Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by lurk2 489 days ago
It would be interesting to see Mozilla diversify itself from its Google stipend, but there seems to be an inherent conflict of interest at play when a non-profit like Mozilla starts to expand its offerings beyond the core product; the tendency is for leadership to use these projects for empire-building. Wikipedia suffers from a similar problem where the core product is great, but the parent foundation uses the product to finance other projects that are only tangentially related to the product itself.
2 comments

This is why I think that web-centric, open source, hosted core apps would be nice to see.

If you want to use the web as your primary application runtime, you're currently stuck with closed-source apps, or pretty bad open source apps that are difficult to integrate.

Sandstorm did (and still is as a community project) try to integrate some existing apps into a cohesive-ish platform with nice security guarantees, but it wasn't really made accessible to every day users.

Something similar to Google Workspace, but open source and hosted by a foundation could be a nice default starting point and/or a principled platform to use, for a lot of users.

Mozilla faces a very similar set of challenges as other "umbrella" open source organizations like Apache, MediaWiki, and the Linux Foundation that have notably low overlap with the current boardmembers.