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0 pointscallahad13y ago0 comments

I'm a Mozilla Corporation (MoCo) employee, as are most "Mozilla employees." The thing is, Mozilla Corporation is a wholly owned subsidiary of the honest-to-goodness 501(c)(3) nonprofit Mozilla Foundation. Thanks to this structure, our work is in the service of the Mozilla Manifesto, http://www.mozilla.org/about/manifesto.en.html, not in pursuit of enriching shareholders.

Mozilla Corporation has been growing -- I think it's around ~700 paid folks right now -- but that's still very, very small compared to the number of people employed by its peer organizations at Apple, Microsoft, and Google.

But that's irrelevant, because the Mozilla project, emphatically, is not the Corporation. Mozilla didn't change the world by having the most money, or hiring the most engineers. It changed the world through the contributions of the world. By being born of the open source movement, and recognizing the potential of an open web. Insofar as Mozilla exists at all, it exists to support you, and the open web. Consider getting involved: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/contribute/

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DannyBee13y ago

FWIW:

1. The corporation will still owe a fiduciary duty to it's shareholders, it's just that it's shareholders are a non-profit. Being a cynical lawyer, while this may be good enough for some people, I'm still cynical. I've seen plenty of non-profits, even in the open source world, go bad. Hell I've helped fund/start non-profits with completely altruistic purposes, like Mozilla does (IE "Helping to open government data and standardize it", or "Provide a completely free non-advertising/non-tracking search engine for non-profit volunteer opportunities"), and seen them go bad and do evil things, despite the best intentions of all the engineers working for them. So while I agree Mozilla is in a better position than most, the idea that simply being owned/responsible to a non-profit makes it "better" is, well, wrong, in my opinion. They go bad just as easily.

2. I used to be involved in some auxillary mozilla projects (bugzilla, etc). I stopped, because of the politics and development policies.

This was 6-7 years ago (maybe longer, i'm getting old), i'm sure things have changed for the better.

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