I just saw a post complaining about the Mozilla layoffs.
I wanted to point out that the vast majority of their income (over 85% in 2022) is from having Google as the default search engine - Ironically, the anti monopoly lawsuit against Google will end this.
Expect things to get worse.
Please don’t assume it was just a cruel choice.
Mozilla CEO is paid 7million a year. I don’t have the number for the rest of the board, but it should be in the same range. I think that when people say this was a cruel choice, they talk about firing people instead of decreasing executive salaries.
Corporate cuts should always start with the greatest fat that does the least work - the ones at the top.
Because if the company has found itself in a place where headcount needs to be reduced, these are the people who led it there and deserve all of the blame for hurting the company to that degree. Plus, you should always start cutting where you get the lowest volume of productive work for the greatest money spent, and that is always at the top.
They have enough cash reserves to last 3 years without any income. But 15% of income is Google free. If Google disappears, they will surely get an income hit, but someone else will gladly pay some price for that position, perhaps half of what Google is paying. People are really blowing this out of proportion.
I think you’re massively downplaying how much of a hit this will be.
Let’s say you make $100k/year. Think about the lifestyle it allows. You’ve just been informed that it’s now going part time, and you’ll only be making $15k/year. How far does that get you?
Now, you’re expecting someone else to pay for that advertising spot, so it won’t be that bad. But who is even eligible? Microsoft’s Bing is the obvious answer, and probably DDG. The rest of the default search engines aren’t even general web searches.
Do you really think that either of them are going to pay any significant amount to be the default? Especially when most people are going to change it back to Google anyway, since these are automatically people willing to change to a different browser?
Sure, they might be willing to pay something. But it won’t be anything close to what they had before.
Both Bing and Yahoo have outbid Google in certain countries in the past. There’s a new wave of AI powered startups with tons of venture capital. I could imagine them making sizable bids.
But I get what you mean. The main difference to your scenario is: search money will definitely not totally disappear, Mozilla has huge savings, and they can just finally pivot and focus on making a real premium offer that people would want to pay for.
Do you really think that either of them are going to pay any significant amount to be the default?
I can see Bing doing it. And Google is so far gone that it would probably be an improvement
Ironically, the anti monopoly lawsuit against Google will end this.
People are quick to assume this, and there’s a very good chance that they’re right, but I don’t think we should take it as a given. It’s always possible that there could be some sort of court decision that allows Google to keep funding Mozilla after the “breakup” is complete.
In any case, we don’t yet know what the outcome of the antitrust case will be, so I think it might be best to avoid making statements of certainty like this until we see how things really shake out.
We should definitely take the possibility of this happening very seriously though.
Found the one sane comment in this entire thread.
Google may or may not stop paying Mozilla as part of the antitrust scrutiny. I have no idea if there’s actual reporting to this effect, or any form of legal analysis suggesting this is the most plausible outcome. If anything, antitrust scrutiny might lead to this funding being more secure and more robust.
So this might not happen, but this whole threads carrying on like it’s a fait accompli.
Taking funding from your biggest competitor is a weird business choice.
Where should they be “taking” funding instead?
That’s the Mozilla paradox right there. A company like theirs cannot survive on the market without breaking their own ideals.
Mozilla should approach proton to try and get accuired. I would love to see Firefox and Thunderbird become part of the proton landscape.
Well all it’ll do is make Proton lose more money.
They are not positive ?
I think they are but Mozilla is not profitable and will be an expense source. Idk if it’ll make Proton negative but it definitely won’t improve their business.
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Everyone seems to have missed or ignored the pun. 😄 I liked it.
Thanks for pointing it out 😂
ideally donations like lots of other FOSS projects
Serious question, is there actually a FOSS project out there at the scale of something like Firefox that survives on only donations?
No because people choose diss cause it’s free. I mean they might say other things but then the vast majority do not donate to anything. People are cheap and that’s why we are where we are with all the ads.
Feels kind of weird, if thats the case how did Linux come as far as it is today?
Corporate support of development, and I’m not just talking about Redhat and SUSE. Hell, Microsoft is a major contributor to the kernel.
VLC I would say
VLC also has a company behind it: https://videolabs.io/
Not the same scale but Signal has a rather new approach for a messaging client. Completely free and funded by user donations - at least that’s the direction they’re trying to head as their initial seed funding starts running low. I’ve doubled my donations for Signal because I’d like to help prove that its a working model and I encourage everyone who uses it to donate, even if it’s just once. I’d love to see Firefox head in that direction where funding goes directly to the browser’s development. If I donate to Firefox today it might go to one of their dozen or so other pet projects that are unrelated to the browser. I think their side projects are great and glad they were able to do them while they had the cash, but funding is clearly drying up and they need a whole restructure to keep the browser alive.
Not the same scale but Signal has a rather new approach for a messaging client. Completely free and funded by user donations - at least that’s the direction they’re trying to head
You do realise they’re trying to become the crypto WeChat? Shit app with horrible management.
You do realise they’re trying to become the crypto WeChat?
Any evidence to support this claim?
Because I’m aware Signal introduced a beta crypto wallet 7 years ago, which was originally only available in select countries, and has had minimal resources allocated to its continued development since. They make zero mention of crypto/payment on their website, and best of all, the crypto wallet isn’t even enabled by default.
Shit app with horrible management.
And here you expose your personal emotional trauma by lashing at at the most inconsequential “nothing”: the development of a privacy preserving crypto wallet, “feature complete” half a decade ago, and disabled by default in a privacy preserving messenger.
Signal is the best free, open source, E2EE messenger that doesn’t leak metadata and has decent UX. Best of all, its completely free to use. Simplex is a good contender, but the UX is still lacking.
I don’t know. Crowdfunding? How does Thunderbird keep it self afloat? Maybe better integration of the community as in more say in what will be developed depending on how much money you donate etc.
That’s exactly the worst way to prioritize. Money should not be influence. That always works out worse in every example in the history of everything.
But thats exactly how they work currently? Google is the default search engine in firefox.
So it’s the default. Big deal. You can change that when you start the app first time. If that gets them funding that’s not a horrible price to pay. Also, that’s not money getting influence exactly, that’s a transaction. “We will pay $x to get this status.” Not the same at all as “I donated lots of money therefore I get to say how you develop the software.”
I haven’t seen the contract between google and firefox.
Maybe “how you develop the software” is a bit far-fetched, I was more thinking about decide where to put efforts into e.g.: continue developing Firefox’s core mechanic of being a privacy oriented webbrowser instead of… whatever they are doing with the funding they get.
Yeah basically what I meant.
Aint it grand that a monopoly power got abused, got checked and our beloved FF is the victim of corpo parasites?
Not even sure what funding model would work for something as critical as web engine but if we don’t figure it out, we will be sucking sundars dick going forward?
Disgusting… Clearly some edge lord using and shilling it, ain’t enough
Clearly some edge lord…
I see what you did there
Mozilla could have allowed people the option to subscribe for a modest fee in addition to giving it away for free, to diversify their income and be less dependent on Google, but they have not been trying that hard to develop other revenue streams.
corpo parasites at the top were paid off to gut it from within… signal is going the same route imho
What’s signal doing now?
To be clear this is tin foil… But the vibe is the same.
Mainly, they get decent budget and staff but they are not pushing the product forward. They don’t care about mass reach or usability, they cover this with claiming that their core audience is a journalist living under an oppressive regime when their user is tech nerd in the west.
Either way there better solutions for that kind. It just doesn’t feel like they competing here.
Kinda like Firefox stop pushing the edge.
Signal does a decent job of encouraging people to make one-time or ongoing donations to the service. I’ve supported them multiple times because they gave me a prompt to do so.
I don’t recall Firefox ever asking for a donation or subscription.
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That’s something! But it doesn’t raise any money from people with other VPN providers or who don’t want to buy a VPN service.
Rip, time to find new income sources
worse? If this means that they refocus on things that matter then I consider this better.
That depends on management, however it definitely could benefit the company.
I think the biggest issue is that a bunch of people are, probably unexpectedly, out of a job.
What things that matter have insufficient engineering resources at the moment?
Firefox is understaffed, servo was canned, deepspeech was canned, firefox reality was canned, firefox for android TVs was canned, send was canned, the upstream project which the translate feature is based on (bergamot) has been extremely inactive and many more.
each one of these projects was/is “important” in some way, and while there are alternatives now or have been picked up by various third parties, each one had a lot of untapped potential, and lets take a look at the projects alternatives or forks current state.
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servo: was picked up by igalia, and is massively far behind, It still has a lot of potential, and progress is quick for what it is, but this is a real embeddable alternative to chrome. Not viable yet, and likely wont be for another year or two.
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Deepspeech: Coqui is dead, existing speech to text stuff is all either proprietary or extremely low quality. Only recently have we seen some progress due to speech to speech AI (AI voice replication). Still largely unusable. Some promising projects have cropped up but none are viable yet.
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Firefox reality: Wolvic took over, it’s in the process of being ported to chromium.
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Firefox for android TV: No alternatives even exist, you have TVBro and Vitabrowser are all just barely usable. and they rely on webview, a geckoview browser https://github.com/threethan/LightningBrowser which isn’t really usable.
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Send: This is the one fork that is actually flourishing. This is really a nifty service at least.
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I think one thing you guys should keep in the back pocket, is that Mozilla jobs are the outlier. The average Open Source Developer salary is very close to the US Federal poverty line. They’re paid mostly in comped passes to conventions. Most of the “averages” you see are compiled from data from companies like Mozilla. OSS devs are typically make around $30k in pure cash, even for ones working on large projects. The only OSS devs that make between the $95k and $150k (25th and 75th percentiles) you’ll see online are ones that work for Mozilla, or Intel, or whoever.
What makes this possible is MIT licensing models that corpos shilled in the 2000’s and 2010’s that directly benefit corperate engineering costs, but don’t contribute back nearly the value they extract. If the majority was GPL + copyright assignment, there would be income streams for leveraging OSS projects in closed source applications via licensing deals.
But the genie is out of the bottle on most of these things. See how Amazon is effectively forking an destroying existing OSS models via AWS provisioning of things like redis and elasticache.
The measley non Google portion of revenue is 81m dollar. If you pay a top dev 200k, you could pay 100 top devs 20m and still have 60m to play with.
This is even before considering a Bing/Yahoo/Ecosia deal.
Mozilla will be fine, but they’ll likely need to be leaner. Lay offs will likely play a part in that. Just got to hope they size and structure it right.
Why keep people on a payroll if you can get volunteers, for free!? People here really that dumb?
