[glenstein]

Exactly, and to your point, a lot of the charges against Mozilla are mutually exclusive, contradictory, or barely even half-made attempts at arguments. You've outlined the make money/don't make money contradiction. But to add a few more of the crazy criticisms, sincerely made:

- Implying without evidence that the VPN is run at prohibitively massive cost and at the expense of other programs

- Claiming that Mozilla has "run out of money" (they have over $1 billion in assets)

- Overstating costs of Mozilla's dabbling in blockchain (they wrote a paper or two)

- Claiming the CEO pay has crippled Mozilla's ability to work on core browser (it's slightly more than 1% of their revenue)

- Claiming without any mechanism or argument that there's a missing feature Mozilla could have developed that would have restored all their market share

- Related to the above, completely ignoring that Chrome drove market share in its own proactive ways, leveraging its search and Android dominance, rolling out affordable Chromebooks and that these drove the market share more than anything specific to Mozilla

- Firefox has become bloated and slow (Outdated talking point, it was true for a time, but then they did the dang thing and delivered Quantum, which delivered the major advances in speed in stability that everyone asked for)

That's not to say there's no valid criticisms, there are plenty. There seems to be real cause and effect, for instance, on Firefox's investments in FirefoxOS and the ability to invest resources in the browser, and that did happen over a time where market share was lost. And the dabbling in ads risks compromising the soul of their mission in critical ways.

But meanwhile these (above) have all generally been basically misunderstandings or bad arguments with no internal logic, but claimed over and over again in the backwaters of internet comment sections with complete impunity. The case study in comment section hallucinations is as interesting to me as what is presently unfolding at Mozilla itself.

[jfengel]

(it's slightly more than 1% of their revenue)

In a lot of industries, 1% revenue is rather a lot. Many domains have profit margins of 5% or even less; that would be fully 20% of your earnings.

Software development is not "many industries", and Mozilla isn't most software development companies. So it's hard for me to say whether that specific CEO salary is appropriate. But I'd rather see his salary described by earnings, rather than revenue, since revenue by itself could just be churn.

[glenstein]

If it impresses you that the CEO pay is 20% of earnings, then, well, software development is going to be something like 500% of earnings, overhead will be 250%, and so on. The relative proportions of the different expenses will be the same. They just look bigger when you compare them to profits.

The CEO pay certainly matters and it's more than I would like, but I don't see how considering it as 20% of profits rather than 1% of revenue demonstrates that it's taking more away from development than any other 1% of their spending.

[jfengel]

Yes, but now you're comparing the CEO to entire departments. Each individual software developer is receiving less than 1% of earnings. Is the CEO really 20 times more productive than they are?

Would it be possible to increase net earnings with a CEO who took home only 19% of net earnings? Changing out a single developer for a cheaper one is not going to be meaningful. But a CEO who takes home a significant fraction of the profit could probably be replaced by somebody who does 99.9% as good a job for 95% of the salary.

In fact, there's a good chance that one of those developers could do 50% as good a job for 1% of the salary. The shareholders would take home more money.

[glenstein]

I feel like I've been consistent throughout by evaluating costs as a percentage of revenue. That’s the actual denominator Mozilla uses when allocating its budget. There’s no switch or sleight of hand happening here. One percent of revenue is one percent of the available operating budget.

It seems like you've changed your framing entirely. Your original point was that CEO pay is significant because it's 20 percent of net earnings. That implied this metric better captured the weight of the cost. But now you’ve moved to a different argument, comparing the CEO’s compensation to individual developers and bringing in a shareholder-return perspective. These are entirely separate lines of reasoning and don’t follow from the point you started with.

Also, Mozilla doesn’t have shareholders? So the idea that the CEO should be compensated in a way that maximizes shareholder earnings doesn’t really apply. Mozilla’s spending decisions should be judged in terms of how well they serve its mission, not whether they increase a surplus that could be distributed to hypothetical owners.

I’m not even necessarily defending the CEO pay on its own. I just don't think you can make the case that it crippled their ability to work on needed features, and I think the logic you’re using has shifted in a way that doesn’t hold up when applied to Mozilla’s actual structure or purpose.

[justsomehnguy]

> Is the CEO really 20 times more productive than they are?

People up the ladder are getting more money not for their productiveness, but for the risks. A single developer can't ruin the company/sales (well, most of the times). A single C-level can do that with ease.

[dingaling]

Isn't the general employee at higher risk than the CEO? Entire departments can be RIFfed at the stroke of a pen and the employees don't have a Golden Parachute or a revolving door to the next corporation.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

> his salary

I may be wrong (I frequently am), but I think the current CEO is a woman, who replaced another woman (with a funny haircut).

[NautilusWave]

Don't you have to look at Mozilla CEO's salary in the context of that of other non-profits?

[fzzzy]

Mozilla Corp isn’t a non-profit. Mozilla org is, but the discussion is about the corp ceo.

[LexiMax]

> The case study in comment section hallucinations is as interesting to me as what is presently unfolding at Mozilla itself.

I have long suspected that a good chunk of the controversy surrounding Mozilla that I've seen is...let's just call it motivated reasoning.

[jama211]

Well said, and this applies to most armchair experts on most subjects on the internet.