Gregory's ServerVenn diagram of what indie tech people think Mozilla wants to be/should be and what Moz actually wants to be: OO
 22 comments
 @kissane with the caveat that back in the day I moved from FF to the shiny new Chrome, thus contributing to its unchecked dominance and bullying, was there anything we could have done to prevent this? Talk of offsetting the absurd funding gap (i.e., whatever Google pays them) may be moot at this point, but it could help future projects like Servo.   @kissane I would say there are nerds inside Mozilla who are baffled by the whole thing, too But, that funding thing turns out to be a real lynchpin and a dilemma all at the same time  @lmorchard @kissane I don't know. I've talked to some moz devs on 'the orange site' and its clear they are ex-Google, or drinking the Koolaid in hopes that they'll get to work on Chrome some day. I love the ideals around why Mozilla was formed. I absolutely hate everything about the organization as it exists today. Its clear that whatever paper those ideals were written on was used as a napkin and disposed of. I still use Firefox, but I just loathe the BS coming down the pipeline. @miah @kissane Well, there's kind of an exchange of folks between all the tech companies. Some ex-Firefox folks went to work on Chrome at various points, I think some went to Apple for Safari, and some came from those teams to Mozilla. Some went to Facebook because they saw opportunities for impact. Folks go all over the place @lmorchard @kissane Surely. But if you are a corporation with a specific goal, there are certainly people you don't want to hire as they'll disrupt that goal with their brainwashed bullshit. I'm not sure you can make any kind of positive impact by working at Facebook unless you're hired to turn off servers. @lmorchard @kissane Good luck to them, their therapists will profit greatly if they ever wake up. @miah @lmorchard Yeah, the Manifesto is still such interesting reading, in both the original and slightly edited later version https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/details/ I'm 100% sure that a lot of senior people at Moz have felt that they're really serving those principles, and still do, and yet. @lmorchard For sure! And Mozilla has done some great things, especially but not only on the foundation side. (Our little Knight-funded team there got so much done, lots of the fellows have been amazing.) But the good things seem to have been sort of to one side of what leadership ultimately wanted, and Baker's bets didn't really pay off.  @josh it's hard for me to make the stated intent and the results match up, yeah, and for closer to 15+ years  @kissane @RangerRick I mean, it's fine. That account is write-only anyway. They weren't being social with it. Maybe if they were they'd have seen the backlash to their more foolhardy ideas. @nivex Isn't that the issue? That nothing they do is what they should do, and everything new they do is terrible? @kissane Google pays Mozilla leadership's salaries, and they have been running Mozilla as controlled opposition to defend Google against monopoly claims. @kissane Mozilla's strategy: be a mediocre imitation of Chrome to show a token effort while alienating long-time users. |
My tepid take is that this gap is only partly Mozilla's faultβthe rest is a combination of projection and the ol' "using the same terms to mean different things" problem.
We sure could use a big institution to be what, say, nerds like me would prefer Mozilla to be, though. (The reason we don't have one is funding.)