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by amooiman 3855 days ago
This is exactly right. I'm an engineer at the non-profit Mozilla Foundation, and these donations keep us working towards our mission (found at https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/details/).
4 comments

Now if only it all wasn't spent on the current massive expansion of the Marketing team and their new executive's salaries. The new CMO has a very checkered history with questionable results. Very much the nepotist who manages to pack his team with former colleagues.

Its a big and divisive internal issue right now. :(

At Mozilla Foundation? Got any links to discussions?
The latest IRS Form 990 for the Mozilla Foundation I can find is here:

https://static.mozilla.com/moco/en-US/pdf/2013_Mozilla_Found...

It's two years old, but if you go through it you'll see some very large numbers in the officer compensation lines, but it's mostly from "related organizations" and not the foundation itself. I'm not really sure how to parse it, and it may have changed in the last 2 years.

Admittedly, its all off record hearsay as it's not to smart to talk badly about your C-levels in public discussion. Though I must say, as a user its hard to sincerely distinguish the business motives of Firefox from other parts of the org. Especially in the recent push of the browser.
> not to smart to talk badly about your C-levels in public discussion

For certain things. But for badthink, seek and destroy.

Out of curiosity, is the MDN a Corp or a Foundation thing? I couldn't tell from the homepage, and I'm always stunned at how good a resource that is.
MDN is powered by Corp staff but also a large # of awesome volunteer contributors.
Hi amooiman, I love Mozilla. I've been following it since pretty much the beginning, and I think it's not getting the recognition it deserves. For example, if you read HN or Slashdot, it's always filled about negative reactions about Mozilla. Some of them have a point, but a lot of them are based on old misconceptions or wrong information. How do you feel about this and what do you think can be done about this? I feel that Mozilla needs to focus on improving its image for a while.
I only started working here a few months ago so I'm still forming my thoughts, but I definitely agree with the general notion that there needs to be some better external visibility/clarity of what we're doing. I can tell you the people here are the most passionate I've met about what they're doing and the organization's mission as a whole, which excites me to log on for work every day in a way that other jobs haven't. As for negative reactions online, well, it's the internet and that's bound to happen. It's only reasonable to expend a certain amount of energy correcting people vs focusing on the work that matters.
It's true that the Internet in general attracts negative reactions. But Mozilla is based on the Internet, so don't you think that these reactions are representative of the true demographic and that they should be given more weight?
Would that be your mission to copy Chrome as much as possible?