Comment by tristanj
17 hours ago
Mozilla brings in almost $700 million per year, they have more than enough money to sponsor MZLA/Thunderbird development.
17 hours ago
Mozilla brings in almost $700 million per year, they have more than enough money to sponsor MZLA/Thunderbird development.
Mozilla tried to kill Thunderbird in 2020. They've been talking about not sponsoring it all since 2015.
They might have the money, but they don't really seem to want anything to do with the project.
Mozilla doesn't have the willpower or vision to do anything with anything.
I like those two comments giving context on what has happened 10 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46118243 (parent and child comment).
Don't be so harsh on them. (\s) They show lots of willpower and some sort of vision when talking about AI in Firefox.
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Good! I hope they do "kill it off" so that someone who isn't totally incompetent can fork it and take it over.
That's basically how you could describe what happened. Those competent people are using Mozilla's infrastructure and trademarks, but otherwise running on donations.
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Mozilla is so sad. They have a lot of money and they could fund the development of both Firefox and Thunderbird.
Yet, they decide to waste almost $7 million per year to pay a CEO and God knows what else.
Here we go again. I don't love the CEO pay but it's like 1% of their annual revenue and typical for positions like that, and Mozilla constantly suffers from these kinds of double sided, quantum accusations. Depending on which random HN thread you're in, the accusation is that (a) they're running out of money and urgently need to innovate to grow their revenue streams but also (b) they've got so much money and their spending of it is simply more evidence of how wasteful they are. Which is it this time?
>and God knows what else.
They publish their financial reports. It's mostly.... the browser. They actually spend more in total and in inflation adjusted terms directly on the browser than ever in their history as a company. Unless they're just faking all those reports? Need more than vibes here.
> ... it's like 1% of their annual revenue ...
There's something about this specific part that doesn't sit well with me.
It's like justifying a huge salary for the president of a charity because they receive millions a year in donations and revenue from charity shops... it's just wrong.
7 million (assuming that's the correct value) is a lot of money. Perhaps not as much as they'd make at Google, but a lot of money nonetheless. And Mozilla is supposed to be a non-profit, with a good mission, with a manifesto, in a David vs Goliath struggle... but the CEO still makes millions, even when cuts are being made those working on the main mission?
The bar for Mozilla is different because they present themselves as being different. Multi-million salaries is what you expect from regular companies, not from good non-profits, and I think that's why the CEO's salary always comes up in these discussions.
With all this said, I also agree with the point about some of the criticism. Nothing Mozilla does pleases everyone, there's always something. It's a hard position to be in.
> urgently need to innovate to grow their revenue streams
No, people are saying that Firefox needs to diversify their revenue streams because almost all of their revenue comes from their main competitor who (likely) only keeps Firefox alive to keep regulators from forcing them to divest their browser. The situation has gotten more dire since the regulators got fired last year.
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>and typical for positions like that
That's the problem. CEOs get paid so much more than everyone else while typically not providing value commensurate with their pay.
like all Big Tech
Except this "big tech" larper is supposedly fully owned by a nonprofit.
That's apparently mostly from Google to be the default search engine in Firefox. Diversifying their income streams is a good move.
The MZLA company that makes Thunderbird is also working on improving self-funding by launching a Thunderbird-branded webmail service.
What do they do with all that money? According to wikipedia, they had about 750 employees. That's a lot of employees for the amount of useful products they have.
How did you come to the conclusion that 750 people is a lot to build a web browser? The Chrome-adjacent teams at Google are about 4,000 people, and that doesn't even include all the people at Google providing infrastructure (e.g. servers, workplace, HR, legal etc.).
Comparing Firefox to Chromium-based browsers doesn't make much sense since these browsers don't develop their own web engine.
How did you come to the conclusion that it's not? Google being bloated is not a good justification for why Mozilla should be bloated too. Someone in the comment below suggested that Ladybird was built by about 10 people. Call me naive, but I don't think you'd need 75x number of people to work on a browser that's already established for over 2 decades.
take the reference of ladybird.
in a couple of years they built the engine from scratch. it's going to soon enter Alpha. how many people from ladybird built that engine? about 10?
all while everyone has said that modern web makes this task impossible
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They need a lot of money to pay their useless execs, so 700 million must be barely enough to keep things running
They publish their 990s so you can look this stuff up if you're actually curious. It's mostly the browser.