While I have not done substantive research myself, I have heard a number of personal complaints from (current and former) Mozilla people that very little of their funding actually goes to working on the core projects (like Firefox or Servo). They seem to have the same problem as Wikimedia where as they got more money, they spent an increasingly large fraction of it on bullshit outside the scope of their original purpose, hiring non-technical people (who are basically impossible to get rid of later on), etc. It’s much easier to downsize R&D than to downsize HR.
No, rust and Firefox are basically the two on-task things they’re still doing. But giving up on servo kind of defeats the point of them working on rust, so who knows how long they’ll keep supporting it.
You mean pushing HTML5 that after 15 years keeps being half implemented, catching up with native apps, and now literally basically turned into ChromeOS for all practical purposes, alongside SaaS applications?
Mozilla's mission is end-user control and an open Internet. Rust significantly improves security in end-user systems, so I think it supports the mission.
Yes, given a somewhat vague mission any smart person can find an intersection between the mission and a project. I myself have done this all to many times.
The real test is if you START with the mission, will you get to the project? In this case no, there's no way to go from a mission to advance an open internet and web to developing a new systems level programming language. You can only get there with motivated thinking.
Given most Web agencies have moved from having Firefox as a must support browser on the support matrix, and Rust still has a couple of decades before reaching C and C++ market adoption, the mission might be quite endangered.
At least Rust has its own foundation, however just like ISO and other foundation based languages, lets see where the companies at the table take it.
> They seem to have the same problem as Wikimedia where as they got more money, they spent an increasingly large fraction of it on bullshit outside the scope of their original purpose
Maybe it's time to ditch the traditional donations system to a per-feature donation. You could even make a policy that, say, 10% of the money of every donation goes to the foundation to use as they please, but the other 90% goes to the development of the specific product/feature.
We need to fins other governance+funding ways for our IT non-profits, or we will keep having this same problem.
I hear what you are saying, and it makes a certain amount of sense for projects that survive on donations (possibly hard to implement due to the fungible nature of $$, but whatever)
However, Mozilla's revenue is mostly from search engine deals, no? If it is true that the Mozilla foundation is under control of people with goals not aligned with the mission to drive forward open internet, I am not sure what can be done? (Not saying this is true, but there have been a lot of grumbling about it)
Perhaps Mozilla's lasting contribution to the world will be as an apocryphal story, warning others of the dangers of ignoring/neglecting core competencies.
