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 certainly don't think the corporate doublespeak is reason to switch to Chrome, but I do think the corporate doublespeak in this announcement is just awful.

When you're doing a layoff, just announce the layoff, show compassion to the affected employees, and if you want to announce other changes, do it in a separate announcement. Putting stuff about the fight against systemic racism in the opening paragraph of a layoff announcement is just inviting a tidal wave of eye rolls.

I have to respectfully disagree. It is common for leaders to re-state their entity's reason for being as they bring bad news. See Churchill's speeches during the battle of France, for instance.

I think this opening was well-written and clearly communicated Mozilla's purpose. You can blame it for being populist, but don't hate the player, hate the game.

The opening, coming from a super well paid CEO, pissed me off. I need a good browser, maybe with accompaigned products but no save the internet, racism, bl, etc. Most likely won't ever support Mozilla with such language.

I think this is a valid point. Donors don't want to give money to further enrich Mozilla's overpaid leadership, and they don't want to give money to then be split between the cause they're really donating for (generally Firefox) and various tangentially related political causes.

There's no way to donate directly to Firefox development.

> There's no way to donate directly to Firefox development.

There is. It is called "restricted funds":

https://www.501c3.org/kb/what-are-restricted-funds/

The more people use restricted funds designation, the less bloated non-profits with wishy-washy missions there would be and the less money there would be to pilfer by the parasite class that lives in the executive roles of the non-profits.

The mechanism may exist, but can you describe how to actually pull this off, including how the money would get sent from Mofo to Moco?

If so, there's a lot of people who would like to do this, I believe.

Donate via check.

Write "Restricted funds - see attachment" on a check. On the attachment list check details and a restriction such as "Direct expenses for <blahblahblah> only." If you just do not want it to go to G&A fluff fund the execs use to live a large life, just exclude G&A: "<blah blah blah> purposes only. No G&A"

Regulations for non-profits aren't a joke. If they took your restricted funds, you bet they are going to follow the restrictions.

Non-profits may hate it but at the end it is money. So they take it. If they decline to cash the check, no skin off your back.

Source: lived in a non-profit land as a tech consultant. Heard constant bitching about big donors being smart and always restricting funds above a few hundred dollars. Execs of every non-profit that pretends it cannot deal with restrictions are taking the donor for suckers and are fleecing them.

Okay, but how does that money get from MoFo to MoCo?

If MoFo made Firefox, this would make sense. But they don’t.

> Okay, but how does that money get from MoFo to MoCo?

It is their problem, not my. They want money. It is restricted. Money is fungible. If they figure out how to use the money that is restricted then they need to spend less unrestricted money.