Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products

[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.

I don't hold Mozilla to higher standards. I regard Mozilla as being deeply sick, even by the standards of a non-profit. The Mozilla Corporation has three plagues.

First, the plague of Debian and the logjam breakers. Mozilla, like Debian, has many technical users with loud opinions and struggles to reach consensus. Debian suffers from this problem because it comes to consensus oh so very slowly - multiple competing packaging formats exist and hurt the community for decades. But, Mozilla has the worst result - "logjam breaker" executives come in, and, rather than pushing the technical leadership to make a reasonable technical decision based on the weighed factors, they break the logjam by encouraging the technical leaders to blindly imitate the competition. This problem is intractable - giving in to the Debianers means being mired in debate forever and making no or extremely slow progress; giving in to the suits means failing to innovate, becoming a clone of your competition, and eventually being forgotten. A true solution requires real technical leadership, something that's sorely lacking at Mozilla, or a different user base, which is not a possibility at Mozilla.

Second, the plague of Wikimedia. Non-technical leadership comes to dominate decisions about how to spending incoming donations from successful technical projects. Such leadership is often interested in hoping from the board of one non-profit to another. Much like Googlers are always interested in content for their next promotion form, such non profit executives are interested in bragging about the great projects they kicked off the ground. The results is a slew of failed and cancelled projects while the core project languishes.

Finally, the plague of social justice run amok. Most companies right now are on social justice kick and for the last few years. That's good; racism is bad, and tech could be a bit more welcoming. However, most companies understand where the lines are drawn. For example, Google executives don't release statements after employees die trashing the employee because of an underlying difference in personality and/or political views. Google also doesn't fire executives because of their political views or previous donations, when held privately, particularly when those political views are relatively common. Such actions have a chilling effect on recruitment and leads to technical talent that might otherwise have been interested in Mozilla (like myself) to permanently write it off.

I don't hold Mozilla to higher standards and I'm not mad about double speak. I'm mad that Mozilla is nasty, that is breaks well established liberal norms regarding political freedom, that it's executives waste my donations on resume lines for their next gig, and that it's technical leadership seems incapable of making balanced decisions other than imitation Google. But most of all, I'm mad that nobody at Mozilla can even see the problem (yourself included). Mozilla is deeply sick and needs to diagnose its own problems correctly, in order to begin remediating them. Until then, I'll regard it as a dying corporation and I'll look forward to the day when Mozilla finally dies and we can get started on the project of building a free web again by forking Chromium.

>Google also doesn't fire executives because of their political views or previous donations, when held privately, particularly when those political views are relatively common.

Obviously you're referring to Brendan Eich. But you're wrong: Eich was not fired, and he was not forced to resign. In fact just the opposite: the board tried to get him to stay. This should not be news to you: it was in the FAQ on CEO resignation, from April 2014 when it happened:

https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/04/05/faq-on-ceo-resignat...

Q: Was Brendan Eich fired?

A: No, Brendan Eich resigned. Brendan himself said:

“I have decided to resign as CEO effective April 3rd, and leave Mozilla. Our mission is bigger than any one of us, and under the present circumstances, I cannot be an effective leader. I will be taking time before I decide what to do next.”

Brendan Eich also blogged on this topic.

Q: Was Brendan Eich asked to resign by the Board?

A: No. It was Brendan’s idea to resign, and in fact, once he submitted his resignation, Board members tried to get Brendan to stay at Mozilla in another C-level role.