>> For that to be viable it would have to add a real benefit that people would be willing to pay for.

does not necessarily mean:

>> [I have little hope for a] commercial desktop office that is not Microsoft.

Companies (and consumers) might have no reason to pay for the actual software itself, but they will pay for:

- Support: where support is things like fixing bugs that are encountered, producing custom builds with cherry-picked bug fixes, etc. Also, more traditional support around getting it configured in your enterprise and/or migrating your enterprise to new software.

- Feature development: so that the software does what they actually need. (Some places might do this in-house, but usually you'd just contract out to one of the companies that has developers with expertise in the codebase.)

It's a mistake to think that money can only be made by selling a product. In the open source world you generally sell services (which is tough, but there are a few companies in this space).

Because OpenOffice is hugely outdated and gets barely any updates. That's a problem for various reasons:

- MS Office compatibility, which Libreoffice invests heavily in.

- Security: from what I remember OpenOffice struggled to ship fixes to various security issues in the past years. Meanwhile LibreOffice invest quite a bit: they're able to ship security fixes fast, and have spent time fuzzing and otherwise hardening code.

- Support: if you want commercial support, LibreOffice has that (not relevant for consumers, but important for enterprise).

OpenOffice hasn't even had a major release since 2014, only very rare point upgrades. That kind of cadence speaks for itself.

Oh come on, let's stop it with the CEO bashing. Especially around he salary. You need a CEO, and Bay Area salaries are high.

Just to illustrate the numbers: a fresh graduate with no experience will easily get more than 100k (even at Mozilla, who IME pay a bit less). A plain manager of a 10-person team at a big bay area company will be earning close to 500k (and most of their direct reports will also be in the 300k-500k range). Then you get your principal and distinguished engineers who can easily make 1M per year. 2.5M for someone leading a 1000 person company isn't expensive, and you do need someone to lead that company - to make tose strategic decisions.

You can quibble around whether or not a specific person made the right decisions (Mozilla aren't doing great, but they're also in a tough environment - maybe their CEO could be making better decisions that would boost usage - or maybe usage is entirely out of their control.) But you do need that person leading the company. And you need to retain them.

And her job definitely is needed, regardless of how well it's being done.

I think this reasoning is not straightforward for Mozilla as it would be for a traditional company.

Normally, the shareholders own the company. They appoint the CEO, or a board of directors or whatever management structure, and they decide how much to pay them. It's the shareholders' company, it's the shareholders' right to decide whether to keep the C-suite and how much to pay them. Things can get a bit muddled with large public companies with many shareholders, or when there are dual class shares, which can partially insulate the management from the owners control, but it more or less works this way.

In the case of Mozilla Foundation, AFAICS, this does not hold. The board of directors is completely self managing; they coopt board members and appoint the CEO of Mozilla Corporation.

I might be very wrong about this, but since Baker is both the chairman of the foundation and the CEO of the corporation, it looks to me like she doesn't basically answer to anyone. It's a bit like she owns the company, except she didn't have to buy it. That's a pretty sweet deal.

>Oh come on, let's stop it with the CEO bashing. Especially around he salary. You need a CEO

Citation needed.

>But you do need that person leading the company. And you need to retain them.

I don't even need / want a company. I want the non-profit organization I was promised, with community leading, and perhaps 1-2 BDFLs to make the final decisions.

Linux did well without a CEO...

AFAIK a non-profit can't make the kind of search engine deal that generates the vast majority of Mozilla's income, and currently funds Gecko development.

> And her job definitely is needed, regardless of how well it's being done.

If I can take a literal potato, stick it in a pot, put that pot in an expensive chair in an expensive well-lit CEO office, have the potato's PA water it every day, and at the end of the year can claim more growth and sustainability, then "how well it's being done" kind of starts to matter.

That presumes that a CEO should be making more than a distinguished engineer. The truth is that CEO salaries are completely public so there's much deeper competition for the highest-paid ones (the ones getting paid the most, not necessarily the best at the job) in an ever expanding bubble the increases the salaries from those making less ("this is what it takes to run an organization of this size"). If we had an actual way to measure value on the job things would be better (something like points above replacement) but no one has figured this out for large organizations that require cooperation (+ different kinds of value).

Those numbers are only true of a handful of household name tech companies that are very competitive to get into. I guarantee you that most line level people at most companies are not making 300-500k.

When it comes to Mozilla, "community project" is often equivalent to dead project. There are exceptions - Thunderbird appears to be doing OK - but my experience with Mozilla is that community is an afterthought - a place to hopefully get some free labour.

That said, Servo did seem to be one of the more lively places, so perhaps it will continue.

Not only Mozilla, that is the outcome of pretty much most FOSS projects when one doesn't have a solid income, only a selected few get to live from donations and patreon.

Honestly, it varies.

Rust seems to have a strong community of voluntary contributors, and could probably be run without company backing. Similar stories if you look at major FOSS projects such as KDE and Gnome - primarily dependent on a wide base of volunteers.

Then there are projects with a mix: plenty of volunteers, along with many commercial contributors - the commercial contributors tend to be more significant (certainly they add more code - but then they're the ones pushing new features for their customers) - but then there are enough volunteer contributions that the projects aren't dependent on the commercial entities. Linux Kernel, LibreOffice, Kubernetes, VSCode, come to mind. And with multiple commercial entities, it's not a tragedy if one drops out.

Then there are those projects with a single commercial backer, and fewer volunteers. Those are the ones that die off when the company drops out. The question is - is Servo in this category?

All the projects you listed get regular brief cases full of money, one just needs to have a look at their sponsor listings, which come down to the selected few I was mentioning.

Even the Linux kernel would never had taken off beyond an hobby project had not been for contributions from Oracle, Compaq, IBM, Intel engineers during the early days.

So yeah will Servo find such a benefactor, very difficult to say, but Samsung used to contribute, if I remember correctly.

> Similar stories if you look at major FOSS projects such as KDE and Gnome

I am not too up to date on KDE, but Gnome is mainly pushed forward by Red Hat, and recently by Canonical. Unpaid volunteers certainly make a decent amount of contributions but the vast amount of progress comes from corporations, not volunteers.

Note that some of the Rust volunteers still get temporary contracts with Mozilla to realize big features. So not everything that was contributed by non-Mozilla employees was done so without Mozilla money.

Thunderbird is okay because it was basically a finished project when it was forcibly emancipated. Servo won’t have the same luck.

>> Thank you for being a patron of the Dallas Morning News. Unfortunately, our site is unavailable to European Union visitors

Please learn some basic geography. Norway (and Switzerland) are not in the EU.

GDPR applies to Norway, even if it's not in EU

Well, they give same message for Ukraine.

That's actually how large parts of Switzerland count their votes. (Some areas count/weigh ballots.)

This e-voting system is optional, can't be used for more than 1/3rd of voters in a given district, and is only being used by a small number of regions.

Given what's happened here, the moratorium on e-voting looks like it could well happen after all (funnily enough, that will also go to a vote).

Using France as a representaiton of Europe isn't really sensible. And Europe as a representation of life outside the US even more so.

Travelling to France feels similar to travelling to the US to me. Horrible infrastructure (especially Paris IMHO). Similar feelings for some other European countries, Italy at the forefront.

Better models are places like the Nordics, New Zealand, Singapore. But more middlingly, Canada, Germany, Taiwan, all outclass life in the US or France. Heck, I'd even say China are doing a lot better in many regards (they have their own issues of course, but many aspects are strong).

I would disagree and say is the best representation of Europe. High output similar to Germany, and Sweden. High unemployment in the realm of Spain and Italy. While other countries sit on various points of different graphs (education, unemployment, immigration, GDP, etc) France just kind of sits near the center of most of them.

Having spent 10 days in France and driving from Paris to Lyon to Nice, this doesn’t jive with my experience at all. French cities were clean and nice. French villages look pristine and well managed. Unlike some of the broken rural areas in the US.

I've spent my vacations in rural France every year for the last 10 years or so. There are certainly some problems — smaller places just don't feel very dynamic economically. On the other hand, the French seem to have a vastly better life/work balance, and I really enjoy their unhurried way of life, even though as a customer, it's not always to my benefit. The one place in the US that reminds me most of this is the Big Island of Hawaii.

You are completely wrong. Customs officials in most countries do not open packages, they use the customs sticker declared value. (Source: I actually receive international packages regularly. I've had one opened package.)

The courier/post office will generally validate that that sticker matches the value you told them for insurance purposes either way.

Well, clearly your custom officials are different than mine then. I've received thousands of international parcels(mostly from asia) and yes, parcels are definitely opened(I know this because many times I had to personally drive to the nearest customs office and they would bring out the stuff they took out of my parcels for inspection).

Of course you can choose to not believe me, but I was explicitly told that the "value" field is completely ignored especially on any post from China, because 99% of the time it's just nonsense and pretty much everything arrives as a "gift"(I once had a brand new Asus laptop worth about $800 that was declared with value of $15, contents: "electronic cables" and "gift" - the customs officers wanted to see receipts of all payments I made for it before releasing it).

>>The courier/post office will generally validate that that sticker matches the value you told them for insurance purposes either way.

Now this seems completely bogus. I've also sent thousands of packages and no one has ever "validated" if what I am sending is actually worth as much as I put on the declaration. As long as it wasn't illegal to send it in the post no one cared.

If your packages are really being opened as often as you say then you are likely on some sort of list. Having received "thousands" (!) of packages from Asia might have something to do with it - that is well into what most people would consider commercial quantities and they have possibly flagged you as potentially running some sort of unlicensed import operation.

I can confirm that in my country (Australia) packages are rarely opened and if they are, it's seldom for duty assessment but checking for contraband of whatever nature. Even if they do flag you for a duty check they don't need to open the package - they do have x-rays, you know. Try and declare a $10,000 drone as a package of t-shirts worth $5 and the officer doesn't need to open the box to reject your "estimate". That said, most sites of any repute worth upholding will print the real value on the declaration, non-negotiable.

You don't need anything near as complex. You just need to give visa-holders (A) job mobility, (B) the right to stay in the country for some amount of time when not employed (this doesn't have to be unlimited...), and ideally (C) not lock the Visa to the employer beyond a year or two.

Some countries implement the above, some don't.

NIN is rarely used in the UK. You need one for student financing... and later for your employer to correctly relay your taxes to HMRC. Certainly it's not needed for banks/credit cards/phones/brokerages/etc.

The last time I opened a bank account in the UK involved me sitting in a bank employee's office with two forms of proof of identity and proof of income. I could have used my birth certificate for one but AFAIK the second would cost money.