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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 Mozilla’s 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 stateof.mozilla.org/

Edit: Replaced commentary with direct source

US Tax Form 990 for year 2022 for Mozilla Foundation. Page 7. Compensation of Officers, Directors, Trustees, Key Employees, Highest Compensated Employees, and Independent Contractors. Line 1. Column A. Mitchell Baker, Chair, paid only by a related for-profit. Column E. Reported compensation from related organizations. $6,903,089. Column F. Estimated amount of other compensation from the organization. $33,513.

The State of Mozilla: 2022 — 2023 Annual Report — 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 (10 months ago)

reshared this

in reply to Jeremiah Lee

Emmanuele Bassi
Emmanuele Bassi
• •

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.

in reply to Emmanuele Bassi

Jeremiah Lee
Jeremiah Lee
• •

@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 Firefox’s development stings doubly.

@Emmanuele Bassi
in reply to Jeremiah Lee

Emmanuele Bassi
Emmanuele Bassi
• •

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.

in reply to Jeremiah Lee

Paul Lalonde
Paul Lalonde
• •
@ebassi there's a great deal of misogyny baked into the claims of "excessive compensation". She's earning at the low side of compensation for a corporation with $3/4B in revenues, most from deals brokered by the CEO rather than direct product revenue.
@Emmanuele Bassi
in reply to Paul Lalonde

Emmanuele Bassi
Emmanuele Bassi
• •
@Flux also reminder that a lot of this narrative is peddled by Eich, as he was torpedoed out of the CEO position for being a homophobe
@Paul Lalonde
in reply to Emmanuele Bassi

Jean-Shell au ʨrminal cha℔yant
Jean-Shell au ʨrminal cha℔yant
• •
@ebassi But did the CEO laid off people, and/or failed to hire more, and/or invest in Mozilla's missions, instead of increasing her capital?
@Emmanuele Bassi
in reply to Jean-Shell au ʨrminal cha℔yant

Emmanuele Bassi
Emmanuele Bassi
• •

@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.

@Jean-Shell au ʨrminal cha℔yant
in reply to Emmanuele Bassi

Emmanuele Bassi
Emmanuele Bassi
• •
@nojhan disclaimer: I worked at Mozilla (for a little bit, 10 years ago), and Mozilla grew far too fast, and far too much, so I don't agree with any assessment that says: "the CEO should get a pay cut and they should hire more people", because that's precisely what broke Mozilla. The issue is lack of direction, and a market that has been monopolised by Google, and that isn't going to be fixed by a bunch more people hacking on Firefox on Linux.
@Jean-Shell au ʨrminal cha℔yant
in reply to Emmanuele Bassi

Dekkzz
Dekkzz
• •

@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 @Jean-Shell au ʨrminal cha℔yant
in reply to Dekkzz

Emmanuele Bassi
Emmanuele Bassi
• •
@dekkzz76 @nojhan @louis the sins of Mozilla run a lot deeper than acquiring a bookmark service, and in general have nothing to do with how they spent money on acquisitions or even hiring practices. Ironically, it's the ironclad conviction that Firefox should be a product that messed them up; if they focused on making it embeddable, we would not have Chrome at the heart of everything… or, at least, not as much (can't fight Google on money and resources)
@Jean-Shell au ʨrminal cha℔yant @Dekkzz
in reply to Dekkzz

Emmanuele Bassi
Emmanuele Bassi
• •
@dekkzz76 @nojhan @louis first: making Gecko (the web rendering engine) usable as a library, which would have reduced the ubiquity of WebKit; then, making Firefox a generic, embeddable framework, to avoid CEF as the core of Electron. By focusing on centralising everything around the web browser, Mozilla missed the train in making the web as an app development platform, and now we have Chrome everywhere, which means Google.
@Jean-Shell au ʨrminal cha℔yant @Dekkzz

Federico Mena Quintero reshared this.

in reply to Emmanuele Bassi

Vincent Degove
Vincent Degove
• •

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

This entry was edited (10 months ago)
in reply to Steve F.

Emmanuele Bassi
Emmanuele Bassi
• •
@freci @vincevlo @dekkzz76 @nojhan @louis xulrunner died long before 2015; we had an embeddable Gecko running in offscreen mode in 2009-2010 on Moblin for netbooks, at Intel, but every time we asked Mozilla for a proper embedding API, they dithered or simply refused because “Firefox is the product”. That’s how you get WebKit everywhere, which leads to Chrome everywhere once Google decides to put their money printer behind a proper effort
@Jean-Shell au ʨrminal cha℔yant @Steve F. @Vincent Degove @Dekkzz
in reply to Emmanuele Bassi

Steve F.
Steve F.
• •

@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)

@Emmanuele Bassi @Jean-Shell au ʨrminal cha℔yant @Vincent Degove @Dekkzz
in reply to Emmanuele Bassi

Luis Villa
Luis Villa
• •
@ebassi @freci @vincevlo @dekkzz76 @nojhan @louis The dumbest part about this is that lots of things were killed internally because, depending on context, the renderer was the product. Just not enough the product to make it widely useful.
@Emmanuele Bassi @Jean-Shell au ʨrminal cha℔yant @Steve F. @Vincent Degove @Dekkzz
in reply to Emmanuele Bassi

firebreathingduck
firebreathingduck
• •

@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
Emmanuele Bassi
• •
@firebreathingduck sure, I’m totally on board with a drop the compensation package for every CEO; if you only drop her salary/bonus, though, she’ll move elsewhere (like she did before), and you won’t be able to replace her (nobody is going to get that massive shave) and you’ll be out of a CEO. Who is going to do the job of getting the money? Donations are not going to sustain a company the size of Moz without letting go a ton of people…
@firebreathingduck
in reply to Emmanuele Bassi

Emmanuele Bassi
Emmanuele Bassi
• •
@firebreathingduck restructuring Mozilla to be leaner, smaller and do less may work for something that fewer people use, and has a smaller appeal, like Thunderbird; it’s not going to send a good message for an increase in investment in Firefox… you know, the thing that still attracts enough users that you can bargain for 400 million USD in search provider deals
@firebreathingduck
in reply to Emmanuele Bassi

Emmanuele Bassi
Emmanuele Bassi
• •
@firebreathingduck once again: Mozilla is not in a good place, and its management has committed multiple blunders; paying their CEO a fraction of the average salary for a tech company of their size and reach isn’t really one of them
@firebreathingduck
in reply to Emmanuele Bassi

firebreathingduck
firebreathingduck
• •

@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.

@Emmanuele Bassi
in reply to Jeremiah Lee

Klaus Zimmermann
Klaus Zimmermann
• •

for comparison, the *entire* fundraising drive of the #FSF is 375,000 USD.

my.fsf.org/donate

That single Mozilla CEO cops a whopping *18 times* more than the goal funding of the entire FSF for 2024!

Fundraising bar for FSF on Dec 29 2023. Progress: 291239 / 375000 USD

Support the Free Software Foundation | Free Software Foundation

my.fsf.org
#fsf
in reply to Emmanuele Bassi

Klaus Zimmermann
Klaus Zimmermann
• •

@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

Emmanuele Bassi
Emmanuele Bassi
• •

@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
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