[staunch]

The Mozilla Treasurer and Chair are still taking $1M each, right? Why is this scandal going unreported?

Are there really no experienced managers willing to run this potentially great organization for $300k/year? Why would we want people who are willing to take so much money from an open source project?

Why are there 1200 people at Mozilla and so little product to show? Why do they constantly spend all of their revenue? Why is it continuing to lose marketshare? Why is there no oversight or improvement after years?

It appears a lot like Mozilla is a corrupt organization taking bribes from its competitor (Google) to not actually compete. There may even be a need for government intervention.

Mozilla spends all of its money, so it's in a perpetual state of needing more. Google probably makes it known that any serious competition would result in the money faucet being shut off.

A competent and uncorrupt Mozilla could have built a Google Search competitor by now and even better browser. It's disappointing.

[groby_b]

If you have the skill required to manage a 1000+ people org, you could easily make a lot more than $1M. Blame the ridiculous salaries in the Bay Area.

And no, there are no experienced managers who want to work in the Bay Area for $300K. You can fairly easily make more than double that if you're able to run a 50-person group.

As for "spend all their revenue", I suggest actually reading the financial statement: https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2016/2016_Mozilla_Au...

"A competent and uncorrupt Mozilla could have built a Google Search competitor by now"

That... is funny. From launch to two years in (that's all I can find), Bing cost $5.5B[1] - or 11 years of Mozilla's revenue.

[1] https://www.geek.com/news/bing-has-cost-microsoft-5-5-billio...

[staunch]

1. I blame a corrupt board of directors for not making Mozilla a great organization that can attract great altruistic leaders that don't need to take so much.

2. Mozilla has blown almost every dollar it has ever earned. Hundreds of millions wasted on failed projects and useless activities. No one disputes this.

3. Mozilla revenues should be growing every year and not never reliant on a competitor's goodwill. And just because Microsoft wastes billions on something (or claims to for tax reasons) does not mean that is the fundamental cost. See: SpaceX.

[Nomentatus]

I think Google and Yahoo, etc, have swung and missed a few times, too.

You don't want them to be dependent on a competitor... neither do I, but with "antimonopoly" (really market power, bundling and patent misuse) laws having not been properly enforced for decades, those few companies still alive to bid, are the only "market." Given the almost zero marginal cost of reproduction of software, it's been a perfect storm. Please give Mozilla credit for being one of the rare counterforces.

SpaceX has been able to snag lots of government contracts designed to increase competition, true. Similar government contracts to build public internet infrastructure under a BSD license haven't been offered, but they might be a great idea - however such proposals aren't part of the political scene right now. If you want that, by all means push for it politically. That makes more sense to me than punishing the messenger (that search monopoly is a problem), i.e. Mozilla.

[wumpus]

Funny that you'd mention the BSD license: an overwhelming amount of early code released under the BSD license was paid for by government grants.

[Nomentatus]

Of course, surveillance infrastructure remains heavily funded: "Today, the NSF provides nearly 90% of all federal funding for university-based computer-science research." https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true-origin-partly-lies-in-ci...

[wumpus]

I was thinking of things like the BSD implementation of the TCP stack, and the MPICH implementation of the MPI message passing standard.

[pcwalton]

> It appears a lot like Mozilla is a corrupt organization taking bribes from its competitor (Google) to not actually compete. There may even be a need for government intervention.

Yes, clearly I only pretend to work nights and weekends as cover for shadowy secret Google payments.

[Nomentatus]

Arthur C. Clarke's law - sufficiently advanced technology appears to be magic (and therefore easy.) So just wave that magic wand faster, darn it :)

[staunch]

Yes, and I'm clearly blaming programmers at Mozilla for the problem ;-)

I hope you find Mozilla better run that it appears, and I hope you can do more great work there, despite its flaws, but it seems to me like you don't have the leadership or organization you deserve.

[bastawhiz]

When making bold claims and assertions, you should cite facts.

[bigbugbag]

honest question: what exactly in what he said are not facts ?

Do mozilla not have 1200 employees and top people being paid 1M $ ?

[windlep]

Mozilla has around 1050 employee's give or take a dozen (at the Mozilla Corp at least, Mozilla Foundation has a few as well, but is accounted for separately afaik).

Some top executives and board members are paid 1-3M according to documentation out there, sure. If you compare to other companies where they'd be in charge of as many people at a similar level, this is substantially under what they could demand.

As an employee, they pay us well with great benefits, though I could likely make 2-3x as much at another company (just like the execs). I rather like Mozilla's mission and my work though, and the work-life balance is nice.

[bastawhiz]

My comment was meant as a reply to bigbugbag below, not the original question. Not sure what happened there.

[bigbugbag]

This is something I wondered about for quite some time now. How come so many employees and so much spent money with so little to show for it.

Reading the reason for dropping alsa support or refusing to have better linux integration it seems mozilla is short on dev time and resources which they clearly are not.

Do you remember when they got 10 000 people donating money to pay to place an ad for firefox 1.0 in NY Times while at the same time they had revenue in tens of millions of dollars ?

Mozilla had a strong stance against a content blocker in firefox for what ? 15 years ? Whatever they said to justify this position it is obvious that the actual reason is conflict of interest with their main source or revenue.

Isn't it strange that while their user base has been divided by 5 their revenue has been up by more than a hundred millions ? Even more so when this revenue is based on number of users being sent to search engine of this commercial partner.

Has anyone on HN and explanation for this ?

[fabrice_d]

Their user base has not been divided by 5. Their market share is way down, because they are not growing with the pool (not surprising given their lack of success in Mobile), which is a different metric.

They are paid for the number of eyeballs they send to their search partners, and it's still a few hundred millions users. Also, it seems that they were underpaid compared to other companies like Opera and Apple were getting per user.

[rebelwebmaster]

Yeah, massively overhauling their code base over the last year really is nothing to show for it.

[a_imho]

Mozilla had a strong stance against a content blocker in firefox for what ? 15 years ? Whatever they said to justify this position it is obvious that the actual reason is conflict of interest with their main source or revenue.

I don't think anyone can really blame the decision, but they should be more straightforward where their loyalties ultimately lie. The fact that one of the best known alternatives to chrome and so called independent browser is in cahoots with Google is a sad state of things.