[margorczynski]

It's good that Mozilla is still there to provide an alternative to the proprietary browsers and is fighting for open Internet standards. But the management direction and the aggressive political stance it took in the last years is not really good for the project.

Also big kudos for Rust, been playing around with it and it really is a great improvement over archaic languages like C or C++.

[madeofpalk]

> It's good that Mozilla is still there to provide an alternative to the proprietary browsers and is fighting for open Internet standards

> aggressive political stance

These two statements are at odds with each other. Mozilla whole purpose is inherently political.

[Boogie_Man]

I think the commenter is referring to the generic "rainbow coalition" language about helping disabled marginalized pregnant women in Africa. I don't think anyone would consider those things as bad, but I can see someone considering them a needless deviation from what (they perceive) Mozilla should be: a FOSS company. It strikes me personally as exceptionally cooperate, which is fine as long as it's not distracting from the core tenants of FOSS. Not everyone can be the FSF.

[jonhohle]

Were I a donor to Mozilla, that would tell me they already have more money then they can use toward furthering their goal and in future years I would look to donate directly to organizations helping the impoverished, oppressed.

There is no expertise at managing humanitarian efforts at Mozilla. There is no overlap with their primary purpose and external charitable contributions outside of those supporting open web standards. It’s a waste of everyone’s resources.

[lupusreal]

It's not just the 'rainbow' initiatives, but the vague way those initiatives are described. Take this for example: "These projects range from creating virtual support networks for LGBTQI+ individuals"

What did they actually do here? Host a mastadon instance for gay people? How many of those people wouldn't have a chatroom with like-minded people if not for Mozilla's efforts? There are countless such spaces on the net already, for instance on traditional social media, on other fediverse instances, on discord or reddit, etc... so how much money did Mozilla spend creating yet another chatroom for LGBTQI+ people and how much real world impact did their effort actually have?

(Aside, saying 'individuals' instead of 'people' exemplifies the sort of swarmy weasel language used by cops, corporate PR, and other snakes putting on airs. Why do they do this, don't they know this kind of language betrays them for what they are? I guess they use this language to impress each other and don't really care that normal people perceive it as inauthentic.)

[jacknews]

not at all.

except in the sense that technology/products are political.

Mozilla advocates a free and open internet. Providing a free and open browser is quite essential to that, and in fact any other effort is pretty much wasted if they can't deliver that.

[madeofpalk]

I think that advocating for a free and open internet is political. Open source software is a radical political movement

[safety1st]

While they were always political, somewhere along the way Mozilla's politics changed. They stopped being an organization dedicated to furthering the cause of free software, and instead dedicated themselves to promoting radical left wing political causes. For example here's the mission statement for riseup.net, which Mozilla gives money to: https://riseup.net/en/about-us

> Riseup’s Purpose

> We value, support, and engage in struggles for human liberation, the ethical treatment of animals, and ecological sustainability.

> We organize on the basis of autonomy, mutual aid, resource sharing, participatory knowledge, social advocacy, anti-oppression work

> We empower organizations and individuals to use technology in struggles for liberation

> Meet the Collective

> Cedar Waxwing is a revolutionary hacker and critic of late capitalism. Although deeply skeptical of technology, Waxwing has spent much of his life in a quixotic attempt to use technology for liberation.

> Colibrí Jacobina doesn’t hesitate to use her abilities and radical spirit to fight rich people, men, meat eaters, fascists, monogamy, and the police.

...And so on.

When you look at what this group actually does it's basically a glorified mail host for Queer, Feminist, Anarchist, Socialist, Labor, Unions etc. mailing lists: https://lists.riseup.net/www/

Now I mean I'm not necessarily against all of these causes but WTF is Mozilla doing bankrolling the "fight against monogamy and meat eaters" or "Anarchist and Socialist" groups? They have lost the plot.

This shift of focus has occurred during the reign of a CEO who is a lawyer and has boosted her own comp to $7.5M annually of course, what a true revolutionary socialist she is!

[Boogie_Man]

Reading this post makes me desirous of an email provider political compass chart.

[pseudalopex]

Riseup and Tor have a long history. They run a directory authority and other services used by the Tor project and community. And people with very different politics can and do use their security guides.

> They stopped being an organization dedicated to furthering the cause of free software, and instead dedicated themselves to promoting radical left wing political causes.

Mozilla's resources are directed at Firefox much more than anything else. Grants and donations were 1% of 2022 expenses. Your claim would be far from true still even if all grants and donations went to communist rebels.

[eimrine]

I have heard some statements that Rust is bad because of its non-free components such as Cargo.

[Georgelemental]

You heard wrong? https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo

[eimrine]

I mean the approval process for packages in Cargo is controlled by vendor.

[zamadatix]

Do you mean the default crates.io registry Cargo uses? Cargo is the package manager, it supports alternative registry definitions and local packages all set in the dependency file. You can run your own private or public registry, or use someone else's, and publish anything you want.

[margorczynski]

By that reasoning almost every Linux distro is also non-free as it uses a default repository for packages.

[M2Ys4U]

One can use cargo without using crates.io, though due to network effects it'd be a pain to do