I think there is a small set of people who would do a good job running Mozilla. Of these people, a very large chunk would do this for $500k annually (this is still enough money for almost anyone to lead a very comfortable life). Being money-driven might make you _worse_ as Mozilla CEO.

Great point. A company that needs to be steered by morality needs leadership that is willing to take the helm because their values align.

But they're not. Firefox market share has tumbled and I'm getting more and more captchas because my browser is now so rare it's considered "suspicious". It's not a flaw in the product itself but it does affect its usability. Marketshare of at least 5-10% is crucial to be on the radar of web devs. Especially because the competition besides Safari is basically all one single browser because they share the engine.

Idk I switched to Firefox earlier this year and it's honestly been really painless. Not sure why a CAPTCHA would trigger based on browser ID when those are so easily spoofed. Why would someone be running a bot on a less popular browser? I have not noticed any change.

The one thing I do notice is that on some very poorly built websites there will be a bug and it's because they haven't checked in Firefox or because I am blocking things that are no longer blockable on Chrome, but this is rare.

For me it's those horrible cloudflare and recaptcha things. I get them soooo much. And also that stupid cloudflare "We're checking if you're human" page.

I am on Linux though. Perhaps Firefox on Windows or Mac fares better. But these problems are from the last year or two and don't happen in chromium also on Linux.

There’s a difference in arguing that Mozilla should pay market rate for a CEO and arguing that the current CEO is worth market rate. I’m arguing the former, not the latter.

> my browser is now so rare it's considered "suspicious".

I've noticed this as well. Also some banking sites don't even work with it anymore.

> my browser is now so rare it's considered "suspicious".

thanks to AI crawlers, every browser is now considered suspicious

If they're in it for the money, instead of the mission, then I say good riddance. That's how we get where we are now.

2-3x staff engineer pay is a LOT of money. More than enough.

I disagree, hiring a CEO for well below market pay because they believe in the mission is a recipe for disaster. Very likely you’ll end up with someone whose heart is in the right place but can’t execute.

2-3x staff engineer salary is a lot of money. But no matter how much I believed in a mission if I could make 10-20x that and set myself up for life financially I’d have a very hard time turning it down.

As opposed to now, where you've got someone who is willing and able to tank the entire project, but it looks good on paper? Is that the kind of person you want to be competing for?

I get what you're saying, but I really can't agree. The mission is important in a non-profit. It's part of what makes them work.

There's people in the FOSS realm running VERY competent operations for simple living wage, or less.

Take KDE for example. It's easy to argue they've accomplished MORE than Mozilla has in the last decade.

Their desktop ships with every Steam Deck (along with some niche laptop manufacturers) and they have a vast ecosystem of applications. Albeit some more rapidly developed than others.

Their structure is entirely different than Mozilla so it's hardly a direct comparison. But the main point is that Mozilla's traditional corporate structure seems to be a millstone.

They could have stashed most of their Google funding and kept a solid team of passionate maintainers paid in perpetuity. Goodwill could have volunteers contributing directly to Firefox, instead of forking it.

It's not clear CEO pay is driven my market forces at all. Pay seems almost completely divorced from competency.

> Very likely you’ll end up with someone whose heart is in the right place but can’t execute.

There's no reason to believe that. But it's still better than someone whose heart isn't in the right place and can't execute.

Or, arguably even worse, someone whose heart isn't in the right place and can execute.