Sorry, my words above feel gross. I don't normally write sarcastic comments, and I don't like to, but I was a little put off by the "good riddance" comment.
I just mean... aren't some entities cost centres that pay dividends later, sometimes non-monetarily. Kinda like children. Not everything needs to compete is the market and be judged a failure if it doesn't succeed through the single metric markets care about, right?
Anyhow, respect (despite my sarcastic start :) )
That's where Mozilla is.
The Corporation makes the browser (and presumably gets the Google money), the Foundation collects the donations and does PR/social justice/bettering-the-world initiatives.
You can't donate to the Corporation to fund Firefox development, and even if you could, any 'excess' profits the Corporation made would get siphoned out to the Foundation anyway.
> The Corporation and MZLA pay license fees per trademark license agreements with the Foundation. In January 2020, the trademark license agreement was amended between the Corporation and the Foundation, whereby, the Corporation will pay the Foundation a royalty payment based on the Corporation’s annual revenue. The amount of royalties owed are calculated using a tiered rate structure, but at no time will the royalty payment go below the lesser of $11.0 million or six (6)% of search revenue. The Corporation incurred $16.3 million and $15.9 million in license fees to the Foundation in 2020 and 2019, respectively.
> The trademark license agreement between MZLA and the Foundation stipulates that MZLA will pay the Foundation a royalty payment based upon the revenue generated from certain products. MZLA paid $63,787 and $0 in license fees to the Foundation in 2020 and 2019, respectively.
In Mozilla's case especially, such a gamble ("gamble"—I really don't think it's that out-there) seems eminently worth it, since they've been treading water at best for over a decade. What's the worst that can happen? They fail? Already happening.
I suspect this entire trend (across the economy, not just at Mozilla) is due to some combo of our modern intense aversion for taking responsibility for anything whatsoever, and pervasive self-dealing in the management class. Board won't replace the "right" kind of person with the "wrong" kind because it's Simply Not Done—why, if anyone in the top half of the intelligence bell curve and an OK work ethic could do their jobs with just a little experience and training, they might no longer command such insane salaries! Can't have that.
But, I'm open to the possibility that it did in fact become unworkable, for some reason I don't know about, to just train people into these positions as-needed, and in fact we do have to pay stupid amounts of money to a tiny, incestuous c-suite class who are the only possible candidates for these roles, or else everything will fall apart.
Its all still horse shit, but if you want to tear down the American CEO institution you have to understand their first and primary argument is that they can still do things others can't, because they're (reportedly) in those smoke filled room where "big deals get done".
Sure—and I'm serious that I'm open to the possibility that something actually did change about the business landscape for non-shitty (i.e. not corruption or principal-agent-problem) reasons such that it's in fact true that there's a big advantage to hiring from the small pool of acceptable CEO candidates that justifies giving them entire train cars full of cash, but it does seem to me like we didn't used to operate that way and things were... basically fine. Not that there weren't huge advantages to being in the "right" set, or whatever, as there has been in any time and place, but that it seems like for the specific case of CEOs it used to be more acceptable to train up existing employees, who didn't start their employment with the company somewhere in the top-exec echelon, into those kinds of roles, which behavior seems like it would act as a pretty effective relief valve on CEO comp getting out of control.
What's going on now sure looks like what would happen if the people in charge of hiring for these roles had a strong interest in keeping the compensation extremely high. But it's still possible there's something else going on, and there are good, non-corrupt motivations at work.
I think that's nostalgia glasses. The level of corruption in SV seems no different to me to Wall Street in the 90s. People in power grasping community resources as their own is nothing new to humankind.
Its still worth being passionate about and rebelling against. While the general theme of the corruption may be similar its still eventful that it is occurring in new areas and in new ways (i.e. SPACs, ICOs).
The 90s might be the wrong point to measure from. Isn't it pretty well documented that CEOs are getting paid greater "multiples" of average pay than they had in the past (e.g. they used to be paid 100x, now they're paid 1000x)?
Even if there was a big advantage to hire from the same small pool of acceptable candidates, that's no justification for paying them "entire train cars full of cash." There's all kinds of scarce and valuable skills that are just as rare but compensation doesn't shoot off to infinity.
Agree whole-heartedly.
I'm all for reducing exec pay and wage disparity, but still... let's give ppl props when they do pro-social things. That's the moral equivalent of a talented software eng opting to take a 70% pay cut to work in non-profit or government sector instead of private sector. The majority of ppl reading and judging are doing no such thing
> Yeah the poor could sustain themselves on cake,
This is the opposite of what the anecdote is meant to say, right? The joke is that the poor can't sustain themselves on cake because lacking bread also means lacking cake. Is $3 million the bread? Is the CEO the poor? Am I having a stroke?
By comparison here is a CEO announcing a noble "sacrifice" at 3 million/yr salary while people and projects were being axed at Mozilla - and in my view Mozilla continues to falter relative to what its trajectory could have been given the extreme amounts of capitol and talent they've had access to.
A real sacrifice would've been to take $0 (presumably this individual is already enormously wealthy).
You do realize in these organizations not everyone is making 150k+.
comment 1: How dare she say 3 million is a sacrifice? That's more money than many of us will see in an entire decade, if not more! None of us can get imagine getting 3 million!
comment 2: Well she could make 10 million, so 3 million to her is chump change.
My guess is as follows: The "us" in comment 1 is the poor, the failure to "read the room" is comment 2 mentioning the 10 million when the vast majority of people identify with comment 1 and thus think mentioning 10 million when even 3 million is unattainable is tone deaf.
Thus, loosely speaking, 10 million is cake, 3 million is bread.
But I agree with you that the analogy is not perfect.
Then thank god that Firefox is FOSS, so whoever picks it up won't have to. The abolition of Mozilla would mean that more thoughtful forks won't have to compete with upstream for either cash or attention. Although I'd bet $1000 that if Mozilla died, they'd give Firefox and its trademarks to the Apache Foundation Openoffice-style to protect Chrome even after the company's last breath.
Yes, and plenty of guys have been saying that since day 0 of the new management taking over, only to get ignored and hushed away. Yet, here we are 8(!) years later :).
New unpopular opinion: Mozilla needs to disappear. The faster it does the better, as it is already dead.
I did not realize currency trade was constrained to your sensibilities; my bad. Private property, free markets! Until two parties enter into an arrangement then you demand they open themselves to business with others?
Right, but the argument goes that the only reason Google pays Mozilla so much is to prop up the competition. Google may have calculated that it would be preferable to pay the hundreds of millions, rather than have Firefox die just leaving Chrome/Safari.
Thus, it's not really a sustainable business, but rather being the lucky benefactor of some scheme. Their value is only in being 'the other guy', not in actually creating a valuable product for consumers. I wouldn't call that a sustainable business.
Google Chrome is not a "sustainable business" either; it just gets funded by Google's other business activities (mainly Google ads). Arguably, Safari is the only one that people (indirectly) pay for when they purchase an Apple device.
> Their value is only in being 'the other guy', not in actually creating a valuable product for consumers.
I use Firefox purely because I feel it works better than Chrome.
Mozilla's value to Google might be only being "the other guy", but Mozilla is valuable to me (a consumer) because they are producing a Firefox, which is a product I consider valuable.
Obviously I would prefer that Mozilla can find a self-sustainable business model to support Firefox development. But if I had to choose between "Mozilla doesn't exist" and "Mozilla exists only because it gets money from Google", then I choose the latter.
Firefox is developed by the Mozilla Corporation. The closest thing to paying for Firefox is probably donating to the Mozilla Foundation, but that money is used for education and advocacy.
That's a choice made by the Mozilla Corporation, not a technical impossibility.
Google isn’t a sustainable business without paying enormous sums to remain in business, without a whole lot of political concessions that have been made to hype USian markets.
What is and isn’t a sustainable business is relative to how frequently you have been told what is and isn’t sustainable business.
This is not true. There are so many examples of 2nd mover who became the dominant force, such as Zoom, Photoshop, MS Office, IntelliJ.
To attribute a success product purely to luck is also intellectually lazy. There are often so many factors, in many cases conflicting, that change of course of a product. It is impossible to say luck is the main factor, although it is usually a factor.
Thats what free market allows.
I’m highlighting social hypocrisy.
Google isn’t sustainable without policy concessions; the market value gibberish is added onto something that is propped up by government looking the other way to sell the idea to people who don’t understand finance is an ephemeral con game. IMO “big software products and services” are only big business because it’s also profitable to politicians insider trading schemes. Open source and for hire software workers and ridding ourselves of big corp protectionism provisions in law and policy would be great. Very little of this distributed ledger and accounting nonsense has value to the average worker; their day to day is being a worker. Make the minority of “successes” compete on an open labor market instead of giving Bezos a pass. Having 25 people willing to chuck $50k each at my dreams.
Make him a gig worker too.
> despite
"In spite of paying my 30 year old live-at-home son a $100,000 per year allowance, he has been unable to find and hold a full-time job"
> “The reason they partner with Google isn’t because they had to; it’s because they want to,” Schmidtlein said.
Mozilla would disappear overnight if Google stopped paying them.
Good riddance IMO (even though I love FF and it's the only browser I use). They haven't been able to build a sustainable business despite receiving hundreds of millions of dollars per year from Google. A flower shop on a street corner can get a better ROI. Mozilla's management is incompetent and shady.