this post was submitted on 17 May 2024
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This is about the Mozilla Foundation, not the Mozilla Corporation.
The distinction matters. The way they are organized, they can’t really overlap functions without jeopardizing the non-profit status of the Foundation. The Corporation is a for-profit company, it gets money from Google and it makes the browser.
What? I'd expect the nonprofit to make the browser and get donations from corporations
The foundation owns the corporation so leadership decisions can flow through. Leadership matters, and what the new executive director says is the focus is a indicator.
Leadership decisions do not “flow through”, they are similar to the board in a traditional corporation. They legally cannot have operational decision making or be involved in the same work, that is a foundational aspect of “non-profit owning a for-profit”. It could just as easily be a for-profit soap company.
The focus of the Foundation is drastically different than Firefox. That’s one of the reasons Firefox was spun off so it could thrive in an environment that was built around it.
If they can have no control of the underlying corporation why bother owning it? Why not just put it on the free market then?
Obviously owning it does give some level of control, boards of directors can have opinions, the principal investors can set directives
Because it’s for fundraising, and they maintain very generic vibe setting, and they know Elon Musk won’t buy it.
The Foundation literally cannot focus on the browser, so what’s your continuing problem here?
That the Mozilla organization as a whole, including the foundation, has lost track of what is actually good for a free and open internet. And it makes me sad
What is good is not letting unethical corporations and only unethical corporations develop cutting edge technologies because me Firefox user and me not like anything ever change.
Cat’s out of the bag, nothing ever goes back the way it was, you just get to live in the new world.
Agreed the world is forever moving forward. Mozilla is being left behind.
To close the loop on this whole discussion, the Mozilla foundations executive director hire was posted to a Firefox community, Firefox being owned by the Mozilla corporation. Clearly there is cross concern between these organizations, otherwise the post would not have been made here, you wouldn't have read it, and you wouldn't have been able to respond to it.
Pretty much every time the foundation does anything a crapton of people complain about how it has nothing to do with the browser.
Then more people comment and complain about Mozilla doing advocacy, or making a podcast, and how those resources should’ve gone into the browser, because they too have no idea there’s a difference.
And it doesn’t help that the corporation and foundation are collectively referred to in press as Mozilla with no distinction.
Mozilla does have a relevancy problem, I think the money from Google does discourage them from doing anything that could jeopardize that funding.
Maybe. I think it’s worth looking at exactly what the role is that they were hiring for: https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/mozilla-seeks-new-leader-for-its-movement-building-arm/