Coz money?
this post was submitted on 17 May 2024
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Probably, like most jobs. In the most recently available tax filings the President and Executive Director (he was both) was making something like $360k.
Honestly that sounds like the correct salary for being in charge of a big foundation
I think a lot of people assume it is like the CEO of the Corporation, who is making a California tech CEO salary.
The one thing Mozilla needs to focus on for internet freedom and independence is the one thing they never never never ever will talk about... The browser
That 500m in annual google money is too precious to actually innovate the browser with.
At this point Mozilla is just a political arm of Google.
AI will solve walled gardens and decentralize the internet? Wishful thinking.
This is about the Mozilla Foundation, not the Mozilla Corporation.
The distinction matters. The way they are organized, they can’t really overlap functions without jeopardizing the non-profit status of the Foundation. The Corporation is a for-profit company, it gets money from Google and it makes the browser.
What? I'd expect the nonprofit to make the browser and get donations from corporations
The foundation owns the corporation so leadership decisions can flow through. Leadership matters, and what the new executive director says is the focus is a indicator.
Leadership decisions do not “flow through”, they are similar to the board in a traditional corporation. They legally cannot have operational decision making or be involved in the same work, that is a foundational aspect of “non-profit owning a for-profit”. It could just as easily be a for-profit soap company.
The focus of the Foundation is drastically different than Firefox. That’s one of the reasons Firefox was spun off so it could thrive in an environment that was built around it.
If they can have no control of the underlying corporation why bother owning it? Why not just put it on the free market then?
Obviously owning it does give some level of control, boards of directors can have opinions, the principal investors can set directives
Because it’s for fundraising, and they maintain very generic vibe setting, and they know Elon Musk won’t buy it.
The Foundation literally cannot focus on the browser, so what’s your continuing problem here?
That the Mozilla organization as a whole, including the foundation, has lost track of what is actually good for a free and open internet. And it makes me sad
What is good is not letting unethical corporations and only unethical corporations develop cutting edge technologies because me Firefox user and me not like anything ever change.
Cat’s out of the bag, nothing ever goes back the way it was, you just get to live in the new world.
Agreed the world is forever moving forward. Mozilla is being left behind.
To close the loop on this whole discussion, the Mozilla foundations executive director hire was posted to a Firefox community, Firefox being owned by the Mozilla corporation. Clearly there is cross concern between these organizations, otherwise the post would not have been made here, you wouldn't have read it, and you wouldn't have been able to respond to it.
Pretty much every time the foundation does anything a crapton of people complain about how it has nothing to do with the browser.
Then more people comment and complain about Mozilla doing advocacy, or making a podcast, and how those resources should’ve gone into the browser, because they too have no idea there’s a difference.
And it doesn’t help that the corporation and foundation are collectively referred to in press as Mozilla with no distinction.
Mozilla does have a relevancy problem, I think the money from Google does discourage them from doing anything that could jeopardize that funding.
Maybe. I think it’s worth looking at exactly what the role is that they were hiring for: https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/mozilla-seeks-new-leader-for-its-movement-building-arm/
OMG. Ctrl+F for Firefox with no results in the article… but there’s a link to a Pikachu image from Google image search results.
I started my career as a media lawyer to protect those who made things that helped us see one another, and the truth about our shared world. Almost fifteen years ago, I co-founded and built a media law clinic to train others to do the same.
Hmm, sounds good.
I am not naive about the Internet at its worst. From the Edward Snowden disclosures to a quick trip to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, much of my career has confronted issues of surveillance — including of my own religious community.
Yeah, I like that we seem to agree.
[...] so we built an accountability journalism outlet, The Markup [...] Our team imagined and made things people used to make informed choices. Blacklight, for example, empowers people to use the Web how they want, by helping them see the otherwise invisible set of tracking tools, watching them as they browse.
Oh, Blacklight, I know that's a cool tool!
In our particular moment – as we’re deploying large-scale AI systems for the first time, as we’re waking up home pages from their long rests, and trying to “rewild” the Internet beyond walled gardens
What? Why?? Oh fucking no
We can imagine a future that centers human agency, and then we can build it, bit-by-byte.
Yeah but AI is most probably not a toolbox for that
Mitchell Baker, Laura Chambers, Nabila Syed... Well it seems women are no better than men as far as capitalist greed goes. It is clear they want to steal the money of developers who want to build Firefox and other tools in better ways, instead of doing this AI and buzzword marketing bullshit and killing Firefox. They even had to layoff some security developers in the past few years just so that these CEO pigs could fill their tummies with more money.
Instead of the anti-trans agenda Brendan Eich, we get this other opposite agenda in place with money grubbing CEOs. Using leftist politics to cloak themselves is fucking disgusting. But since they are women, they will be immune to any criticisms.
She is taking a position at the non-profit Mozilla Foundation, not the for-profit Mozilla Corporation that builds Firefox, did layoffs, and pays its executives millions.
So the AI is not going to be a thing in Firefox, right?
Can’t say anything about what Firefox is going to do, but that isn’t her job.
Did you read the article?
With this change, we are seeking a new Executive Director to lead the Foundation’s movement-building programs. Currently, the Foundation has two core programs:
Global Programs funds, convenes, and synthesizes the movement to increase the diversity, cohesion and impact of people working on internet health issues globally. The team has conducted research on AI transparency best practices; given grants
Over the past few years, Mozilla’s leadership — including CEO and Chairwoman Mitchell Baker and President and Executive Director Mark Surman — have been working to expand the scope of this work. Surman has been focused both on pointing to the Foundation’s movement-building programs at the challenge of creating trustworthy AI and on expanding the Mozilla portfolio to include a new venture capital arm and a commercial AI R+D lab.
Former executive director was the one aiming to create AI, and new executive director is filling the role now. So, it is the same circus clowns doing the show.
The former executive director was also the president, and continues to be the president, where he will pursue AI.
Starting in 2024, Surman will move full time to work on this growth and expansion work, remaining as Mozilla Foundation President.
We don't fucking care about your new boss Mozilla