#mozilla has done a lot of good for the web, but the hybrid "for-profit owned by non-profit" model is and always has been a mistake.
You get the worst of both worlds -- a layer of nonprofit bureaucracy on top of for-profit business practices, compensation structures, and decision-making.
It reflects Mozilla's history, being born in the ideological swamp of hypercapitalist Silicon Valley, which frowns upon nonprofits, and which pursues profit, growth & "disruption" above all else.
I feel for the folks impacted by this round of layoffs. I hope folks at the top will seriously ponder that the right thing to do in this situation is to take a fucking pay cut yourself.
But above all, I hope we can find better organizational models to support the future of the open web.
@eloquence Without that "for-profit" money though, do you think they would have had even a fraction of the paid developers they had working on it?
I have my doubts that without it they would have been able to stay relevant in comparison to the other major browsers. Just look at some of the lesser browser projects without major financial backing and how lacking they are in terms of consumer expectation of features/performance.
The question for me is whether you can sustain a team large enough to maintain a high quality browser & participate in open standards development indefinitely, as opposed to what Mozilla has done, which is to sustain a much larger team on the basis of an _unsustainable_ revenue stream.
Mozilla's large open source efforts have been primarily funded by Google (briefly Yahoo), and that was always a very precarious long-term bet.
@eloquence @bpepple I think that, in a better world, Mozilla would receive large amounts of public subsidies in the interest of not allowing the complete degeneration of the browser market into a Google monopoly.
Feels like its too late for that now, though, and it probably wouldnt have worked with their hybrid structure anyway.
@eloquence Yeah, I never really understood what was going on with MoCo and MoFo. I asked MoCo employees a few times and they didn't usually seem to have a clear either which way money flowed. I know you can check MoFo's public financials, but those never made much sense to me either.
I guess we might have a partial answer to that now? The money didn't flow in the right direction.
@eloquence Having worked there, the Foundation (MoFo) and Corporation (MoCo) were actually pretty separate.
The non-profit owning the for-profit is kind of a tax loophole AFAIK whereby MoCo pay for the use of MoFo's IP (logo, etc.)
In 2010 there were <5 people working for MoFo, then they scaled it up to focus on Webmaker, Open Badges, etc. (stuff I was part of) and then scaled back again.
Lots of mistakes, but I don't think non-profit bureaucracy is one of them!
For sure - I didn't mean to imply otherwise. To me the separation _is_ the problem: you have a separate Board, a separate ED, a separate revenue strategy, 501(c)(3) compliance requirements to worry about, all the while the for-profit goes about its business in a manner largely independent of this structure.
Tax reasons are a huge factor, but of course MoCo could align its business practices much more with NPO practices even under its legal structure, but chooses not to.
And those tax reasons are tied to a specific decisions which I would frame at least partially ideological: to make itself utterly dependent on Google (briefly Yahoo) as a source of revenue. That achieved faster growth, but it meant foregoing the creation of single, independent organization with diversified revenue.
This decision to grow a business instead of an institution is what I am most critical of.
As you may know, 501(c)(3)s are legally entitled to earn as much mission-related income as they want - that's why massive nonprofit enterprises with plenty of questionable practices like Goodwill can exist. They can even make substantial taxable _unrelated_ income.
So you can absolutely create a nonprofit that makes deals with other businesses to sustain itself -- just probably not one that makes one big deal with a single corporation that almost entirely sustains it.
I can't speak for the UK situation -- I know the 501(c)(3) space pretty well, including the considerations under the US tax code. It's in this context that my criticism applies.
What motivates the choice of this legal structure in the UK, and how are those for-profit companies run? For example, do they tolerate inflation of executive compensation? Would be interested to read more about this before forming an opinion.
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