?"
Because although the author conflates Foundation and Corporation they are in fact separate entities and money does not go into a single bank account.
If you want to know where the Mozilla Foundation spends your donated dollars then you can read their financial report. There are many dozens of line items that list where money goes.
"Why does Mozilla continue to take donations if it doesn’t need them?"
Because raising money is literally what non profits do as their primary means of income. They cannot just "take" money from the "cash cow", the Corporation which is a separate entity.
I sort of understand that Mozilla wants to care for the concept of an open internet which requires a lot more than just software development. I don't particularly understand or like the exact things they finance, but politics is a complex game in which you loose if you don't play.
What I absolutely fail to understand though is why they don't have long-term focus on diversifying income? All their alternative revenue sources are neglibile, and their strange attempts to provide paid products seem to be either hobby-projects of someone at mozilla (ex: pocket) or a cheap rebrand of a product (ex: vpn).
Am I wrong to expect more from such a technologically capable organisation?
They do have a focus on that, it just hasn't really panned out. To be fair, you're talking about the billion dollar question. It's not exactly an easy problem.
>Mozilla should convert to a worker owned enterprise and stop giving all of that money to execs.
The compensation to execs seems irrelevant. That is almost literally just a Google bribe.
Mozilla pays 200M for software development, from that I can only assume that they pay quite generously and they seem to have absolutely no issue with money, as they are funded by Google.
To me it seems hey have more money than they know what to do with. Hardly something which could be fixed by workers rising up and taking care of distributing Googles Millions.
Mozilla literally forced out the creator of Javascript, Brendan Eich, because of his religious and political views.
They're funded by Google because Alphabet doesn't want another IE6/MS anti-trust case. They are planned/fake competition. The fact that there are privacy aware forks of Firefox (like Librewolf) speaks volumes.
Should still convert to a worker owned enterprise. Democratically the workers most likely wouldn't vote to waste money on Google bribes like the execs have.
How has she not been ejected after so many years of falling market share? I have a really hard time understanding the business sense of a board that hasn't taken a very hard look at Mozilla's leadership.
I couldn't possibly say, but one might suspect she has old connections with early Googlers, and Mozilla is still (at ever lower revshare rates in successive deals) a cheap source of search traffic for Google, and good PR aka "antitrust repellant". At $5.6M/year comp, wouldn't you sell your soul this way? https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2021/mozilla-fdn-990...
Because the board is perfectly content with sucking Mozilla dry.
Mitchell Baker - Lawyer, wrote the MPL (involved since Netscape)
Laura Chambers - Stanford MBA, ex-McKinsey, ex-eBay C-suite, ex AirBnB, ex Paypal. Currently CEO of a wearable breast pump company.
Kerry Cooper - Harvard MBA, currently also in the board of PG&E, Upstart, Gradient, Fernish, Fictiv as well as an executive-in-residence at Acrew Capital.
Karim Lakhani - PhD in management at MIT, Professor of Business Administration, publishes papers on management and once a decade a paper on open source/open contribution.
Bob Lisbonne - Stanford MBA, venture capitalist, ex Netscape/Mozilla
Hugh Molotsi - Computer Engineering Masters, ex Intuit, specializes in intrapreneurial actions
Kristin Skogen Lund - INSEAD MBA, ex Coca-Cola, ex Unilever, various governmental positions in Norway
The amount of people with technical knowledge on that board is low. The amount of people that aren't MBA leeches is low. The board is perfectly happy to keep the grift going.
She is an old timer that is with Mozilla since the beginning. Should be pretty hard to challenge her from the inside after Brendan Eich departure.
What I have to say is that Brendan Eich lost his respect with hia peers inside Mozilla after donating for the campaign against gay marriage, so it was entirely his fault.
As with Wikipedia, what I assumed how the organization operated and how it does is vastly different.
Basically everything here seems biazarre and makes trusting Mozilla very hard. Does anybody believe that they can stand up against Google, when Google, at any point they want to, could crash their whole operation?
I think it is quite likely that Google is keeping Mozilla afloat to avoid anti-trust allegations. Mozilla existing is worth a few hundred millions to Google. But Mozilla apparently has no real use for that money, they spend around 200M on software developmemt that means one thousand high paying software developer positions. And they could hire hundreds of more developers at any point.
HN loves to simultaneously criticize Mozilla for
1) being financially dependent on Google
2) spending resources on literally anything except Firefox
3) doing anything that smells like monetizing Firefox, no matter how innocuous
Spoiler alert: They have essentially no hope of avoiding 1 without doing at least a little bit of 2 or 3. Unlike Google, Apple, and Microsoft, they don't have billions of dollars coming through the backdoor from other business units.
As for "whether they can stand up to them", they can and do, all the time. Including _literally this week_ with Google's Web integrity bullshit. Whether it accomplishes much is a different matter, but it's not for lack of an attempt on their part.
>HN loves to simultaneously criticize Mozilla for 1...3
You summarise pretty much everything that is wrong with HN started appearing somewhere around 2013 before becoming mainstream in 2016+.
That is having zero understanding on business. Cash Flow, Revenue Generation, Sustainable business model, and market monetisation. Ironically on forum that is about startup and VC.
I do get that they aren't in a position where they have easy choices, but what they are currently doing is wrong. They need to be a much smaller and focused organization, which can generate funds from various sources and use them to do effective development. You don't need 200M to develop firefox.
In their current position they exist to give Google some protection against anti-trust allegations. That is about the worst spot for their organization to be in.
>As for "whether they can stand up to them", they can and do, all the time.
You are right. Google likely knows that they can completly ignore them, so they can say whatever they want.
5 replies →
Mozilla can explore turning Firefox freemium and cutting relience on Google.
At 10% conversion, and $20/year price point, Mozilla would be making the same money it now makes from Google, but it would be coming 100% from its users, aligning all incentives. Then it is a whole new reality regarding product and company decisions.
The browser is the most intimate product we spend hours in every day to access information. The age of paying for your browser and have it work in your interest should re-emerge.
I would gladly give five figures to Mozilla if I knew it would go, without replacement, to Firefox. They don't. So I won't. Nothing else they do is remotely offensive compared to the mission creep.
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They have one billion dollars and they're cutting back on Firefox software development. If anything they don't get hated on enough.
Bear in mind a lot of it is just concern trolling.
Many of the people saying this have as much interest in improving the things they complain about as anti-renewable comments have a genuine interest in reducing bird fatalities.
Mozilla (and Wikipedia as mentioned by the OP) have been subjected to a long running culture war boycott.
Similar to wind power, I'd guess their continued success in the face of this contributes to the feelings of anger towards them.
1 reply →
2a - crazy CxO bonuses
Not going to argue the article, Mozilla should be doing better. But the author obviously is trying to push some politics not so subtly.
https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/muc18q/whats_the_dea...
Ah yes, it is the author who pushes agenda not "not profit" Mozilla "donating" $480000 to political organizations.
It is both, but Mozilla has never tried to hide it. Read their blog for a bit and you'll see ton of advocacy for various subjects.
Cherry-picking expenses that total barely 500k out of a 500M budget and hiding it behind "noooo we don't get political here promised" is also pushing an agenda.
The Mozilla Foundation does plenty of stupid shit. I don't agree with much of what they're doing, starting from Baker's insane pay for how terrible of a job she does. But 400k to an association... At best that pays for two rallies that total 500 people, at worst it's giving money to friends.
What a dumb hit piece. The author Cherry picked things to politicize.
How about the many millions of dollars the Mozilla Foundation spends on grands and research supporting so many individuals and organizations that help make the world a better place.
The full list can be found at https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2021/mozilla-fdn-990...
1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
2) They still have no job focusing on these things when their browser, their main product, is loosing market share like crazy. Why not spend all that money on Servo and Oxidation instead?
3) It's not politicizing to say that a software developer is using money for political purposes instead of making software. You are the one politicizing this because you deflect from this valid criticism into a discussion about the author's politics.
Disgusting. I hope that Mozilla can re-focus on their original mission, and align their finances with building the best browser possible rather than wasting it on political activism.
What is their original mission?
Developing Firefox.
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Obviously relying on Google for money is fraught, but it isn't exactly clear where they'd get an equivalent source of income. Otherwise the subtext seems to be "I don't like their politics" which suggests maybe the author shouldn't donate any money to them. Personally I would be sad if Firefox was neglected, but that doesn't seem to be happening, as far as I can see.
I suppose Microsoft might be willing to broker a deal to have Bing as the default search, although that would probably attract similar levels of criticism from the same people.
DuckDuckGo would be the "obvious" choice, but I doubt they can come up with the same kind of numbers.
Brave Search might be an option, but unlike Google and Microsoft the browser is Brave's main product so they might not want to deal with a competitor, they probably have a lot less cash lying around, and they have some history with Mozilla.
Yahoo! Search is still around, maybe some others? I don't think anyone other than Microsoft and Google have a spare ~$500 million lying around for this though.
Wait what? "spare money lying around?" that is a complete misunderstanding of how this works. You make it sound as if that money is some kind of "donation". THat Google is doing Mozilla a _favour_ here. But nothing could be further from the truth: instead this is a business deal where everyone wins. (Read: generates a stupid amount of revenue)
Google probably makes at least 3x of what it pays Mozilla in search royalties. At least. Who knows what Google makes with what it does after Firefox has done its small part.
This is a hugely profitable business for Google. That has _nothing_ to do with "spare money lying around". This is a cash cow for Google. Specially since they do the same with other players like Apple. Many many billions of dollars are at stake.
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From the report: During 2021, Mozilla paid $387 Thousand dollars to a Mckensie Mack Group whose LinkedIn page describes itself as “Black-led and nonbinary-led, MMG is a global social justice organization”.
And another $100K to an "Action research collaborative" that sounds like another social justice org?
WTF? This sounds like money laundering. I just want a good browser. I'm now regretful that I was donating regularly to Mozilla.
100% looks like money laundering. They paid six figure amounts to businesses that don't even have a website and are impossible to find any information on:
And the author adds this update at the end of the article: "August 5th, 2023 Update: To date, no request for clarification or additional details has been answered."
This is extremely suspicious on Mozilla's part. I hope there is further investigation into all this wild spending they are doing using public donations without any accountability.
"$30,000 to “MC Technical Inc.” in 2021. Who are they? Well, they don’t have a website, that’s for sure. The business registry listing is about the only thing of the company that seems to exist. The listed address is someone’s house."
It is a nice round number so it is probably someone who did some work for them and sent them an invoice. There is nothing special about that. Unless you have an agenda to make it sound like something bad. Which I think the author does.
Many hacker news readers have their own incorporated with weird names that are registered to their home addresses. Because when you provide services to a company you ideally need a legal entity. Having an address is a legal requirement. And having a website is not.
It is that simple. The Mozilla Foundation probably has many contractors that do work for them.
Similar to "Why do some of the recipients of Mozilla money appear to be nothing more than empty shells of companies — not even having a simple website?" - it just shows the author has no idea how small non-profit / 501(c) world works. It is easy to make it sound like a headline but in reality it is probably just small non profits struggling to get funding to do interesting things.
"Why do some of the recipients of Mozilla money appear to be nothing more than empty shells of companies — not even having a simple website?"
This is exactly how many readers here at hacker news also run their business: you need an official entity to receive money.
And if you are doing something interesting that the Mozilla Foundation would like to support with a grand for example then you will need to have that "empty shell" because if you receive funding for a project personally you will be taxed the shit out of it and lose many benefits. There is literally nothing special about this.
"Where does Mozilla spend those donated dollars?"
should really read
"Where does the Mozilla Foundation spend those donated dollars?"
Because although the author conflates Foundation and Corporation they are in fact separate entities and money does not go into a single bank account.
If you want to know where the Mozilla Foundation spends your donated dollars then you can read their financial report. There are many dozens of line items that list where money goes.
"Why does Mozilla continue to take donations if it doesn’t need them?"
Because raising money is literally what non profits do as their primary means of income. They cannot just "take" money from the "cash cow", the Corporation which is a separate entity.
I sort of understand that Mozilla wants to care for the concept of an open internet which requires a lot more than just software development. I don't particularly understand or like the exact things they finance, but politics is a complex game in which you loose if you don't play.
What I absolutely fail to understand though is why they don't have long-term focus on diversifying income? All their alternative revenue sources are neglibile, and their strange attempts to provide paid products seem to be either hobby-projects of someone at mozilla (ex: pocket) or a cheap rebrand of a product (ex: vpn).
Am I wrong to expect more from such a technologically capable organisation?
They do have a focus on that, it just hasn't really panned out. To be fair, you're talking about the billion dollar question. It's not exactly an easy problem.
Google is paying Mozilla to develop a web browser, to allow Google to develop a web browser without pissing off anti trust.
They're doing a merely ok job. It's not clear if that's intentional or because they're badly run.
There's a story there, this article seems to mostly be political winging.
The reason why there is a foundation that owns two for profit corporations, is so the corporations can pay taxes. It is the opposite of shady.
Mozilla should convert to a worker owned enterprise and stop giving all of that money to execs.
>Mozilla should convert to a worker owned enterprise and stop giving all of that money to execs.
The compensation to execs seems irrelevant. That is almost literally just a Google bribe.
Mozilla pays 200M for software development, from that I can only assume that they pay quite generously and they seem to have absolutely no issue with money, as they are funded by Google.
To me it seems hey have more money than they know what to do with. Hardly something which could be fixed by workers rising up and taking care of distributing Googles Millions.
Mozilla literally forced out the creator of Javascript, Brendan Eich, because of his religious and political views.
They're funded by Google because Alphabet doesn't want another IE6/MS anti-trust case. They are planned/fake competition. The fact that there are privacy aware forks of Firefox (like Librewolf) speaks volumes.
2 replies →
Should still convert to a worker owned enterprise. Democratically the workers most likely wouldn't vote to waste money on Google bribes like the execs have.
7 replies →
Mitchell Baker needs to go and let people do their job.
How has she not been ejected after so many years of falling market share? I have a really hard time understanding the business sense of a board that hasn't taken a very hard look at Mozilla's leadership.
I couldn't possibly say, but one might suspect she has old connections with early Googlers, and Mozilla is still (at ever lower revshare rates in successive deals) a cheap source of search traffic for Google, and good PR aka "antitrust repellant". At $5.6M/year comp, wouldn't you sell your soul this way? https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2021/mozilla-fdn-990...
Because the board is perfectly content with sucking Mozilla dry.
Mitchell Baker - Lawyer, wrote the MPL (involved since Netscape)
Laura Chambers - Stanford MBA, ex-McKinsey, ex-eBay C-suite, ex AirBnB, ex Paypal. Currently CEO of a wearable breast pump company.
Kerry Cooper - Harvard MBA, currently also in the board of PG&E, Upstart, Gradient, Fernish, Fictiv as well as an executive-in-residence at Acrew Capital.
Karim Lakhani - PhD in management at MIT, Professor of Business Administration, publishes papers on management and once a decade a paper on open source/open contribution.
Bob Lisbonne - Stanford MBA, venture capitalist, ex Netscape/Mozilla
Hugh Molotsi - Computer Engineering Masters, ex Intuit, specializes in intrapreneurial actions
Kristin Skogen Lund - INSEAD MBA, ex Coca-Cola, ex Unilever, various governmental positions in Norway
The amount of people with technical knowledge on that board is low. The amount of people that aren't MBA leeches is low. The board is perfectly happy to keep the grift going.
She is an old timer that is with Mozilla since the beginning. Should be pretty hard to challenge her from the inside after Brendan Eich departure.
What I have to say is that Brendan Eich lost his respect with hia peers inside Mozilla after donating for the campaign against gay marriage, so it was entirely his fault.
3 replies →
Is this you Google. Sorry, even if Firefox was run by the mob right now, it’d be better than handing you control of the web.