MDN Plus

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!

I didn't say that I think but I am tempted to pay anyway.

The big question is:

Does the money go to Firefox or to funny projects and (what I consider) insane exec salaries?

What is that insane salary? Seems you have no idea about how much executives are paid at that level in general. Or for Mozilla everyone has to work for free?

OP was clearly specific: EXEC salaries, not engineers and developers. And I'm not sure I would want their current execs there even if they indeed worked for free, not to mention at their absurdly high, grossly underserved salaries while they butcher the company all the way down.

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.

Do you apply the same rigorous standards to all your purchases?

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 isn't just "Mozilla Execs", it's specifically Mitchell Baker[1] because of:

> "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).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker

>What have other CEOs done to justify their salaries?

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?

Using the same timescale, Wikipedia itself (the Wikimedia Foundation) went from $5M revenue to $120M, 24x. [1],[2]. During that time the Executive Director's salary went from $168k to $387k[3]. At the end of Sue Gardner's leadership in 2014 there was a question about her $300k salary[4] which included the response:

"(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...