Firefox Money: Investigating the bizarre finances of Mozilla
Firefox Money: Investigating the bizarre finances of Mozilla
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The author may be a right-wing fellow. Nonetheless, the data he exposes are taken from official Mozilla docs.
This "report" is exactly what I would expect from Lunduke. It is really sad that this reactionary content comes from someone who I once thought was cool.
The only part I can agree on : the execs at Mozilla are getting paid too much in the current situation.
Now to get to the real meat.
The combined spendings to political organizations make up around 1m$. This is less than the donations made to Mozilla foundation. Considering the very political nature of the foundation, these spendings were likely authorized there.
Now, why would a technology company spend on political organisations? Well, simply put : technology is political. People trying to peddle that technology is not political are trying to sell you the status quo.
Technology companies spend insane amounts of money on lobbying.
Now, why would Mozilla spend money on left-leaning organisations? Well, simply put : left-leaning politics (though embedded in neoliberal Californian ideals of the internet) are embedded at the core of Mozilla from the start with Mozilla manifesto.
I'm not gonna get into why Lunduke thinks that these organisations are bad but consider it a red flag.
Now, what I would ask to anyone reading this : why do you think Lunduke is ignoring this? Why would Lunduke try to paint this picture?
194I'd say the CEO is the only one who's overpaid. The other executives make between $200k to $370k, which is a lot of money but barely noteworthy imo.
63If they're living in SF, then it's even less money. It's a lot, don't get me wrong, but it takes a lot of money to afford to live in (or around) that city.
38Yeah, for sure, the CEO is the clear outlier. I just count them as an exec though that might be misusing how that term is used colloquially.
19I don’t know enough about corporate finance or how Mozilla is structured, but why is the CEO the only one marked with “paid only by a related for profit”? Is this coming from money from Mozilla Corporation? Why is she the only one being paid from there and not the others? Does that maybe have something to do with the disparity in pay?
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This “report” is exactly what I would expect from Lunduke. It is really sad that this reactionary content comes from someone who I once thought was cool.
It's sad. When I discovered the Linux Action Show back in 2006 or 2007, he seemed like a fun and interesting person. But it's amazing how quickly that perception proved false. And his Twitter feed in 2020 was a dumpster fire.
Well, simply put : left-leaning politics (though embedded in neoliberal Californian ideals of the internet) are embedded at the core of Mozilla from the start with Mozilla manifesto.
Which is so fascinating given the involvement of people like Brendan Eich, and also descending from noted Libertarian and capitalist Marc Andreesen
19I mean, the neolib Californian ideals of the internet was anarchist so always anti-gov but not anti-corporate. That's how you end up with compromise points in the Mozilla manifesto like this:
Commercial involvement in the development of the internet brings many benefits; a balance between commercial profit and public benefit is critical.
Worth mentioning that Eich came from the Netscape days and was highly influential on a technical level.
12Disregard everything below. I mistook the comment about neo-liberalism for a quote from this guy.
I'm leaving the text up for context, but this criticism is misdirected.
==
It says everything you need to know that he (I suspect deliberately) confuses neo-liberal for left-wing ideology.
Neo-liberal = capitalist with a smoking jacket and a fancy degree on the wall.
SV is absolute rife with anarcho-capitalist ideology. I can only dream of a version of SV that actually carries some measure of economically liberal ideology.
My guess is this guy is confusing social liberalism with economic liberalism. But, of course, that's the entire right wing schtick these days.
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The problem isn't that they're spending money on political causes and I wouldn't even expect them to do some false balance bs where they'd spend money on left and right wing politics, but spending money on political causes with almost zero transparency (like what do orgs do with the money, how effective are they, are they actually aligned with certain values, who is involved in these orgs, etc) seems fishy as fuck.
14Permanently Deleted
3I didn't read the article... Are the organizations secret? I don't think it's fishy if not. Why would they need to spend time justifying things to the public like that?
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Ieft leaning? These orgs sound more like the typical liberal right centrist orgs from america lol
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It is stated within the article that Mckensie Mack is non-binary, however the author chose to refer to them with she/her pronouns. Regardless of “politics” and “beliefs”, I don’t agree with ignoring or disrespecting somebody’s identity.
137So where’s Lunduke’s articles on the numerous right-wing shady organizations? I haven’t listened to or read anything by this hack in many years now because of the fact that he has a clear agenda motivated by his own political bullshit.
Maybe find an article that is written by someone reputable and post that to numerous communities.
102This right here.
He was always a shit. But seeing him in 2020 parroting alt-right talking points and defending the Proud Boys showed exactly what kind of person he is.
33I don't really care if someone fights in both directions if their points are valid. Misgendering or not, mozilla has had some troubling developments internally and it's good people shed light on it.
3Shedding light with bias is the whole problem with media in the current landscape. They're never done objectively. All it does is provide a feedback loop within the echo chamber, further dividing people with the result of "see, I told you the other side is bad." Motivations matter. Lunduke has, in the past, proven where his motivations are. If he actually reported on all political, economic, technological goings-on in an objective manner, given he is a pretty good communicator, then I'd withdraw my opposition to him. Until such time, I keep to my opinion of him and have no interest in his articles. I can form my own opinion of Mozilla independent of what Lunduke or FOX News or MSNBC tries to get me to ingest.
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Given the author's political affiliation and the apparent lack of coverage of this anywhere else I find it difficult to make any conclusions other than those that would indicate the author's politically makes.
87It's so painfully obvious that the article was written to push a personal agenda rather than objectively address the topic
66Without having read the whole thing, so I'm not sure how clear the article is about it: the important part is that donations to Mozilla go to the Mozilla Foundation, which does the political campaigning/social justice etc. stuff, while Firefox development happens in the Mozilla Corporation funded with search engine deals etc.
So again:
Donations to Mozilla do not go towards Firefox development
53And looking independently at what the Mozilla Foundation does: Thank God for the Mozilla Foundation. The do incredibly important work and is as far as I know the strongest advocacy group for a free and open net.
52The EFF is probably competitive there. But clearly they’re both on the same side of most issues, so not really a competition.
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51I think this approach is doomed. People only care about Mozilla because of Firefox and Firefox is falling behind again, no doubt coinciding with the mass layoffs and the ejection of the Servo engine. They've caught up with Chrome on most fronts a year or three ago when their reinvented CSS and layout engine was released, but they're still on the back foot these days.
This is incorrect. Firefox recently surpassed Chrome in a key benchmark and has generally been on a roll lately.
Yes, their current iterative improvements are not as sexy as the big release of Quantum, but to say they're currently falling behind is the opposite of the truth. They've just pulled ahead.
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The author may be a right-wing fellow. Nonetheless, the data he exposes is not fake!
This should not be noteworthy much less be sufficient to make the article seem credible.
33Hey folks - Just want to note that the !Technology mod team is aware of the reports on this post. After some discussion we decided to leave the thread up, since it had already generated a decent amount of good discussion despite the problems with the article itself. However, I do want to make it clear that we do not condone intentionally misgendering people.
If you have any questions or feedback, feel free to reply here or DM me.
26Besides the CEO thing, this makes me wanna donate even more to the foundation
22And this is one of the many reasons I don't donate to Firefox. Firefox employees should really fork that project and make it better than what it is now instead of just being Google's dog + an excuse to pay millions to a single person and hundreds of thousands to random individuals, who have nothing to do with Firefox.
400M in cash could go to a lot of development efforts. They could rewrite Firefox entirely in Rust, make it run on any platform, move the needle on web technologies in a big way, hell, they could make their own damn phone with that kind of money, or even write their own competitor to ChromeOS.
But instead...
18And what do you do after three years? Then the cash will be used up.
Mozilla isn't just developing the Firefox browser. Technology is inherently political - and educating people and influencing actors politically on the free and open web is very important. Firefox is much less likely to mis-align away from their browser users than chrome simply because they don't have the misaligned incentives like the chrome Browser which is equally made by the largest internet advertising firm of the world.
They even has created FirefoxOS for phone at some point in the past 10 years. But I don't remember what happened with that.
26They tried making a phone already and it failed to gain steam.
14What are you on about? This is super confusing to me. Mozilla does a lot of great work. It's insanely hard to make and develop a web browser... Are you aware of that? Apple probably spends a large fraction of the amount Mozilla does and yet safari benefits more from open source than Mozilla and is still one of the biggest shit piles on the planet.
12Safari makes most of their web engine open source. Android originally used Webkit for everything related to browsers, that's why the Android WebView API is full of WebKit references. Webkit is now just Safari without the nice Apple shell. It runs on basically any OS, with varying levels of hardware acceleration support.
Safari on iOS may be neutered by Apple's fear of web apps eating their extreme App Store profits, but on desktop the engine isn't that bad. It had notifications long before they became a problematic missing feature on iOS, for instance. It got WebP support and other stuff Safari on mobile lacked for a long time because desktop browsers could just use the open source libraries already out there.
I occasionally use Gnome Web if I want to quickly look something up without restoring all my tabs, and I find WebKit to be a fine browser engine most of the time. It even has PWA support on desktop, which Firefox has decided isn't worth investing in.
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Use LibreWolf. I've switched to it from Brave because it's counted as firefox market share but it gets rid of all the non-browser features (Pocket, Telemetry, etc.) and enables some interesting flags in the config (ResistFingerprinting for example).
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I've heard that it wouldn't it be possible due to tax laws, but I do wish that you could donate directly to Mozilla Corporation itself. The foundation's advocacy work is important, but it would also be important to ensure Firefox's continued development without them having to rely on Google
15You could just buy one of their products (Pocket, VPN, etc.) and not use it if you want.
10Where does the money from here go?
4To the foundation for their advocacy.
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A Lunduke article??!? Ewww. To the unsub button I go! Thought beehaw was better than this..
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