Comment by lenkite
Comment by lenkite 3 days ago
I would happily pay monthly for Firefox - but not to Mozilla Corporation. Will Pay to developers, development support and operations - not to pad the CEO salary.
Comment by lenkite 3 days ago
I would happily pay monthly for Firefox - but not to Mozilla Corporation. Will Pay to developers, development support and operations - not to pad the CEO salary.
I'm worked on many larger teams and leadership is independent of compensation.
The fact that "high performance leaders" need to make tens of millions of dollars is one of the greatest lies being told in the modern age.
Right now my chief in the fire company where I volunteer makes the same amount of money I do: $0.00. He is the greatest leader I have ever personally met, and I've been around for a while.
When I was in the Army, my company commander (a Captain) made ~4x what the newest private did. The highest-paid officer makes ~9x.
There are government senior executives and university professors running labs with budgets and teams that make Mozilla look like a lemonade stand for practically nothing.
Mozilla should ask the Linux Foundation what their budget is, what their leadership structure is, and do that.
Mozilla, no matter what they say or think or try, is and will always be a web browser developer. A web browser. Anything else is a side project, a hobby. A distraction. Every single molecule of fuel used by their brains while at work and every single microwatt of power used by their infrastructure should be wholly and aggressively dedicated to building the tools and organization needed to create the best web browser possible.
Bloated payrolls are tolerable if the decisions made are wise, responsibility is taken, and strategies exist and make sense.
Mozilla seems to have none of these.
But man they're spending a shit-ton on "AI"!
Three examples off the top of my head — PostgreSQL, FreeBSD, and Debian — are doing just fine without someone "taking responsibility" (when have Mozilla's CEO ever done that?).
Debian has an elected leader that is not paid and has pretty limited authority overall.
There's also the Linux kernel, with Linus doing both managerial and technical work, running circles around Mozilla's leadership in both. He makes just a few millions per year, less than Baker did even two years ago AFAIK.
PostgreSQL is just a community of volunteers as far as I'm aware, not full-time developers employed by the project.
FreeBSD seems to have three paid directors: https://freebsdfoundation.org/about-us/our-team/
Debian has a leader and also seems to be more a volunteer organisation than a full company: https://www.debian.org/intro/organization
It can be done; an example is Igalia: https://www.igalia.com/jobs/
> We are a worker-owned, employee-run company with more than 20 years of experience building open source software in a wide range of exciting fields.
If there's enough money to go to the developers actively working on a product to make it sustainable, I think a lot of people would get on board with that and would pay for FF.
> If there's enough money to go to the developers actively working on a product to make it sustainable
That's a big if. AFAIK most open source project developers don't get remotely enough donations to support them working on it full-time. The ones that do are the exception, not the norm.
Leadership doesn’t mean earning more money.
I’m fine with twice the amount of a developer. Taking into account responsibility, public involvement and special clothing. Travel costs and so on are separate. The developers are doing the hard work.
There is not “team” if a MBA or lawyer gets 38 times the wage of an actual person doing the work.
Worth thinking of it also "the other way". As long as some people (developers) accept an MBA above them getting 38x, without adding much value, this will happen.
I don't personally like it (so generally did not allow to happen to me), but if some people feel "safer" getting lower pay (less chance of getting fired, easier to get re-hired as there are more low paid positions than high paid positions), the natural result is that it will happen.
My experience is that both high and low paid positions are not as "safe" as people think they are (seen multiple changing in various organizations types), so people should care more about finding a reasonable organization.
I think you need a CEO, you just don't need a CEO that is paid $7m/year. That's ludicrous. What amazing decisions have they been making that were worth that amount? Have they really contributed more than a team of 70 developers could?
There are plenty of competent people that could be CEO for far less, like $200k/year.
It doesn't even have to be that. Take that and bump it 5 times like a million dollars. Throw in more cash if they can increase Firefox's market share. Have clauses to penalize anything about opt-out telemetry or anti-privacy features. I'm happy to add more carrots as well as more sticks.
All said and done, that will still be way more reasonable than that ludicrous salary.
> don't know if you have ever worked in a larger team that lacked someone to make decisions, take responsibility and set a strategy
I had once. The ultra micro-managing boss went to surgery and was off for two months. The whole company happily cruised along, numbers kept going up, his toxic pressure was absent, people kept working and making things.
I don't know how it would go for long term, but these were some of the best months.
Leaving aside the (valid) sibling commenters here pointing out that it can be done well, but you're making a strawman argument - the gp never said anything about eliminating managers or organisational structure.
They specifically targetted two things:
1. directing funding towards Firefox development. Mozilla have been criticised for spending large portions of their income on non-Firefox endeavours while not publishing breakdowns of Firefox-specific spending in their annual reports
2. The CEO's salary: the commenter said nothing about not wanting the CEO position to exist, merely a desire for the funding to the Foundation to not be excessively funnelled into salary increases while the company's resources contract. Which seems reasonable.
It's bizarre. In Japan, the custom is to revere your elders, in the US its apparently whoever is titled "leader". All of HN shivers in exaltation at the mention of the word.
The reality is that Firefox would have done much better had Mozilla fired their CEO 15 years ago and never hired another one. All of them executed significantly worse than mere government bonds did.
Yet we happily do that for everything else.
Either software developers have to figure out how to out compete the CEO ghouls (without becoming CEO ghouls themselves), or we just have to accept that the CEO ghouls will take their cut. There's no version of this where you can pay for a service, but also dictate how that money is spent.
I think that's because those everything else are products with an opaque structure, and Mozilla, and for example Wikipedia, are more transparent. Really highlights why some people don't open up, either themselves, their source code, or their organizational structure: it's just inviting endless criticism.
Adding to the point, donating to Mozilla (or Wikipedia) is optional, and paying for a product is not, legally. So if I'm buying clothing, it's whatever, I need my clothing, and the price is just the functional gateway of getting it. But in case of a Mozilla donation, I'm trying to do something good in the world. And if I discover that it's wasted, then I'm not just getting nothing - I am worse off, because I supported a bad cause.
This has been part of my conclusion too.
There's an irony that in providing people the option of not paying, you are also inviting them to find flaws in your organization to avoid paying. We are all aware that Microsoft sucks, yet there's never any doubt that you'll have to pay for a 365 subscription if you're a serious business. At the same time we'll also gladly accept that small companies don't donate to the Linux foundation, because they have to pay their bills.
By using the control we advocate for (forking projects, reducing funding, etc) we only harm the projects that afford us that control. Not paying Mozilla does nothing to reduce the control of Google over chrome. It only hurts the one browser that gives you the choice.
That's true, although I will point out that we've long had a funding crisis in OSS. Tons of very valuable, very necessary OSS work is being done for no or little pay.
Add to that the value capture that happens outside of that exchange. We may say that valkey is well enough funded to continue development, but that doesn't account for the immense value that is being captured by the big cloud providers charging a premium for hosting it. Azure, AWS and GCP are only as valuable as they are because there's some software you can run on them. The cheaper that software, the more they get to charge.
This is sort of a general problem with the American system of "philanthropy". We can say that the Linux Foundation is developing the Linux kernel independently for free, and that various other companies then donate, but that ignores the fact that the Linux kernel has been tremendously valuable for those same companies. In a more real way, they are paying for the development of the kernel, but they are not paying anything even close the value they are deriving from it. Value is in that way being extracted from the Linux kernel outside of the Linux Foundation, and that looks a lot like "an executive in between".
Isn't this the idea of charity though? To give without expecting something in return? I think open source software had a tremendous positive impact even if some companies also made profit out of it. How would it have been otherwise? Only walled gardens with no possibility of doing anything (like forking) and probably a miserable developer experience.
You give the examples of Azure, AWS and GCP - do they really have that much secret sauce? My impression is that AWS is mostly giving a new name to open source stuff. If all would decide tomorrow to double their prices competitors will appear immediately. And my guess is that their profit is due to forgotten or over-provisioned resources of other organizations anyhow.
I think we should focus on the benefits for society of open source, not on reducing the profit that some will make from it here and there.
Firefox's entire appeal is that it is not like every other corporate entity. Its legitimacy hinges on how far it can separate itself from intrusive corporate interests.
If Mozilla goes the same way, Firefox loses all goodwill it gathered over the years and stops being an option against Chrome et al.
That's an interesting perspective I hadn't heard before
I'll need to think about this more but one difference that comes to mind after giving it some thought is that donations are a choice. Buying food is not really optional. I'm not going to the store and giving them 50€ because I hope they continue to operate, I give them the money as an equal exchange
There is a group of people who would choose to shop more frequently at a certain place, or tip more, if their favorite place is having trouble, but as far as I know this is only a small effect and market forces decide for 95% whether a place can continue to pay its bills. With open source software development like at Mozilla, barring other income sources, they rely on those 5%. The donators don't need to accept that their money is spent on drugs and mansions¹, the way that they do when buying groceries and the big boss might indeed use the profits in that way
¹ I have no clue what else you would do with the 7M USD a year that someone else quoted. Even at a 50% tax rate (idk what the tax rate is for someone who operates a non-profit in the USA), an average person could literally retire after six months of telling others what to do at this "non profit"
I can't get around doing it for good products that are better than their competition. Firefox isnt that. I'd pay if it meant supporting enthusiastic engineers that try to make the best browser and strive to compete with Goliath. I'm not going to pay for the inflated sallary of the CEO of a product that is worse than the competition.
Or in slightly less fatalistic words: In any entity with more than 1-2 employees you need someone to make decisions and be accountable for them. The normal solution is to have a director/CEO for this. You may be able to get away with paying them slightly less than market rates if they are doing it for a good cause, but if you want someone competent you will need to pay them a relatively high salary to compete with other employers.
Expecting Mozilla to somehow function without a CEO, unlike pretty much every other charity in the world, is just not reasonable.
Yes exactly! Except for developers who I don't like and except for the development of features I don't like and except for certain functions within the code which I don't fancy, and also they have to use tabs instead of spaces if they want my hard earned money! Also which text editor is each developer using?
How are you expecting to run an entity with developers, support, and operations without any leadership?
I don't know if you have ever worked in a larger team that lacked someone to make decisions, take responsibility and set a strategy, but in my experience that is almost always a disaster.