Current headcount of 1,070 and they really only have one product on the market that they're developing: Firefox. Their VPN is just a rebranded Mullvad and Pocket is barely more than an extension. I've lost track of whether Thunderbird is Mozilla supported or not at this point.
I have been a loyal Firefox user since the early 2000s and am just disappointed that this is where Mozilla ended up. I feel like there is some business development path where certain businesses de-emphasize their product in favor of caring more about their internal culture.
They're trying to expand towards some privacy-focused offering. I enjoy having Firefox Relay to hide my real email address when subscribing on a website. I hope they'll keep increading their paid services to become sustainable.
I feel like lock-in is an understatement. If Relay shuts down or you opt to stop paying, your online presence is basically halted without a LOT of work to change your email everywhere.
I have no information to back up this claim but my guess is that nearly all of the users of Mozilla's non-Firefox products also use Firefox (e.g. all Relay users are Firefox users). If this is true, they still need a best-in-class browser to attract users to their paid services.
Moreover, if a majority of their income is from Google from being their default search engine, then it behooves Mozilla to increase their browser's market share.
> it behooves Mozilla to increase their browser's market share.
i would imagine quite the opposite. Google's funding is implicitly a mechanism for google to _prevent_ firefox from gaining a large enough marketshare to threaten chrome, whilst it remain a "viable alternative" to give to regulators.
It might be that google is on paper paying for search engine traffic, but i think it's plain as day to anyone, that if firefox's market share grows significantly higher than chrome, google would actually stop paying firefox in an attempt to prevent chrome from being dethroned. I think the firefox executives know this - and therefore, never actually attempt to focus firefox's market share but instead, focus on peripheral features.
After all, their lavish pay (despite apparently being below market for the same position elsewhere) depends on google.
> “A small alternative that is better and different is fine,”
That's the quote from the CEO.
CEO has resigned to collecting checks, while the browser losses market share.
Mozilla the non-profit has brought us a lot of good stuff - rust etc, but they shut down the rust team. Servo was going to be big - but that threatened money.
Mozilla can live off donations / grants etc from countries. if they reduce management and hire more engineers.
Servo was not going to be big. It was a test bed that Mozilla extracted value from in the form of Stylus, WebRender, etc. People really seem to rewrite history a lot.
Honestly I think it's gotten to the point we need to start asking these hard questions about Mozilla. And yes Mozilla's c-suite pays themselves far above what they deserve and far above industry norms for an alleged open-source project. I've become convinced Mozilla has been hijacked by the executive board and are essentially accepting a bribe from Google to not compete in the browser market or at best Mozilla absolutely and absurdly mismanaged. Mozilla gutted the Firefox dev team. Where is the money going? Other major open-source projects run successfully on a fraction of Mozilla's budget. What is even the purpose of Mozilla anymore?
and it can't do much either. Other FOSS browsers like Brave are independently funded and have a better survival rate than Firefox which has been losing millions of MAUs every year.
The only thing that can save Firefox is a better management and a better business model but we all know that's not going to happen. The current management has been unable to do anything of value.
That's a great point but I think Chromium closing down source code would be less of a problem (as chromium developers could create a common fork) than Firefox losing Google as its oxygen.
If firefox could remain community contributed, the loss of google as a source of funding might be painful in the short term (for their paid employees), but might be good for the future of firefox.
I highly suspect that the management at mozilla is merely using google as a source of income, with no real intention of attempting to dethrone chrome.
> Other FOSS browsers like Brave are independently funded
Which relies on Chromium, which means they aren't doing 100% of the development (and a large part of development is driven by Google, which in turn means, Brave relies on Google).
The management seems to be extracting lots of value into their own personal wealth. Sure, that might end up killing the company long term but the amount of wealth they're extracting has the top management set for life.
Yes. All that means is that the money siphoned off by management was never taxed as revenue.
Non-profits are not charities (though some are). It is just a business model. The fucking NFL is a non-profit organization.
See also: Boy Scouts of America. Nearly bankrupt from sex abuse lawsuits, the program itself may fold, but no executive is going hungry.
See also: the Susan Komen foundation, whose only function is to raise money to talk about breast cancer. Not to cure it, just to raise awareness of it.
> Yes. All that means is that the money siphoned off by management was never taxed as revenue.
Non-profits are not charities (though some are). It is just a business model. The fucking NFL is a non-profit organization.
Honestly, every sentence in there is incorrect.
Are many senior non-profit execs overpaid for underperforming? You’re prob right. But the hyperbole takes away from your point, IMHO.
The NFL's non-profit status has been contentious for years.
> Section 501(c)(6) of the Internal Revenue Code specifically defines professional football leagues as exempt organizations under that section. These organizations are exempt whether or not they administer a pension fund for football players. (Irs.gov)
To be clear, the difference between the NFL (when it was a 501(c)(6)) and Mozilla as a 501(c)(3) is the former tax status specifies an entity's purpose as serving members of an association, while 501(c)(3)s have a purpose to serve the public good.
Strictly from a nonprofit financial perspective and from reviewing its most recently filed public 990, Mozilla doesn't pay its senior staff an exorbitant amount; it looks to be an entity with $20-$30M in revenue and double that in assets, so seeing its highest paid employees making $200-$300K isn't out of the ordinary. It does look to pay quite a bit to Upwork, which I assume is their rent expense. It can be difficult to tell from a 990 if there is fraud going on however.
No but that seems to be the expectation. People act like if it's a non-profit that they have to be held to the highest standards, and everybody there should be volunteering out of the goodness of their heart. Meanwhile, anything done by a for-profit company is okay, because they're a business and they have to make money. Fucking bullshit.
Maybe more interesting is how Chrome's market share has flatlined at 60-ish percent. It hasn't gone up for years. I wonder to what extent Google will want to keep investing so much in it, if it's not growing.
They have a unique structure with a for-profit subsidiary that takes in the revenue and then disburses a portion back to the nonprofit. My understanding is that it's a similar structure as OpenAI now has.
The non-profit owns the for-profit and thus any profit.
The non-profit Mozilla Foundation has a wholly owned for-profit subsidiary Mozilla Corporation which makes Firefox.
In theory, this opens up avenues for revenue generation since the for-profit can engage in activities beyond the goals of the non-profit.
It also opens up avenues for revenue based compensation for employees. Non-profits have some legal “reasonableness” tests for compensation that for-profits do not. If the for-profit subsidiary starts raking in huge new revenue it can decide to distribute it to the employees rather than the parent non-profit.
Non-profits come with administrative overheads so they may use a for profit subsidiary to remove those, in the hope of greater overall revenue for the non-profit.
Despite these valid reasons, many feel that Mozilla has no good justification for it and the true beneficiaries of Mozilla Corporation’s status are their executives, not Mozilla Foundation.
Non-profits can be “abused” without needing a subsidiary. Some spend 90% of revenue on expenses and administration and give little to a cause.
It sounds egregious but may not always be. Imagine a couple with a non-profit that’s basically a well regarded website forum to promote understanding of a medical cause. The forum requires a lot of moderation due to trolls. It has revenues of $60k but distributes it all as salary to the two staff.
I have been a loyal Firefox user since the early 2000s and am just disappointed that this is where Mozilla ended up. I feel like there is some business development path where certain businesses de-emphasize their product in favor of caring more about their internal culture.