#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.
@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.
Erik Moeller
Brian 
crab