I would happily pay monthly for Firefox - but not to Mozilla Corporation. Will Pay to developers, development support and operations - not to pad the CEO salary.
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Either software developers have to figure out how to out compete the CEO ghouls (without becoming CEO ghouls themselves), or we just have to accept that the CEO ghouls will take their cut. There's no version of this where you can pay for a service, but also dictate how that money is spent.
Add to that the value capture that happens outside of that exchange. We may say that valkey is well enough funded to continue development, but that doesn't account for the immense value that is being captured by the big cloud providers charging a premium for hosting it. Azure, AWS and GCP are only as valuable as they are because there's some software you can run on them. The cheaper that software, the more they get to charge.
This is sort of a general problem with the American system of "philanthropy". We can say that the Linux Foundation is developing the Linux kernel independently for free, and that various other companies then donate, but that ignores the fact that the Linux kernel has been tremendously valuable for those same companies. In a more real way, they are paying for the development of the kernel, but they are not paying anything even close the value they are deriving from it. Value is in that way being extracted from the Linux kernel outside of the Linux Foundation, and that looks a lot like "an executive in between".
Adding to the point, donating to Mozilla (or Wikipedia) is optional, and paying for a product is not, legally. So if I'm buying clothing, it's whatever, I need my clothing, and the price is just the functional gateway of getting it. But in case of a Mozilla donation, I'm trying to do something good in the world. And if I discover that it's wasted, then I'm not just getting nothing - I am worse off, because I supported a bad cause.
There's an irony that in providing people the option of not paying, you are also inviting them to find flaws in your organization to avoid paying. We are all aware that Microsoft sucks, yet there's never any doubt that you'll have to pay for a 365 subscription if you're a serious business. At the same time we'll also gladly accept that small companies don't donate to the Linux foundation, because they have to pay their bills.
By using the control we advocate for (forking projects, reducing funding, etc) we only harm the projects that afford us that control. Not paying Mozilla does nothing to reduce the control of Google over chrome. It only hurts the one browser that gives you the choice.
Expecting Mozilla to somehow function without a CEO, unlike pretty much every other charity in the world, is just not reasonable.
I don't know if you have ever worked in a larger team that lacked someone to make decisions, take responsibility and set a strategy, but in my experience that is almost always a disaster.
If Mozilla goes the same way, Firefox loses all goodwill it gathered over the years and stops being an option against Chrome et al.
> We are a worker-owned, employee-run company with more than 20 years of experience building open source software in a wide range of exciting fields.
If there's enough money to go to the developers actively working on a product to make it sustainable, I think a lot of people would get on board with that and would pay for FF.
Debian has an elected leader that is not paid and has pretty limited authority overall.
There's also the Linux kernel, with Linus doing both managerial and technical work, running circles around Mozilla's leadership in both. He makes just a few millions per year, less than Baker did even two years ago AFAIK.
That's a big if. AFAIK most open source project developers don't get remotely enough donations to support them working on it full-time. The ones that do are the exception, not the norm.
FreeBSD seems to have three paid directors: https://freebsdfoundation.org/about-us/our-team/
Debian has a leader and also seems to be more a volunteer organisation than a full company: https://www.debian.org/intro/organization
I had once. The ultra micro-managing boss went to surgery and was off for two months. The whole company happily cruised along, numbers kept going up, his toxic pressure was absent, people kept working and making things.
I don't know how it would go for long term, but these were some of the best months.
There are plenty of competent people that could be CEO for far less, like $200k/year.
I’m fine with twice the amount of a developer. Taking into account responsibility, public involvement and special clothing. Travel costs and so on are separate. The developers are doing the hard work.
There is not “team” if a MBA or lawyer gets 38 times the wage of an actual person doing the work.
All said and done, that will still be way more reasonable than that ludicrous salary.
The fact that "high performance leaders" need to make tens of millions of dollars is one of the greatest lies being told in the modern age.
Right now my chief in the fire company where I volunteer makes the same amount of money I do: $0.00. He is the greatest leader I have ever personally met, and I've been around for a while.
When I was in the Army, my company commander (a Captain) made ~4x what the newest private did. The highest-paid officer makes ~9x.
There are government senior executives and university professors running labs with budgets and teams that make Mozilla look like a lemonade stand for practically nothing.
Mozilla should ask the Linux Foundation what their budget is, what their leadership structure is, and do that.
Mozilla, no matter what they say or think or try, is and will always be a web browser developer. A web browser. Anything else is a side project, a hobby. A distraction. Every single molecule of fuel used by their brains while at work and every single microwatt of power used by their infrastructure should be wholly and aggressively dedicated to building the tools and organization needed to create the best web browser possible.
Bloated payrolls are tolerable if the decisions made are wise, responsibility is taken, and strategies exist and make sense.
Mozilla seems to have none of these.
But man they're spending a shit-ton on "AI"!
I'll need to think about this more but one difference that comes to mind after giving it some thought is that donations are a choice. Buying food is not really optional. I'm not going to the store and giving them 50€ because I hope they continue to operate, I give them the money as an equal exchange
There is a group of people who would choose to shop more frequently at a certain place, or tip more, if their favorite place is having trouble, but as far as I know this is only a small effect and market forces decide for 95% whether a place can continue to pay its bills. With open source software development like at Mozilla, barring other income sources, they rely on those 5%. The donators don't need to accept that their money is spent on drugs and mansions¹, the way that they do when buying groceries and the big boss might indeed use the profits in that way
¹ I have no clue what else you would do with the 7M USD a year that someone else quoted. Even at a 50% tax rate (idk what the tax rate is for someone who operates a non-profit in the USA), an average person could literally retire after six months of telling others what to do at this "non profit"
I don't personally like it (so generally did not allow to happen to me), but if some people feel "safer" getting lower pay (less chance of getting fired, easier to get re-hired as there are more low paid positions than high paid positions), the natural result is that it will happen.
My experience is that both high and low paid positions are not as "safe" as people think they are (seen multiple changing in various organizations types), so people should care more about finding a reasonable organization.
You give the examples of Azure, AWS and GCP - do they really have that much secret sauce? My impression is that AWS is mostly giving a new name to open source stuff. If all would decide tomorrow to double their prices competitors will appear immediately. And my guess is that their profit is due to forgotten or over-provisioned resources of other organizations anyhow.
I think we should focus on the benefits for society of open source, not on reducing the profit that some will make from it here and there.
Unfortunately, CEO is not always leadership.
Aside from that, leadership can come from the people doing the work. It is working in many cases.
The reality is that Firefox would have done much better had Mozilla fired their CEO 15 years ago and never hired another one. All of them executed significantly worse than mere government bonds did.
They specifically targetted two things:
1. directing funding towards Firefox development. Mozilla have been criticised for spending large portions of their income on non-Firefox endeavours while not publishing breakdowns of Firefox-specific spending in their annual reports
2. The CEO's salary: the commenter said nothing about not wanting the CEO position to exist, merely a desire for the funding to the Foundation to not be excessively funnelled into salary increases while the company's resources contract. Which seems reasonable.