Everyone who's been saying "I wish they would just charge money for this", here's your chance to put your money where your mouth is!
replies(11):
The big question is:
Does the money go to Firefox or to funny projects and (what I consider) insane exec salaries?
Serious question: do you ask other vendors (Google, Amazon, Wapo, whoever) you use about HR and internal budgeting choices before deciding to do business with them?
The national median software developer salary is something like $110k. The middle 50% range is like $85-150k, so if you're making above 150k TC you're already in the top 1/4 of developers, who are already very high up in general.
I say this because people on HN love to pretend that "industry-standard" means $250k+ for new grads and $400k for experienced ICs when that's just not true. FAANG-level salaries (which can absolutely be 300, 400, 500k TC) are the 1% of the 1%.
So yeah, find me a way to finance Firefox only, and not the funny projects, and to ensure that not a single cent goes to their execs (neither directly nor through some creative accounting, where they reduce engineer salaries to offset the cashflow from this new stream, and pocket the savings), and you have my 10 bucks a month for the next 8 years (and possibly longer, but let's see what they do in 8 years). I won't move the goalposts and I'll make good on my promise.
It’s a very common question when you give money to a non-profit, which Mozilla is.
If they want to get better market share they should start paying more!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Ol...
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Afaik people's main issues with the exec salary is their poor performance. Why pay "market rate" for "below market performance"?
Do you refuse to buy a drink or a pair of shoes or a travel ticket unless you can ensure that "not a single cent goes to execs" who get "absurdly high, grossly underserved salaries while they butcher the company all the way down"?
Or do you think the Mozilla execs are _uniquely_ greedy to a degree not comparable to that of the execs of Nestlé, Nike, etc.?
(EDIT: This is assuming that you actively want to purchase MDN Plus. If you don't care about the perks but would purchase it solely as a donation, then it's understandable if you give a higher scrutiny to charities than to sellers.)
It is definitely unreasonable to compare a Mozilla engineer’s pay to an average brought down by body-shop CRUD operations. They’re really not the same industry.
Don't need execs coming in selling VPNs with the browser.
And that's why people are worried about where the money will go.
Mitchell Baker owns it all and draws a salary from the corporation according to public records.
Pretty sure the foundation owns the IP etc and the corp leases it, funneling money around.
Statements are public.
> Serious question: do you ask other vendors (Google, Amazon, Wapo, whoever) you use about HR and internal budgeting choices before deciding to do business with them?
Mozilla is a lot more like a charity than an actual business, and people do ask questions like that about charities (e.g. how much of a donation will go to admin overhead vs program work is often reported for them).
I don’t know how many appeals I have seen asking me to use Firefox to help preserve the open web.
When they are asking you to behave altruistically, it is your right to ask about their behavior as well.
To me, this is a problem, and while it’s documented somewhere, it’s not nearly communicated well enough on their website when you’re actually making a donation. As a matter of fact, it’s sometimes even downright misleading.
As such, I don’t believe the corporate structure is a healthy one, and the organization(s) are not properly aligned in where the profit comes from, where they make the biggest impact in the world, and where the donations go to.
Most Mozilla employees draw their salary from Mozilla Corp.
As a response to that prompt, it's a completely legitimate question to ask: would my money actually be going where I want it to go?
Anyway, I think people do ask themselves where the money they spend goes. They do that all the time. It's the basis boycotting different businesses. They don't ask it in every case, such as when the question has been answered already, or where there isn't ongoing controversy about how money is being spent.
The usual counter argument in this type of discussions is that it's Google's fault, because they changed their sponsorship, and there's nothing the execs could do. And then the counter to that is why pay big salaries if there's nothing they can do about revenues. Back to square 0.
I wish Mozilla setup funds for each project like it was done for Thunderbird. Then the execs can be paid from sponsorships etc.. but I personally have stopped to give to Mozilla any money since that change happened.
Mozilla is going against FAANG products like Chrome. Compared to the competition their salaries are tiny.
I know that a lot of people here have fantasies about becoming one of those yada yada ya.... But it is not good. Our system where huge resources go to a self selecting elite and the rest of us are left with the crumbs is going nowhere good and I keep as far out of it as I can.
I do not want to live in a shack in the woods, so I have to engage a bit. But as much as possible and practical, I do not.
Ah, so you aren't going to pay at all. This is just a soapbox to start dissing Mozilla again with the usual tropes.
That being said poor performance is for sure something to criticize on - although to be fair we are talking about competing with some of the largest and most entrenched companies on earth - not an easy job.
And _now_ they come asking us to pay for MDN? I am not optimistic about this.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24132494 [2]: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2020/12/welcome-yari-mdn-web-docs-... [3]: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2021/01/welcoming-open-web-docs-to...
If their revenue went way up, absolutely. Which is what happened when the executives got more money.
Hopefully it goes to MDN. Nothing about the scenario you describe would be improved by funneling money from MDN to Firefox, that would make the problem worse. What I'd like is for Mozilla to introduce ways to fund Firefox directly, not for the money to come from a different critical web resource.
Yes, Mozilla (.org) is a non-profit, and Mozilla (.com) is a regular corporation. Yes, Mozilla has commitments about transparency. Yes, exec salaries are insane.
Do folks who ask this question scrutinize every purchase or business they make to this degree? In the laundry list of entertainment, learning, and professional subscriptions, what portion of spotify, github, or other popular subs end up contributing to just the feature or service you like as opposed to the entire organization and other initiatives that the organization supports?
We already know that Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook and Oracle are evil.
> Any revenue generated by MDN Plus will stay within Mozilla. Mozilla is looking into ways to reinvest some of these additional funds into open source projects contributing to MDN but it is still in early stages.
> A subscription to MDN Plus gives paying subscribers extra MDN features provided by Mozilla while a donation to Open Web Docs goes to funding writers creating content on MDN Web Docs, and potentially elsewhere.
It's not totally clear to me after a little research, but I think MDN is part of the corporation, not the foundation? (It's isn't listed as on the foundation website as one of their projects.
With charities in general, it'd be better if people focused on results more, rather than on how resources are being allocated. Luckily, that idea has been gaining more and more traction, e.g. GiveWell.
Yes. When you are paying for something, you should have an idea of where that money is actually going. That is why it comes up here. There isn't anything exceptional about this case with Mozilla.
How do you give an organization money, and ensure that that specific dollar doesn't go to the execs? Any money that goes to the org, pays for those execs one way or another. You can't just ask the Firefox team to pretend they don't exist.
However, when you're giving to charity, what are you getting? You probably want to know.
If charities are smart, I bet they could take advantage of this by creating classic ladders which encourage more contributions if people get a say of where a "portion of their donation" goes.
You don't get a saying how money is spent by any non-profit if you donate it. If you don't agree with how the non-profit spends their money don't donate.
I'd assumed these were concern trolls just trying to attack people they've been trained to hate for no reason by propaganda.
If these commenters genuinely think they're helping the open web with these comments then that makes both my brain and heart hurt.
I would bet you that most people are in the latter group, not the former. I certainly almost never purchase such services from ordinary companies, as I don't see sufficient value in them.
If they did, the donations to some charity type orgs would probably drop to 0. Lots of unhappy people about the pink "awareness" org and others that spend as much money doing the events and paying for staff than doing anything else. Yes, we're "aware" of breast cancer.
And then when the revenue goes down to something like $400 million, you'd expect something like the CEO stepping down and the number of executives getting cut. Like what happened with Mozilla.
I'm not sure where you're getting that number, but it's much too low.
The figures at https://www.levels.fyi/company/Mozilla/salaries/Software-Eng... better match what I saw when I worked at Mozilla.
You can compare compensation at equivalent levels for Mozilla and peer companies at https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Mozilla,Microsoft,Apple,Goog... . You'll see that Mozilla pays well, but significantly less than them.
> "In 2018 she received a total of $2,458,350 in compensation from Mozilla, which represents a 400% payrise since 2008.[14] On the same period, Firefox marketshare was down 85%. When asked about her salary she stated "I learned that my pay was about an 80% discount to market. Meaning that competitive roles elsewhere were paying about 5 times as much. That's too big a discount to ask people and their families to commit to.""
> "By 2020, her salary had risen to over $3 million. In the same year the Mozilla Corporation laid off approximately 250 employees due to shrinking revenues. Baker blamed this on the Coronavirus pandemic.[15]"
That is, the people who developed one of the more hyped new programming languages of the last decade were let go, the main MDN team is gone, FireFox OS is gone, long-standing FireFox loyalists were given reduced customisations and a move towards a copy-of-Chrome-but-worse experience, marketshare is down enormously since the peak, there's been a churn of janky also-rans like promoting Goya beans or something, who even knows.
What have other CEOs done to justify their salaries? Microsoft's share price is 7x higher since Satya Nadella took over. Tesla's share price is 15x higher since 2018. Amazon's share price has almost tripled since 2018. Apple's share price has more than tripled since 2018. Facebook almost doubled since 2018 (but has fallen some). CEO thinks it's unfair that other CEOs get paid more??
It's not even uniquely greedy, if the service is going well. I am annoyed at travel tickets for trains in the UK which are more expensive than flying, often late, all too often don't turn up at all, often crowded to the point of cramped standing room with the argument that "our contracts prevent us buying more carriages". If then the CEOs were saying "it's unfair that well run travel company CEOs earn more, so we're going to raise our salaries" that would be annoying. (They probably even do say that, but they have the decency to keep it behind closed doors, or to make up something about doing a good job).
I do have a regular donation to the Mozilla Foundation but I too wish I could chip in specifically to Firefox proper.
https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/who-we-are/leadership/
If the board were to decide that Mitchell's time as leader was done, they could do so.
It’s completely fair game to criticize the overhead costs of charities: it’s one of the most common things to criticize about charities, in fact.
Using the same timescale as the Wikipedia article, 2008 to 2018, Mozilla's revenue had risen from $78.6 million to $436 million. A more than 400% increase. Does that justify her salary?
"(2) Retention bonus to compensate Sue for lost opportunities during the transition period: $165,000."
This seems to undermine Mitchell Baker's reasons for her salary increase, doesn't it?
Wikipedia also gets a slightly higher score from CharityNavigator than Mozilla, edging them out on more efficient earnings, lower admin overhead, but far ahead on "growth of expenses": https://www.charitynavigator.org/ein/200049703 vs https://www.charitynavigator.org/ein/200097189
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fundraising_statisti...
[2] https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/financial-reports/#sec...
[3] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_salarie...
[4] https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@list...
They're not really comparable organizations. The corporate comparisons you started with were closer comparison, though Mozilla has some unique circumstances.
FAANG & companies that pay similarly employ something like 8-10% of the engineers in the country, so this is an enormous overexaggeration. We can quibble about whether it's reasonable to represent that as "industry standard" or not, but it's not such a drastic outlier that it becomes unreasonable to use it as a point of reference when discussing things that might be reasonable to aim for (or expect, in certain contexts).
(And to pre-empt that: I'm not saying you can't criticise results. I'm saying that focusing on exec pay rather than on results feels misdirected.)
No, I'm normally not that picky (or actually not that well informed, which would be a prerequisite), I just avoid anything from Nestlé, I'm subscribed to /r/FuckNestle/ on Reddit to spot their many subsidiary brands I would not be aware of.
I indeed don't care at all about the MDN Plus perks, it would just be a donation to keep a browser alive. I would hate it if the money did NOT go into keeping the browser alive. Current execs are killing the company while pocketing insane (market competitive, sure, but incommensurate with the absolute lack of success in their leadership) salaries, while devs are being let go. I can't support this status quo with my money.
I think we both agree on this. What they pay their execs is irrelevant. What I'm saying is, I'm not buying peanut butter, it's available for free. I am considering donating money for the peanut butter I already get for free, but the grocery conglomerate that accepts donations on behalf has already fired half the peanut farmers, and discontinued the Crunchy variety that I really liked.