Please rethink your position. There are many people who genuinely care about freedom and privacy working at Mozilla, while at Facebook, Google, and Apple, developers are selling us out every day.
I’m sure there are many people working at Facebook, Google and Apple who also genuinely care about freedom and privacy, while there are developers working at Mozilla who are just as willing to sell out users as anyone.
It is true that Mozilla’s a nonprofit, but that doesn’t mean a lot to me when I try to guess what they’ll do in the future.
I think his point was that instead of throwing your hands up in the air and declaring all options to be equally terrible, it might be better to support actors that are generally good.
The original comment seemed to be “sure, some people working for Mozilla are bad, but some are good, and some people working for their competitors are also bad.”
My points were (1) the statement didn’t actually say anything interesting because it only talked about some of the people working at each company (i.e., it was just as true if you switched the company names around), (2) all companies are made up of people, so it’s hardly a surprise that some of those people have admirable motives and others don’t, and (3) “nonprofit” doesn’t necessarily mean “good,” or “pure in heart,” or whatever people seem to think it does.
> It is true that Mozilla’s a nonprofit, but that doesn’t mean a lot to me when I try to guess what they’ll do in the future.
It should tho.
Mozilla is not free of mistakes, but they're recognized as such, and handled as such. Thanks to the non-profit status none of the bad decisions Mozilla made was a result of conflict of interests.
My original comment was ambiguous: (1) I didn’t predict Firefox OS, Rust, the current branding push (moz://a), cancelation of particular projects, the switch to Yahoo search and the recent switch back to Google, etc., and (2) I didn’t expect any of Mozilla’s political activity, including this lawsuit. Knowing that Mozilla qualifies as a nonprofit in the US doesn’t make its behavior any easier to predict.
I believe that Mozilla’s nonprofit status requires it to show “community support” in the form of donations from a lot of people, so the tax status does influence the foundation’s policies in some way (e.g., policies can’t upset too many donors), but I think that influence is pretty limited.
Mozilla has to make do with the same imperfect people as everyone else.
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Even though I’m bad at it, I will make one prediction: suing the federal government is expensive. Obviously Mozilla will use the lawsuit as a fundraising opportunity. If the suit is successful, they will have another reason to be mentioned in history books. But if the suit fails, or if the fundraising doesn’t work out, this might end up as a very costly mistake.
Plenty of bad decisions from Mozilla were the results of conflicts of interest - between their desire to be useful to users in the immediate term and their desire to push for a better web in the long term, or between individual employees' views and the organisation's interests, or even between their users' interests and the organisation's desire for money (the default search provider) - being a nonprofit doesn't mean you don't want money, it just means you spend everything you get, managers who want to empire-build still want to increase their revenue even in a non-profit.
Mozilla is exempt from one very specific set of interests that other web organisations have. They still have a vast number of competing interests to consider in their decisionmaking. Indeed Google's controlling shareholders, being mostly billionaires, may well exert less pressure in practice than Mozilla's donors.
It is hard, at this point, to claim that people working to advance the success of companies like Google and Facebook genuinely care about freedom and privacy. If they did, they would quit, and go work for competitors. The sort of talent these companies bring in have high incomes and are extremely sought after... it's not like they don't have a choice.
Bingo. All corporations have employees who have consumers' best interests at heart, and ones who don't. But a corporation exists as its own entity, and as an entity, google, facebook, and apple are against consumers, while mozilla is not.
Do you have specific examples? I don't usually see instances of Apple being more than price-gougers who do a decent job with privacy, and I'm interested in learning more.
They participated in PRISM[1], essentially an NSA-sponsored backdoor. For the most part, however, I agree that they're significantly better than most other giant corporations.
