Comment by criticalfault
5 days ago
This is only fair.
Mozilla doesn't deserve to survive. New players deserve our support, like servo and ladybird.
Even with an enormous budget from Google (500M, I think per year) they managed to ruin everything, including Firefox, the thing bringing them those 500M.
To me it looks as if Baker is an undercover person put there to sabotage Mozilla. Tldr: funded by Google, made absolutely everything in her power to run it into the ground
Unlike historical examples like Stephen Elop that moved from Microsoft to Nokia and buried their mobile division only to return to Microsoft, Mitchell Baker was with Mozilla since the start.
I'm not sure about that. Baker was one of the first Netscape employees, she literally helped found the Mozilla foundation, and she served as the first president of it.
I'm not saying she has done a good job, but a lot of the early Netscape people like Brendan Eich have done nothing but sing her praises.
If we take a look at the results, I'm not convinced she is a good guy just because she was there at the beginning. There is a chart with her salary going up and Firefox usage going down. Looks like an X.
If anything, how come she didn't make it a success on the very limited market?
Even if she wasn't a bad actor in the beginning, she could have changed her opinion and be seduced by the money.
Just for comparison: a few people made a completely new engine in a few years. Task often thought as impossible (they had 200k USD for the start). Mozilla started servo, then when they saw its going well, decided to abandon it?
So what was Mozilla spending the money on? Many have requested the ability to donate for Firefox development, but it was never allowed: they (she?) wanted to distribute the donation money on things they thought were important?
For years they made decisions that the uses hated. How else to explain this?
Yup, wouldn't be the first one [0].
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Elop