←back to thread

1602 points rebelwebmaster | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.001s | source
Show context
dblohm7 ◴[] No.24122017[source]
[I am a Mozilla employee, and yes, I do recognize how my position influences my perspective.]

One thing that always frustrates me a bit whenever Mozilla comes up on HN or elsewhere is that we are always held to impossibly high standards. Yes, as a non-profit, we should be held to higher standards, but not impossible standards.

OTOH, sometimes it just seems unreasonable and absurd. Stuff like, to paraphrase, "Look at the corporate doublespeak in that press release. Fuck Mozilla, I'm switching to Chrome."

Really? That's what's got you bent out of shape?

Sure, Mozilla has made mistakes. Did we apologize? Did we learn anything? Did we work to prevent it happening again?

People want to continue flogging us for these things while giving other companies (who have made their own mistakes, often much more consequential than ours, would never be as open about it, and often learn nothing) a relatively free pass.

I'm certainly not the first person on the planet whose employer has been on the receiving end of vitriol. And if Mozilla doesn't make it through this next phase, I can always find another job. But what concerns me about this is that Mozilla is such an important voice in shaping the future of the internet. To see it wither away because of people angry with what are, in the grand scheme of things, minor mistakes, is a shame.

EDIT: And lest you think I am embellishing about trivial complaints, there was a rant last week on r/Firefox that Mozilla was allegedly conspiring to hide Gecko's source code because we self-host our primary repo and bug tracking instead of using GitHub, despite the fact that the Mozilla project predates GitHub by a decade.

replies(49): >>24122207 #>>24122515 #>>24123409 #>>24123463 #>>24123818 #>>24124348 #>>24125007 #>>24125088 #>>24125320 #>>24125514 #>>24125773 #>>24125821 #>>24126133 #>>24126145 #>>24126438 #>>24126473 #>>24126826 #>>24126868 #>>24127039 #>>24127289 #>>24127324 #>>24127417 #>>24127727 #>>24127795 #>>24127850 #>>24127935 #>>24127974 #>>24128022 #>>24128067 #>>24128168 #>>24128400 #>>24128605 #>>24128708 #>>24128913 #>>24129190 #>>24129234 #>>24129821 #>>24130155 #>>24130218 #>>24130519 #>>24130938 #>>24130967 #>>24131699 #>>24131761 #>>24132064 #>>24133337 #>>24140947 #>>24145537 #>>24168638 #
Santosh83 ◴[] No.24122515[source]
I may be rapidly downvoted but what strikes me as an outsider (reading most of the comments in this thread) is the collective psyche in the US is viscerally against any entity rising to the top that does not have profit as its sole goal. What they want is for Mozilla to solely focus on Firefox, on the technicalities, and shut up about everything else. And yet no one will actually pay for it as a product.

The tragedy of Mozilla is a very human one, with special embellishments added by the prevailing culture in the US, its home...

replies(10): >>24122554 #>>24122819 #>>24123527 #>>24124954 #>>24125208 #>>24125800 #>>24125844 #>>24126217 #>>24126240 #>>24129542 #
betterunix2 ◴[] No.24125844[source]
"the collective psyche in the US is viscerally against any entity rising to the top that does not have profit as its sole goal"

It is more like people are willing to dismiss bad behavior when there is a clear profit motive, since it seems obvious that when someone is in it for the money they will ignore other considerations. Take the profit motive out of the picture and people start to imagine other motives or attribute bad behavior to negative character traits, even when the behavior is generally better than the for-profit counterparts'.

replies(1): >>24126081 #
1. acheron9383 ◴[] No.24126081[source]
Well, people expect a company to not try to ride the high horse down the low road. I don't personally think Mozilla has really done anything bad, I get it, they are a real company, with real employees who work for a living. Sometimes the realities of running a company clash with their PR of being some sort of public good. FWIW, I like Mozilla, and a lot of their values, and the products they put out, but their marketing does leave them open to ridicule in ways that a company who always answers "money" to the "why did you do this?" question is not.