- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
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Orgs have to wean themselves off big tech dollars. Painful, but has to happen. They’ll have to restructure and refocus. Maybe cut out the AI stuff and focus on core functionality?
Firefox makes enough in its portfolio to maintain its core. It doesnt need all the new bullshit that is only looking to spend money
What wouldn’t I be able to access without compatibility investments? Spotify, LinkedIn? I think I’m fine.
Besides, what’s the point of OSS that is owned 85% by a big company?
Linux Mint puts out a great OS for a few thousand per month. With the start it’s got, Firefox could go on for decades without more income.
Mint is based on Ubuntu which in turn based on Debian.
Mint is neither developing OS, or Linux kernel from scratch.
On the other hand, Mozilla is maintaining Firefox browser and most importantly Gecko JS engine all by itself.
comments claiming mozilla doesn’t need the money make me feel i’m crazy. you actually think making a modern web engine that competes with chrome in terms of performance and compatibility is easy? that relying solely on donations from individuals and voluntary work are gonna cut it? if it was that easy, we’d have more than just gecko, webkit and webkit fork – but we don’t.
it also truly drives me insane when people bring up the forks, as if they’re anything more than re-skins.
without financial backing, mozilla is dead, firefox is dead, and the web will be 100% google’s. no project as large and complex as firefox stays afloat without corporate-level money.
The majority of Mozilla’s money actually does not go towards Firefox. They have a crazy amount of side projects.
looking at their 2023 financial report, unless i’m misinterpreting something, they spent around 200 million paying “program staff” (i suppose that’s the developers) and 130 million paying executives, which is more than i was expecting. still, if their revenue gets slashed in 90%, just firing every single executive wouldn’t be enough. they’d still have to fire firefox staff
No but maybe the C-level guys don’t need multiple millions while the actual developers don’t hardly get paid in comparison.
i might be mistaken, but mozilla’s executives get paid about 15% of the total revenue. it’s a lot, but it’s not the problem here
15% of their revenue just for the fucking CEO (a string of really bad ones at that) is a huge fucking problem.
Firefox has experienced declines in profit and market share, while the CEO’s compensation has increased. This situation raises questions about the company’s performance and priorities.
Heres a fucking idea. Why dont you fire the execs that need all that cash, use that 10% to pay the devs and operate as a non-profit, foss company should?
Exactly, at this point it’s becoming clear that Mozilla is the problem. The amount of money it would take to simply fund a team of devs actively working on FF is a fraction of the money Mozilla pulls in. Most of that money is spent on execs, middle management, and random projects that they come up with to justify their existence.
They need to get the fuck rid of that executive. Whoever has been running FF the last couple years has done a terrible job in picking directions for them to go, IMHO.
The problem lies in the board and the company culture
They’ve gone though enough CEOs for me to suspect that there is a bigger issue.
They changed CEOs just last year…
And how much is the new one raking in? They swapped out the person, but kept the problem.
Despite those choices, I’m not sure there were many other directions that could ever bring in the profits that Google does.
What the fuck would a non profit need to pull google level profits for?
Mozilla should have been a gatekeeper for open web standards and made a browser that catered exactly to that. The rest is window-dressing.
What did they do with the Google money, tho? Eye-watering packages for their MBA/Lawyer executives and compromise after compromise with DRM peddlers in the name of “market cap”.
Fuck em, and let it be a lesson for other non-profits. FSF doesn’t seem to be any worse off for not paying cOmPetiTiVe rAtEs to get some clueless execs to betray the mission to chase trends and funds.
I don’t see how being a non-profit suddenly makes it cheaper to build a secure, modern and compatible browser. (Although I know lots of people underestimate how much effort that takes. But just consider that already Mozilla’s doing it for far less money than Google invests in Chrome, for example.)
Running a community-centred nonprofit is inherently more efficient resources-wise than paying managers and execs piles upon piles of cash in a for-profit scheme
That’s the kind of thing that sounds nice, but in practice I don’t think that’s what evidence points towards.
I never really understood why mozilla insists on being a corporate entity in the first place. Tons of (if not most?) it’s development comes from volunteers already. Just scale down to doing basic development moderation and rely on donations / collaborate with other open source orgs.
Mozilla is the most profit-oriented non-profit org I’ve seen.
I think you’re grossly overestimating the share of volunteer contributions if you think it might even be over half. It’s amazing what contributors do, but the vast majority, and especially thankless-but-important work like web compatibility or security, is done by paid staff.
In terms of contributed code, obviously yeah. But there’s a lot more work involved in development than just that, plus all the basically necessary addons.
That is true, but all that wouldn’t be able to survive if Mozilla were to significantly scale back development.
Firefox makes up about 90 percent of Mozilla’s revenue, according to Muhlheim, the finance chief for the organization’s for-profit arm — which in turn helps fund the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation. About 85 percent of that revenue comes from its deal with Google, he added.
I fail to understand how they haven’t figured out a way out of this seems to me they’re using all the money they from Google as if there is no tomorrow… Why on earth also if Firefox is so clearly their main product does it seem to not always be at the centre of their attention? I get doing other products but they seem to not be going anywhere. Honestly, to a layman like me it seems they’ve been doing the same stuff as Google without having the massive ad revenue but with the search revenue. Where did the Firefox OS go ? They never followed through like Google did with their Pixels for example. Why?
On cross-examination by the DOJ, Muhlheim conceded that it would be preferable not to rely on one customer for the vast majority of its revenue, regardless of the court’s ruling in this case. And, he agreed, another browser company, Opera, has already managed to make more money from browser ads than it does from search deals. But while that may be a potential pathway to diversifying Firefox’s revenue, he added, scaling up such a business at Firefox may look different, in part because of the privacy-preserving approach it takes to products.
I don’t love that response. What are Opera’s ads like? There are two reasons I use Firefox : opensource and ad blocking… I honestly think Firefox should offer more branded services like their Pocket, VPN or email with thunderbird, why not even a cloud in a continuation of their Firefox Send service? Or just try to ask for donations from time to time with some transparency about the budget… I’d personally love to better understand why there is a corporation and a foundation.
I fail to understand how they haven’t figured out a way out of this seems to me they’re using all the money they from Google as if there is no tomorrow… Why on earth also if Firefox is so clearly their main product does it seem to not always be at the centre of their attention?
The answer to the second question is the answer to the first - there have been a ton of attempts at alternative sources of funding, but it’s hard to come close to the ~half a billion USD the default search deal provides. So far the branded services you’re calling for don’t seem to have been able to pull it off, and I haven’t seen any signs that donations would be able to either.
(Although as for email with Thunderbird…)
Dont worry im sure mozilla the ad company will be able to figure out a way to keepntheir CEO well paid.
Is that the executive paid 10 million a year? Or maybe one of the few millions a year ones?
Muhlheim, the finance chief for the organization’s for-profit arm — which in turn helps fund the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation.
But Plohman (via the last link) is. According to this (PDF warning), that’s $415,519 total.
On the for-profit side, who knows! It’s anybody’s guess.
But isn’t google search fucked?
Firefox was doomed decades ago
They had a lot of market share and then promptly lost it
the sad truth, i believe. i hope i’m wrong, but the effective death of firefox feels like a matter of time
God please don’t let Firefox die.
I can’t handle any more slop. I can’t go back to chrome.
