I want Firefox to succeed more than ever and I support Mozilla finding better revenue sources than search engine default sales, but I do not support a $7M salary for its CEO.
I canceled my recurring donation to Mozilla because I need that money more than Mozillaâs CEO needs that money.
If there is a direct funding option of developers working on Firefox, I will happily reallocate that money. Send me links.
Source: Form 990 https://stateof.mozilla.org/
Edit: Replaced commentary with direct source
The State of Mozilla: 2022 â 2023 Annual Report â Mozilla
Every year, in the spirit of openness upon which Mozilla was founded, we share publicly the ways we have protected, fought for and helped advance the internet in service of the people who rely on it every day.stateof.mozilla.org
This entry was edited (4 months ago)
reshared this
Emmanuele Bassi
in reply to Jeremiah Lee • • •first of all: never, ever read what drivel Lunduke vomits. He's scum, and if you're getting your information from him you're basically falling for a huckster.
Second: your donation goes to the Mozilla Foundation, but the CEO is paid by the Mozilla Corporation, and that money comes from the business deals that are, among other things, made by the CEO.
CEO are overpaid? Yes, that's absolutely true all across the industry; is the MoCo CEO paid by donations to the MoFo? No.
Jeremiah Lee
in reply to Emmanuele Bassi • • •@ebassi I was not aware of Lunduke until today. Several people have pointed out his bad behavior in the past. I will not link to him in the future. I believe his points in this post are valid and have not found similar reporting to update my post with.
My objection is to the allocation of capital. $1M less to the CEO could fund several folks making Firefox better. My years of donations to the foundation never getting directed towards Firefoxâs development stings doubly.
Emmanuele Bassi
in reply to Jeremiah Lee • • •the points Lunduke makes are generally informed by his perspective, which is alt-right drivel, so always be careful about the target of his next attack.
As I said: I agree with the sentiment that CEOs are overpaid for what they contribute. I don't believe in singling out one of them just because there's a non-profit foundation involved in it.
Paul Lalonde
in reply to Jeremiah Lee • • •Emmanuele Bassi
in reply to Paul Lalonde • • •Jean-Bio au Terminal Chatoyant
in reply to Emmanuele Bassi • • •Emmanuele Bassi
in reply to Jean-Bio au Terminal Chatoyant • • •@nojhan that's for the board of MoCo/MoFo to decide, but if they keep her employed I think they are satisfied with her performance.
I am all for expressing dismay at the performance of Moz, and their lack of direction; I don't want to single out the MoCo CEO, when clearly the MoFo is behind her; and I don't really want to single out her pay, because adding 10 more engineers isn't going to make Firefox any better if there isn't anyone bringing in cash at year's end.
Emmanuele Bassi
in reply to Emmanuele Bassi • • •Dekkzz :emacs:
in reply to Emmanuele Bassi • • •@ebassi @nojhan
@louis
Mozilla is almost a case study in clueless management leadership, how much did they pay for pocket?
i remove it from the UI but every update there it is back front & centre.
Emmanuele Bassi
in reply to Dekkzz :emacs: • • •Dekkzz :emacs:
in reply to Emmanuele Bassi • • •@ebassi @nojhan @louis
embeddable? in what sense?
Emmanuele Bassi
in reply to Dekkzz :emacs: • • •Federico Mena Quintero reshared this.
Vincent Degove
in reply to Emmanuele Bassi • • •That seems a great idea for the future: electron apps are shit, but there is a high demand (from developers) to write "desktop apps" with web technology. If Mozilla can answer this demand better than Electron (and I'm sure there is room for improvement) it will be a massive success.
This train hasn't passed yet, still time to hop in
Steve F.
in reply to Vincent Degove • • •Emmanuele Bassi
in reply to Steve F. • • •Steve F.
in reply to Emmanuele Bassi • • •@ebassi @vincevlo @dekkzz76 @nojhan @louis XULRunner never really lived, tbh (I just picked the last release date as the "death" date in the post above).
I remember being psyched when ephy was ported from gtkmozembed to gtk-webkit, the code became sooo much simpler. But it was before Chrome became the problem it is today (I got my memory backwards, Chrome was released in 2008 while the first Epiphany version using Webkit is from 2009)
Luis Villa
in reply to Emmanuele Bassi • • •Louis :emacs:
in reply to Emmanuele Bassi • • •@ebassi @dekkzz76 @nojhan We all know how much money Mozilla gets from Google under the pretence of being the pre-set search engine of a minority browser.
Obviously, however, Mozilla's management has perhaps been given a mandate: to limit the spread of Firefox as much as possible. To spend money for ridiculous acquisitions, just not the advance of Firefox. And to limiting the introduction of innovative features. Avoiding antitrust cases for being a de-facto monopoly is just a nice side effect.
So far, they have been very successful with their strategy: Firefox is almost unknown to the general public and it is very unlikely that will ever change.
Always follow the money and everything makes sense.
firebreathingduck
in reply to Emmanuele Bassi • • •@ebassi
You're making an irrelevant distinction. Mozilla Corporation pays other Firefox contributors, so if Mitchell Baker had to suffer in unspeakable torment with a $500k income, that would free up 6 million dollars for other contributors and then fewer of us would need to donate.
And it's classic Wall Street logic to keep raising the compensation of a CEO while their flagship product lost 80% market share under their leadership. Any non-exec would be fired for the same outcome.
For the record, I donate monthly to Thunderbird and the Software Freedom Conservancy.
Emmanuele Bassi
in reply to firebreathingduck • • •Emmanuele Bassi
in reply to Emmanuele Bassi • • •Emmanuele Bassi
in reply to Emmanuele Bassi • • •firebreathingduck
in reply to Emmanuele Bassi • • •@ebassi
We're armchair pontificators beating a dead horse here. But it's fun.
Mozilla's flagship is Firefox, and to continue the flagship metaphor, the rest of their navy is composed of kayaks.
And Baker and Mozilla leadership spent fifteen years trying to pivot to new projects instead of focusing enough on the core product. Now to be fair, Google shamelessly used its search monopoly to promote Chrome and Mozilla could do nothing. So maybe if Mozilla had done everything right, it wouldn't matter.
But when you install Firefox, your start page should have a blank search bar. On the right side you should have five simple links: personalize this page, set as default browser, see what's new, get add-ons, donate.
No start page full of ads and images.
*Never* modal dialogs about features, default browser, "What's New", etc...
Fast, lean, get out of my way and let me get things done. Give users what they want and what they know, with their option to explore more. i.e. a product that puts me first, not Mozilla.
Klaus Zimmermann :unverified:
in reply to Jeremiah Lee • • •for comparison, the *entire* fundraising drive of the #FSF is 375,000 USD.
https://my.fsf.org/donate
That single Mozilla CEO cops a whopping *18 times* more than the goal funding of the entire FSF for 2024!
Support the Free Software Foundation | Free Software Foundation
my.fsf.orgEmmanuele Bassi
in reply to Klaus Zimmermann :unverified: • • •Klaus Zimmermann :unverified:
in reply to Emmanuele Bassi • • •@ebassi ok, you don't like the FSF. That's fair.
I still encourage you to go on and add up the target budgets of all the donation-driven open source software projects you can find doing fundraisers this year.
Then we can see how many entire projects' yearly budgets equal out the Mozilla CEO's salary, or just half of it if it's too difficult. Let's make it fair and discount the "bonuses" that were not part of the base salary.
Here's a starter: Framasoft - 200,000 EUR. Know of any other?
Emmanuele Bassi
in reply to Klaus Zimmermann :unverified: • • •@kzimmermann this is the compensation for the CEO of the Mozilla *Corporation* (who is also the chairman of the Foundation, but doesn't get compensation for that). You should not compare the CEO of MoCo with other no profit foundations, or small donation-driven software projects. Framasoft isn't getting 400mil USD per year out of deals with other companies.
That's why I said that the FSF doesn't do anything, compared to Mozilla.
Klaus Zimmermann :unverified:
in reply to Emmanuele Bassi • • •