Firefox Money: Investigating the bizarre finances of Mozilla
lunduke.locals.com
The author may be a right-wing fellow. Nonetheless, the data he exposes are taken from official Mozilla docs.
The author may be a right-wing fellow. Nonetheless, the data he exposes are taken from official Mozilla docs.
I read through it and I don't know what the issue is?
There seems to be an issue with Mozilla supporting diversity and inclusion. Also he has an issue with them having enough money to run the business. I.e. not living paycheck to paycheck.
This article is nothing.
Less than one minute in reading and there's already one big misrepresentation and one outright lie.
He tries to 'clear' the misconception that Mozilla develops software by showing the areas of focus of the foundation, making a point about how it should be software development and instead are some vague ideological goals.
But the foundation should be ideological. The browser is ideological and lots of the users use it because of ideology. There would be absolutely no issue with that even if the fact that is the corporation and not the foundation the one that focuses on software development weren't true. Open the frontpage of any big open source project that works with a foundation (GNOME, Fedora, Linux) and you will see front and center the big focus on promotion of ideological values. And those are values focused on internet freedom, which are absolutely related to software.That's what a foundation does. That's the way things are. And yet open mozilla.org and the first thing you'll see is the software it makes. So what's really the accusation there?
Second point makes the previous accusation make even less sense. He proceeds to show financial balances about reduction in expenses that show that the biggest one is software development. So the reality shows that Mozilla is focused on software development. The accusation goes that precisely software development is the area with the biggest cuts. One could argue that doing more with less is a good thing, specially knowing how exactly the types like the author frequently use smaller projects like librefox or ungoogled chromium as an example of a smaller more focused project that firefox should be, but I won't do that. Instead I will point out how his accusation of the biggest cuts to software development are and outright lie easily visible to anyone with eyes and basic arithmetic knowledge. While software development saw 41 million in cuts, administration and management costs went down almost 60 million. One would think that's a good thing and exactly the kind of point he should be noticing given the accusation, but if the foundation is becoming leaner in the management side that would kind of render his whole text moot, so he ignores that.
I will keep reading and analyze each point on his own, but after this and knowing very well this kind of people I don't think anyone could trust this analysis. I'm sure I'll come across the author anonymously on 4chan attacking 'pozzilla' and their 'trannyware' (I'm sorry) or on twitter harassing women developers, and I'll let him know my opinions.
I'm a Firefox fanboy, but a lot of these expenses do seem really odd.
Like what?
Funny how this worthless fear mongering is appearing right as people start to protest chromium.
Great post. Does it matter if it's right or left wing? How did you concluded that
Lunduke is known to have been defending quite extremist (on the right side of the political spectrum) view point on certain subjects.
As such, many people, me included, do not really like him.
It's still just ad hominem.
Ad hominem applies to arguments. The source of an argument does not affect the soundness of that argument.
But it's not a fallacy to question an overarching narrative based on the source. If a person keeps selectively choosing facts and twisting words to forward a specific narrative, it's not fallacious to view what that person says with skepticism.
Edit: Typo. Also changed "valid" to "sound".
If you think his narrative is skewed and based on selectively chosen facts and twisted words, you could correct that.
And other people are doing that in the comments. I addressed your point about ad-hominem specifically. So your response is kinda irrelevant to what I wrote.
People are questioning the narrative the author is painting based on their motivations. That's different to ad-hominem.
Saying that someone leans right is considered an attack on their character now?
It absolutely matters. We need to consider that a right-wing actor is likely to exaggerate claims against an organization that is ostensibly socially-minded and represents anti-corporate interests, like Mozilla.
Seems pretty corporate interests to me.
Iām not denying that Mozilla has a history of poor governance. But they are the competitor to Google here. You need to consider these things in context to understand what anti-corporate means for the internet.
The only reason they're a competitor to Google is because Google allows them to be by giving them money for the default search engine.
They're just sailing their boat until it sinks.
The author clearly has an issue with the money going to left-wing orgs specifically. They're making a big point out of all the antiracism and one of their bullet points asks why Mozilla has no problem alienating their user base.
@Engywuck Great article
I moved from FF to Vivaldi (couldn't find better browser, and form that to LibreWolf) due to how shitty the Mozilla Corp is. We need a fair player here but doesn't seem that we gonna have anything anytime soon
Mozilla is shitty, so you're opting for Google instead? That's like saying the air quality is bad, and opting to jump in the ocean and drown.
I said I moved back to LibreWolf (Firefox fork)
Oh sorry, my reading comprehension is clearly lacking :P I've been eyeing LibreWolf for a while, but I'm mostly too lazy to switch my addons over.
I made the same mistake lol, thought OC said he moved to Vivaldi and previously tried librewolf
@Evkob @Gargari, this is not so clear, Mozilla has made a pact with the devil some years ago and is sponsored by Google, it even employs several Google devs who develop FF, the risk of depending on outside investors. Chromium is certainly from Google, but it is, just like Gecko, FOSS and therefore every browser developer is free to gut it, throwing out any Google API, which they are doing in Vivaldi (leaving some to the user's choice in settings), no homecalls to Google.
https://www.cnet.com/news/privacy/a-dangerous-conflict-of-interest-between-firefox-and-google/
FWIW, Vivaldi attracts a lot of the FF power users that updates like Quantum abandoned. Vivaldi honestly wipes the floor with Firefox feature-wise especially for tab organisation, but the fact it's Chromium might push some people away.
It would've been nice if they used Gecko, but eh. I went from FF to Vivaldi to now, the Firefox fork Pulse. It's a bit janky sometimes, but with native vertical tabs and the Simple Tab Groups add-on I love it enough to use it as my main browser, and there's little to no bloat. There's also Floorp, another Firefox fork, this time from a Japanese community, which AFAIK predates Pulse and is inspired by Vivaldi, implementing some of its features like Tab Workspaces. Worth mentioning for those wanting a more Vivaldi-like experience.