undefined | Better HN

0 pointstectec5mo ago0 comments

What's the quote?

0 comments

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

I agree with the person you're responding to. Decades of funding and they have zero savings to show for it.

Though it's questionable as to how much big players like Google would have continued to fund Mozilla if they had seen Mozilla making the financial moves that would have made it an independent and self-sufficient entity.

lesuorac5mo ago

> Though it's questionable as to how much big players like Google would have continued to fund Mozilla if they had seen Mozilla making the financial moves that would have made it an independent and self-sufficient entity.

Look at how much money Google gave to Apple (Safari) vs Mozilla (FireFox) per year.

The CEO has unarguable been doing a poor job. Losing market share has lost them more potential revenue than any of their pet projects raised.

gkoberger5mo ago

Well, they have over a billion in the bank. Which is both a ton of money, but also goes away quickly when you're a large company paying lots of money to salaries.

zug_zug5mo ago

So if you have a billion in the bank, you can collect 5% return and never touch the money. So you get $50m a year to pay enough engineers to make a browser.

That's plenty of money if they recognize they need a super lean company with 0 bloat and a few highly paid experts who focus on correctness and not bullshit features.

pseudalopex5mo ago

How many engineers are enough to make a browser? How do you know?

Vivaldi employ 28 developers and 33 others to make an unstable Chromium fork and email program.[1]

Bloat and bullshit features to you are minimum requirements to someone else.

[1] https://vivaldi.com/team/

3 more replies

vjvjvjvjghv5mo ago

Exactly! With such an endowment they should be able to develop a browser and maybe some other stuff with a small team that’s focused on tech and not social justice.

glenstein5mo ago

>So if you have a billion in the bank,

I just want to note that this is what is sometimes called carouseling. Which is, instead of acknowledging the original accusation was not correct, which is what should be happening, this comment just proceeds right on to the next accusation.

What is happening, psychologically speaking, that is causing a mass of people to spew one confidently wrong accusation after another? They don't have an endowment (they do!). Well they're not investing it! (they are). Well they're not working on the browser! (they shipped 12 major releases with thousands of patches per release with everything from new tab grouping and stacking to improved gpu performance to security fixes)

This is like a dancing sickness or something.

1 more reply

account425mo ago

But then they can't LARP as a silicon valley tech giant with million dollar CEO salaries.

roenxi5mo ago

That isn't really the best way to think about not-for-profit schemes like Mozilla. Every organisation eventually becomes corrupted (as in fact we see with Mozilla), so creating an eternal pot of money for something is not strategically sensible.

If good people are in charge, they'll just spend everything and rely on ongoing donations. If nobody thinks it is worth donating too then it is time to close up shop. Keep a bit of a buffer for the practical issue of bad years, sure, but the idea shouldn't be to set up an endowment.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse