Mozilla Corporation, which develops Firefox, is a for-profit business. It just so happens that 100% of its shares are owned by the Mozilla Foundation, a non-profit.

The sooner the profit corp dies off and eats humble pie then, the better.

An actual community project should rise from this state of affairs, with tanginble, browser-oriented goals, not something dependent on Google's money...

Here's the person who announced the firings... Nothing to do with development or FOSS, some laywer ex-Netscape employee:

Winifred Mitchell Baker (born 1959) is the Executive Chairwoman and CEO of the Mozilla Foundation and of Mozilla Corporation, a subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation that coordinates development of the open source Mozilla Internet applications, including the Mozilla Firefox web browser. Baker was trained as a lawyer. She coordinates business and policy issues and sits on both the Mozilla Foundation Board of Directors and the Mozilla Corporation Board of Directors.

It's like the leeches that hang on to NGOs for a salaried office career, and don't do activism themselves...

For all his faults, at least Brendan Eich was an actual developer, and with important contributions to the web and Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox.

> An actual community project should rise from this state of affairs

This is just so naive view ... it's always the abstract "community" which should step in and save the day. Recently it was LibreOffice too where people got all mad due to proposed branding and again "community" superhero was expected to step in, fork it and carry on the whole development.

In reality these projects are far too huge to be purely community projects. They require full time paid developers and not few of them. They won't be able to survive without corporate sponsorship (and thus influence).

>In reality these projects are far too huge to be purely community projects.

Mozilla is far too huge to not have money. Just 200M from those 600 million per year it took from Google, put in the bank, could pay for 50 developers/graphic designers/ $200K per year to work on it for 20 years. That would have taken care of the engine for 2 decades...

Instead they burnt money in BS ventures, Cxx salaries, events, and so on...

> 50 developers/graphic designers

That is way too low to be anything more than maintenance mode. By my estimation [1], you'd want somewhere around 250 full-time equivalents to be able to declare the project in a healthy state.

[1] Take the number I'd estimate for Thunderbird, multiply by 10 for Firefox-scale, then add another 20% to account for the operations that Thunderbird gets "for free" (e.g., maintaining server infrastructure) and accounting for the fact that email standards are far slower in innovation than browser standards.

You're delusional if you think you can maintain a competitive browser runtime with 50 employees.

I think you can maintain it with even less...

KHTML was done by a tiny KDE team.

After Apple adopted it, Webkit/Safari only had a small team of people working on it.

A good team of 12-20 devs is better than some BS team of 250 with politics, communication overhead, lack of coherence etc that comes with scale...

> KHTML was done by a tiny KDE team.

Yes, 20 years ago.

Fortunately, web technology did not evolve and grow at all since so it should be doable now too, right?

> Yes, 20 years ago.

So? 20 years ago Netscape still had a much larger team, Microsoft too, and Webkit with its small team still beat them in their own game.

Small teams can build whole OSes, browsers, compilers, and whatever they put their mind too. Given good devs/experts, they can do so even better/faster than bigger teams.

P.S. 1 Not that a 50-strong team is small.

P.S. 2 Plus, way of missing the point. The team-of-50, 200K, 20 years = 200M was just an example. 200M is 1/3rd of what Mozilla made in a year for decades. And even those 200M would just be the raw money spent, not invested or anything. They could afford to support a 300-strong team of 20 years with 2 years of their revenue un-invested. And that's with a $200K/year salary, which doesn't have to be...

Kinda wonder what happened after the yahoo buyout. Supposedly Mozilla could have kept all the cash from yahoo's search deal, but still solicited revenue from google by making them the default instead. Where did that money go, and why not just earmark it for Firefox?

https://gizmodo.com/yahoo-s-insanely-bad-deal-to-pay-mozilla...

My understanding is that there was a lawsuit over this https://www.businessinsider.com/yahoo-mozilla-legal-fight-ov...

I have not heard about this in a very long time (note this article is from December 2017), but also, litigation takes a very long time.

> Nothing to do with development or FOSS

Not exactly nothing to do with FOSS. She wrote the MPL. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker

Having said that, I do think these recent layoffs reflect badly on her if she is indeed responsible for them.

Not only did I not know that a non-profit could wholly own a for-profit, not only did I not know that they could share executive leadership, I certainly did not know this was the case for Mozilla.

Note that a for-profit owned by a non-for-profit is really a not-for-profit. Because the only things that the for-profit company can do with it's profit are reinvest it, or give it to the non-for-profit.

>Because the only things that the for-profit company can do with it's profit are reinvest it, or give it to the non-for-profit.

It can also pay it's Cxx's nice salaries and hefty golden parachutes, which makes it a for profit for them...

Then what is the benefit of this arrangement?

That is, based on what you said, it sounds like there is no meaningful difference between having a non-profit do all the work, and a for-profit doing work on behalf of the non-profit that owns it. But if that was the case, why would anyone bother with the extra layers? I'm inclined to assume there is some reason for the extra layers, and I have difficulty believing those differences are in society's best interest.

I think the difference is mainly in restrictions on what kind of activities a non-profit can participate in. I'm not sure on the details.

Taxes are a big reason. In many countries you can save quite a lot on revenue tax this way.

> community project ... rise from affairs

By the looks of it, Servo is a project that failed to deliver a new browser engine after years of work. If there were a chance that the project could be turned around to result in usable software, I'm sure Moz wouldn't have killed it. Is it worth the effort to pickup the project rather than starting from scratch? I don't know, and would appreciate if contributors share their opinion, or come up with a roadmap. By the reaction of some devs here on HN ("don't worry, Rust is safe; no really!") unfortunately I got the impression that the project was treated more as a showcase for Rust rather than a serious attempt at a new browser engine (please don't take it personally; I know this attitude from the "100% Javs" days and consider it a junior dev trait). Also, the "rise from ashes"/Phoenix metapher is no stranger to Mozilla, only that Moz picked the remains from Netscape; the effort to code a browser from scratch (in Java) had failed as well; it resulted in the Rhino JavaScript engine which is still heavily used.

Servo wasn't intended to build a full engine to replace Gecko, just to prove out components (Stylo, WebRender, etc) that could be integrated back into Gecko proper, built in a way that takes full advantage of Rusts strengths, and it's been pretty successful by that measure, IMO.

There was plenty more work to do (other commenters have mentioned a new layout engine), and I'm disappointed to see Mozilla abandoning such a core next-gen R&D project that has already brought substantial improvements to their main product.

> Servo wasn't intended to build a full engine to replace Gecko, just to prove out components

That's really not a true reflection of prior communications about Servo's goals.

Parts of Servo succeeded, like the webrender GPU stack and the CSS selector engine.

The parallel layout engine failed. It just kept running into corner cases that didn't handle parallel layout well. If you look in the layout_2020 folder in the source repository, you can see an in-progress pivot to a new approach that would hopefully have less problems, but now we'll never know.

This isn't a surprise. It was supposed to be a research project; if parts of it didn't fail, that would be a surprise.

Oh come on, let's stop it with the CEO bashing. Especially around he salary. You need a CEO, and Bay Area salaries are high.

Just to illustrate the numbers: a fresh graduate with no experience will easily get more than 100k (even at Mozilla, who IME pay a bit less). A plain manager of a 10-person team at a big bay area company will be earning close to 500k (and most of their direct reports will also be in the 300k-500k range). Then you get your principal and distinguished engineers who can easily make 1M per year. 2.5M for someone leading a 1000 person company isn't expensive, and you do need someone to lead that company - to make tose strategic decisions.

You can quibble around whether or not a specific person made the right decisions (Mozilla aren't doing great, but they're also in a tough environment - maybe their CEO could be making better decisions that would boost usage - or maybe usage is entirely out of their control.) But you do need that person leading the company. And you need to retain them.

And her job definitely is needed, regardless of how well it's being done.

I think this reasoning is not straightforward for Mozilla as it would be for a traditional company.

Normally, the shareholders own the company. They appoint the CEO, or a board of directors or whatever management structure, and they decide how much to pay them. It's the shareholders' company, it's the shareholders' right to decide whether to keep the C-suite and how much to pay them. Things can get a bit muddled with large public companies with many shareholders, or when there are dual class shares, which can partially insulate the management from the owners control, but it more or less works this way.

In the case of Mozilla Foundation, AFAICS, this does not hold. The board of directors is completely self managing; they coopt board members and appoint the CEO of Mozilla Corporation.

I might be very wrong about this, but since Baker is both the chairman of the foundation and the CEO of the corporation, it looks to me like she doesn't basically answer to anyone. It's a bit like she owns the company, except she didn't have to buy it. That's a pretty sweet deal.

>Oh come on, let's stop it with the CEO bashing. Especially around he salary. You need a CEO

Citation needed.

>But you do need that person leading the company. And you need to retain them.

I don't even need / want a company. I want the non-profit organization I was promised, with community leading, and perhaps 1-2 BDFLs to make the final decisions.

Linux did well without a CEO...

AFAIK a non-profit can't make the kind of search engine deal that generates the vast majority of Mozilla's income, and currently funds Gecko development.

> And her job definitely is needed, regardless of how well it's being done.

If I can take a literal potato, stick it in a pot, put that pot in an expensive chair in an expensive well-lit CEO office, have the potato's PA water it every day, and at the end of the year can claim more growth and sustainability, then "how well it's being done" kind of starts to matter.

That presumes that a CEO should be making more than a distinguished engineer. The truth is that CEO salaries are completely public so there's much deeper competition for the highest-paid ones (the ones getting paid the most, not necessarily the best at the job) in an ever expanding bubble the increases the salaries from those making less ("this is what it takes to run an organization of this size"). If we had an actual way to measure value on the job things would be better (something like points above replacement) but no one has figured this out for large organizations that require cooperation (+ different kinds of value).

Those numbers are only true of a handful of household name tech companies that are very competitive to get into. I guarantee you that most line level people at most companies are not making 300-500k.