LWN: Comments on "Baker: Changing World, Changing Mozilla"

Should Mitchell Baker give most of 1 billion back to Mozilla?

nix — Thu, 10 Sep 2020 12:30:36 +0000

I'll say. Why on earth get millions in bonuses and incentives while your browser's market share is plunging? Bonuses for what? Failure?

Covid2019? Wait, what?

XERC — Thu, 03 Sep 2020 19:20:18 +0000

I don't know, but if the Mozilla Corporation gets its money from Google and Google gets its money from advertisements that are paid by other businesses, many of them a kind of human-contact related businesses, then if Google's revenue goes down, so does Mozilla Corporations revenue.

"$10 Billion: Google’s Lost Advertising Revenues Due To The COVID-19 Outbreak"
https://archive.vn/klbJS

Baker: Changing World, Changing Mozilla

XERC — Thu, 03 Sep 2020 19:13:41 +0000

You mean, the efficiency of nose-diving?

According to the "internal" letter
https://blog.mozilla.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Messa...
it was the developer-tools and internal tooling side that got laid off. Given that there are plenty of other browsers that try to please the end users, the developer-tools was the Mozilla's main competitive advantage, a lot like Nokia had its Symbian operating system as an advantage, but the Nokia executives decided to dump the Symbian in stead of upgrading it by adding a new GUI system to it and having a more power-saving, efficient, cellphone operating system than the Android is.

Another stellar example of a total failure by the management is the Sun Microsystems decision to concentrate their Java development efforts on server-side applications. At that time the HTML-canvas did not exist, the possibility to create cross-operatingsystem-GUI-applications was only with Javan and the then-closed-source QT, where only Java had the property that an application can be compiled on one operating system and run on the other, but in stead of leveraging the main strength of the Java, the properly cross-operating-system-GUIs, they went for server-side applications, where then-existing Python might have worked just fine: write on one operating system and then run the py-files on whatever CPU based server. There was also Perl and to some extent even Bash+GCC: the installation step might have included compilation of all of the business application dependencies, which back at that time wasn't that many. Keep in mind that the Python source files based installation may include a solution, where an Installer is generated automatically for a specific server and some runtime mechanism decrypts the "closed source" py-file in RAM before executing it by using the installer specific decryption key. That kind of an encryption based mechanism has been used successfully at delivering closed source software to end users. That is to say, Java did not have a unique advantage on the server side, but it sure had a unique advantage on the GUI side.

Baker: Changing World, Changing Mozilla

XERC — Thu, 03 Sep 2020 18:49:35 +0000

How about the idea that the moment somebody S1 PAYS for activity A1, the party S2 carrying out the A1 has to please the S1 and the moment the S2 has to please to anybody at all, the S2 does not have the freedom to properly experiment by scrapping a project and declaring that there should be a totally different approach and the original task was stupid to start with?

Supposedly the Albert Einstein said that if he has to save the world within 1 hour, he would spend 55min on figuring out, what the problem is and the remaining 5min on solving the problem. From that perspective proper FOSS development can take place only in the form of sub-components of paid projects or as an end user application that has literally zero budget as a principle. The only form of sponsorship that can work without intervening with proper development, experimentation, is the university tenure style sponsorship, where the sponsor handles over the money and tells the sponsored party: "Here's the money, please do not bother me with telling how You spend Your time or what You work on or whether You work on anything at all. I know that You are intellectual enough to do at least something useful in the long run and that's good enough for me."

Another option is, where the developer earns the money itself and in stead of buying a Ferrari lives modestly to keep living expenses low so that the money would last for some longer time period while the developer works on FOSS. Freelancers working on their own components that they need for doing paid projects are such examples.

On top of that there's also the question, what does one want from life? If one does not need to achieve anything in life other than a big bank account, then why waste time on any FOSS projects? Just jump jobs, may be crawl at the corporate ladder to become one of those overpaid CEOs oneself or do something like the Google and Facebook founders did and enjoy the money. With a lot of money it is possible to totally legally and openly buy oneself a citizenship of almost any nation on planet Earth. I guess the Canadian investment requirement for getting a Canadian passport was about 2M$. The rich Hong-Kong banksters can certainly afford that, which is probably why they did not care to stand their ground and keep the Hong-Kong an independent region. It's just the poor Hong-Kong students that have to stay and suffer the changes, not the Hong-Kong top business leaders/banksters.

Should Mitchell Baker give most of 1 billion back to Mozilla?

XERC — Thu, 03 Sep 2020 18:16:47 +0000

Asking for a DONATION in Europe means culturally that the person asking for a DONATION is in dire need for help, which in turn means that people, who are NOT WELL OFF will make an effort to kindly help and donate something. An average monthly salary in Eastern-Europe is about 1400$ and a good specialist monthly salary in Finland is about 5000$, id est about 60k$/year.

For short, for a Mozilla Corporation like organization to ask DONATIONS from anywhere other than U.S. is UTTERLY DISGUSTING. Why a hell should an Easter-European software developer, who makes about 25$/year DONATE ITS WORK TIME to any U.S. open source project, where the CEO gets over 2M$/year and "low salary" developers get about 100k$/year?

Really, those people give the America a really bad reputation in Europe.

Should Mitchell Baker give most of 1 billion back to Mozilla?

apscomp — Fri, 28 Aug 2020 03:24:56 +0000

hi,

just ran a back-of-the-envelope-calculation.... at most the salary for close to the whole current decade comes to about $10 million and change... A billion$ is 1,000M dollars... where does this number come from ?

Covid2019? Wait, what?

Hi-Angel — Sat, 22 Aug 2020 14:25:23 +0000

This may be a stupid question, but can anybody explain what's the relation between Mozilla finances and Covid2019? Don't get me wrong, I understand some industries do get losses, like restaurants, landlords, and the rest of fields implying an actual human contact.

But for IT industry specifically it is a golden era, because α) demand for doing stuff remotely sharply increased and β) the existing IT companies continue working normally by moving everyone onto remote work, and may even cut the costs by no longer renting apartments.

So when I hear "Mozilla was severly damaged by Covid2019", it makes absolutely no sense to me!

How are CEO salaries calculated?

ms_43 — Sun, 16 Aug 2020 10:28:46 +0000

Which funds maybe 5% of the actual development and maintenance of LibreOffice code; the majority being funded by the commercial ecosystem's enterprise customers, and a minority done by volunteers.

But of course, not being based in Silicon Valley helps too.

How are CEO salaries calculated?

rahvin — Sun, 16 Aug 2020 04:46:16 +0000

It's not just that it's $2.5 million. It's that it's grown from 1/4 that to it's present value in less than 10 years. That kind of inflation while they are losing users and marketshare is just NOT acceptable.

You see this same type of stuff in publicly traded companies where the board of directors that sets the CEO salary are composed entirely of other CEO's from other companies and the stock holders aren't doing anything to fix it because the largest owners are institutional investors like mutual funds that don't go hands on over anything. This is an area where I believe the US is long overdue to impose some regulation on because these incestuous boards where CEO's are serving on boards of other companies whose CEO's server on their own corrupts the enterprise and allows things like the Sears situation to occur where a CEO turn the entire company to acting towards their own interests and no one holds them to account.

If Mozilla can't find a CEO for under a million they should promote from within.

Should Mitchell Baker give most of 1 billion back to Mozilla?

mpr22 — Sat, 15 Aug 2020 16:48:12 +0000

Sounds like all economies above subsistence level, frankly.

Should Mitchell Baker give most of 1 billion back to Mozilla?

scientes — Sat, 15 Aug 2020 15:49:52 +0000

> "you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours".

Sounds like the U.S. economy.

How are CEO salaries calculated?

patrick_g — Fri, 14 Aug 2020 13:20:16 +0000

The entire budget of The Document Foundation (LibreOffice) is one million dollars.

Should Mitchell Baker give most of 1 billion back to Mozilla?

liam — Fri, 14 Aug 2020 07:40:36 +0000

Page 8, https://lwn.net/Articles/828581/

Looks like the next highest is $295 000.

However, CEO's base salary is $450 000 (page 52). The other $2 000 000 is under bonus and incentive compensation. It's the latter one that might be questionable.

Baker: Changing World, Changing Mozilla

jschrod — Thu, 13 Aug 2020 23:34:11 +0000

Farnz comment was very interesting, for somebody not living in the UK.

Your reply was, in fact, superfluous. In particular, your first paragraph is not the style of communication we appreciate here at LWN.

How are CEO salaries calculated?

rgmoore — Thu, 13 Aug 2020 16:29:54 +0000

But 2.5 million is a lot of money.

$2.5 million is a lot of money for one person. But if you divide it out, it's about $10K for each of the 250 people being laid off. IOW, even dropping the CEO's salary to $0 would only save enough money to pay a few of the people who have been laid off. It looks bad for the CEO to earn many times as much as a developer, but high CEO salary is not the root cause of Mozilla's financial problems.

Should Mitchell Baker give most of 1 billion back to Mozilla?

anton — Thu, 13 Aug 2020 12:58:47 +0000

I am not say "how the world is", i'm saying "how the world should be".

In the world, as it should be, CEOs are not paid more than five times the lowest wage in their company.

Baker: Changing World, Changing Mozilla

roc — Thu, 13 Aug 2020 11:19:08 +0000

That's sad, but understandable.

The AV1 community is much bigger than Mozilla and contains a lot of companies with a lot more money. If they care about AV1 (and they do; they sure don't want to go back to the old patent pools), they'll keep investing.

Should Mitchell Baker give most of 1 billion back to Mozilla?

ale2018 — Thu, 13 Aug 2020 07:49:25 +0000

> I am not say "how the world is", i'm saying "how the world should be".

Until we measure success by salary amount, we're not "how the world should be".

Baker: Changing World, Changing Mozilla

flussence — Thu, 13 Aug 2020 07:38:37 +0000

I've just read that the entire Daala/rav1e team is gone due to this. AV1's encoding performance was already next to useless, but with no prospect of fixing that the format may as well be dead now.

The best time for Baker to resign was years ago. The second best is now.

Baker: Changing World, Changing Mozilla

Cyberax — Thu, 13 Aug 2020 00:30:51 +0000

Well, crisis averted: https://www.zdnet.com/article/sources-mozilla-expected-to...

I guess the CEO deserves a raise. Especially with all the fired people increasing the overall efficiency.

Should Mitchell Baker give most of 1 billion back to Mozilla?

rahulsundaram — Wed, 12 Aug 2020 23:23:00 +0000

> What i am saying is that they should not pay less.

That position could potentially be satisfied with executives like these in general getting paid less than they are right now. You could tie that as a proportion of the average pay in the organization for instance across the industry

Should Mitchell Baker give most of 1 billion back to Mozilla?

himi — Wed, 12 Aug 2020 23:07:06 +0000

Remuneration boards are notorious for granting ridiculously large executive salaries and benefits packages - in large part because they're typically made up of people who benefit from that trend continuing. If it was regular workers from these companies voting on the remuneration that would be different, but it's almost exclusively other executives.

Should Mitchell Baker give most of 1 billion back to Mozilla?

roc — Wed, 12 Aug 2020 23:00:49 +0000

That differs from my knowledge. The developers I knew at Mozilla who quit and went to work at the well-known Bay Area big tech companies made a lot more after the move, even just looking at cash.

Should Mitchell Baker give most of 1 billion back to Mozilla?

seneca6 — Wed, 12 Aug 2020 20:49:27 +0000

Thank you for this welcome clarification.

Were it otherwise, it would be very difficult to communicate globally. While I agree that no one should be punished financially for doing non-profit or Free Software work, we also have to see the global reach of software like Firefox. A user in a developing country is also invited to donate, right? I can only guess that in their minds, being competitive in the Valley is not the primary concern.

Baker: Changing World, Changing Mozilla

gioele — Wed, 12 Aug 2020 19:51:30 +0000

> Anybody with two functioning brain cells understands the difference between being fired and being laid off. Your officious and loquacious explanation was superfluous.

farnz explanation provided an interesting insight into a matter that I, as somebody that is not familiar with the UK job system, did not know. Thank you farnz for the comment.

On the other hand, the sarcastic and off-putting tone of your comment did nothing but put the rest of your argument under a bad light.

Should Mitchell Baker give most of 1 billion back to Mozilla?

Wol — Wed, 12 Aug 2020 18:49:28 +0000

Given that many of them sit on each others' boards, I think it's a case of "you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours".

Cheers,
Wol

Should Mitchell Baker give most of 1 billion back to Mozilla?

bracher — Wed, 12 Aug 2020 17:49:25 +0000

CEOs don't have the power to award themselves payrises, executive compensation would at a minimum require board approval.

Should Mitchell Baker give most of 1 billion back to Mozilla?

bracher — Wed, 12 Aug 2020 17:47:45 +0000

Keep in mind that non-profit status also means that there is no hope of equity compensation, so salary will likely adjust up to account for that. Rings true based on conversations with a few friends who have worked for Mozilla in technical roles, they were paid more than they would have been at a for-profit tech company because compensation at the for-profit would have included stock options or grants.

Baker: Changing World, Changing Mozilla

dr@jones.dk — Wed, 12 Aug 2020 17:36:58 +0000

I feel sorry for Fred... :-(

Baker: Changing World, Changing Mozilla

anton — Wed, 12 Aug 2020 16:31:05 +0000

"Kündigung" and "Entlassung", I think.

Should Mitchell Baker give most of 1 billion back to Mozilla?

excors — Wed, 12 Aug 2020 15:35:04 +0000

As far as I can tell, no donations were used to pay the CEO.

The Mozilla Foundation is non-profit, but the Mozilla Corporation is for-profit. Mitchell Baker is Chair/CEO of both. The MoFo 2018 form lists her "reportable compensation from the organization" as $0, and "reportable compensation from related organizations" as $2.5M, with a note of "PAID ONLY BY RELATED FOR-PROFIT".

So it sounds like she's paid nothing by the non-profit MoFo - she's only paid by MoCo (which I assume gets its money from search engine licensing etc). In particular, donations go to MoFo and therefore do not go towards her salary; they have to be spent in accordance with MoFo's charitable status. The highest salary paid directly by MoFo was $300K for the executive director.

Should Mitchell Baker give most of 1 billion back to Mozilla?

Wol — Wed, 12 Aug 2020 15:13:39 +0000

The problem basically is that CxOs don't want to be paid less than average. And they have the power to award themselves payrises.

The result is that executive salaries soar as the workers get less and less. As a multiple of average salary, the typical CxOs salary has probably risen 10 or 20-fold since the start of the century. Are they really worth that much?

Cheers,
Wol

Baker: Changing World, Changing Mozilla

farnz — Wed, 12 Aug 2020 15:11:22 +0000

The dictionaries I can find all define redundant as a synonym for "no longer necessary", which is exactly what a redundant job is - a job that was once necessary, and now is not.

Baker: Changing World, Changing Mozilla

jensend — Wed, 12 Aug 2020 14:55:07 +0000

Anybody with two functioning brain cells understands the difference between being fired and being laid off. Your officious and loquacious explanation was superfluous.

The reason it seems silly to Americans is because we don't use redundant as a mere synonym for e.g. 'unnecessary.' If something is redundant, the purpose it tries to fill is already filled by something else- repetitive speech, duplicated parts. "Redundant fail-safe design" = multiple parts accomplish the same purpose so if some fail the purpose is still accomplished. This normal use is at odds with the British employment use in all cases except those in which you have been replaced by a machine.

Should Mitchell Baker give most of 1 billion back to Mozilla?

clump — Wed, 12 Aug 2020 14:53:01 +0000

Non-profit status is important here. You can be employed by a big, for-profit organization and still work on Free Software. We would expect to be paid commensurate with our work regardless of the license at such places.

What about the salaries of others besides the CEO at Mozilla? I don't know what people make inside of Mozilla but should Free Software developers at non-profits be paid less (or even be laid off) while the CEO (and perhaps other executives) should be paid more? Executive salary at Mozilla is very relevant when others are losing their jobs.

Should Mitchell Baker give most of 1 billion back to Mozilla?

ubhofmann — Wed, 12 Aug 2020 14:47:16 +0000

Last year, I donated 100$ to Mozilla Foundation. I didn't know they need 24.000 donators like me every year just to get the money they need to pay their CEO. I'm surprised and disgusted.

Should Mitchell Baker give most of 1 billion back to Mozilla?

tsdgeos — Wed, 12 Aug 2020 14:12:16 +0000

I am not say "how the world is", i'm saying "how the world should be".

I don't disagree that NGO and Free Software companies usually pay less.

What i am saying is that they should not pay less.

As the Free Software community we should reject that people are just paid less because they are doing "what they like", otherwise we're simply punishing them for liking the common good.

Should Mitchell Baker give most of 1 billion back to Mozilla?

rahulsundaram — Wed, 12 Aug 2020 13:42:41 +0000

> Ok, let me rephrase the question, are you saying that a developer working for a Free Software company should be making less money that the same developer working for a non Free Software company?

Setting aside that the topic was CEO salaries and not developers, it is typically the case that non-profit salaries are lower than corporate salaries and it is possible, even likely the case that free software developers on an average get less than proprietary software developers assuming margins for free software products are lower

Baker: Changing World, Changing Mozilla

roc — Wed, 12 Aug 2020 13:18:00 +0000

> Is embedding web views on Android really a more common approach than embedding web views on desktop, considering the Electron/CRE ecosystem?

They're both pretty common.

The more important question is: where does Mozilla have the best chance of building an embedded Web component that people will actually use? They've identified Android WebView as missing a lot of functionality that some developers need, and positioned GeckoView to occupy that niche.

There isn't much point in taking on Electron etc on the desktop without a compelling reason for developers to pick something Gecko-based over Electron.

Maybe it'll work, maybe it won't, but there isn't any point in producing an embedding component that even its developers can't think of a reason to use.

> It's not the first time Mozilla pivoted on Android; and since GeckoView is being used for applications like the mixed reality platform which was also heavily restructured in this rounds of layoffs, it's a fair question to ask what kind of future GeckoView has.

By my reckoning they've just completed their second significant Android technology shift ever (over about 10 years) --- first from the XUL-based browser to the Java front-end, now having introduced GeckoView. I'm not sure why that should be considered problematic.

The fact that GeckoView was used in the mixed-reality stuff is mostly irrelevant since Firefox on Android is far more strategically important than MR ever was.

If you think there's an actual reason for Mozilla to stop using GeckoView for Firefox on Android, what would it be?

TBH the biggest risk for GeckoView is that Mozilla simply drops Gecko altogether everywhere and becomes another Chromium shop. Based on who's been laid off, that does not seem to be the plan.

Baker: Changing World, Changing Mozilla

roc — Wed, 12 Aug 2020 13:00:14 +0000

https://www.cnet.com/news/mozilla-cutting-250-jobs-after-...

> Mozilla restructured its security functions "to better ensure the security of Mozilla and its users," Mozilla said of the cut. "Some positions were eliminated as a result of this effort, but the teams responsible for the security of the Firefox browser and Firefox services were not been impacted."