- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.ml
- technology@lemmy.ml
- firefox@lemmy.ml
The author may be a right-wing fellow. Nonetheless, the data he exposes are taken from official Mozilla docs.
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This “report” is exactly what I would expect from Lunduke. It is really sad that this reactionary content comes from someone who I once thought was cool.
The only part I can agree on : the execs at Mozilla are getting paid too much in the current situation.
Now to get to the real meat.
The combined spendings to political organizations make up around 1m$. This is less than the donations made to Mozilla foundation. Considering the very political nature of the foundation, these spendings were likely authorized there.
Now, why would a technology company spend on political organisations? Well, simply put : technology is political. People trying to peddle that technology is not political are trying to sell you the status quo.
Technology companies spend insane amounts of money on lobbying.
Now, why would Mozilla spend money on left-leaning organisations? Well, simply put : left-leaning politics (though embedded in neoliberal Californian ideals of the internet) are embedded at the core of Mozilla from the start with Mozilla manifesto.
I’m not gonna get into why Lunduke thinks that these organisations are bad but consider it a red flag.
Now, what I would ask to anyone reading this : why do you think Lunduke is ignoring this? Why would Lunduke try to paint this picture?
I’d say the CEO is the only one who’s overpaid. The other executives make between $200k to $370k, which is a lot of money but barely noteworthy imo.
If they’re living in SF, then it’s even less money. It’s a lot, don’t get me wrong, but it takes a lot of money to afford to live in (or around) that city.
Yeah, for sure, the CEO is the clear outlier. I just count them as an exec though that might be misusing how that term is used colloquially.
I don’t know enough about corporate finance or how Mozilla is structured, but why is the CEO the only one marked with “paid only by a related for profit”? Is this coming from money from Mozilla Corporation? Why is she the only one being paid from there and not the others? Does that maybe have something to do with the disparity in pay?
The problem isn’t that they’re spending money on political causes and I wouldn’t even expect them to do some false balance bs where they’d spend money on left and right wing politics, but spending money on political causes with almost zero transparency (like what do orgs do with the money, how effective are they, are they actually aligned with certain values, who is involved in these orgs, etc) seems fishy as fuck.
(like what do orgs do with the money, how effective are they, are they actually aligned with certain values, who is involved in these orgs, etc)
These are all issues of the organizations own reporting, not anything Mozilla did. Mozilla is not responsible for disclosing the operational details of places it donates to or works with.
The laws and regulations surrounding NPOs, charities, and foundations and what they report are a whole other rabbit hole.
I didn’t read the article… Are the organizations secret? I don’t think it’s fishy if not. Why would they need to spend time justifying things to the public like that?
Ieft leaning? These orgs sound more like the typical liberal right centrist orgs from america lol
It is stated within the article that Mckensie Mack is non-binary, however the author chose to refer to them with she/her pronouns. Regardless of “politics” and “beliefs”, I don’t agree with ignoring or disrespecting somebody’s identity.
So where’s Lunduke’s articles on the numerous right-wing shady organizations? I haven’t listened to or read anything by this hack in many years now because of the fact that he has a clear agenda motivated by his own political bullshit.
Maybe find an article that is written by someone reputable and post that to numerous communities.
Given the author’s political affiliation and the apparent lack of coverage of this anywhere else I find it difficult to make any conclusions other than those that would indicate the author’s politically makes.
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I think this approach is doomed. People only care about Mozilla because of Firefox and Firefox is falling behind again, no doubt coinciding with the mass layoffs and the ejection of the Servo engine. They’ve caught up with Chrome on most fronts a year or three ago when their reinvented CSS and layout engine was released, but they’re still on the back foot these days.
This is incorrect. Firefox recently surpassed Chrome in a key benchmark and has generally been on a roll lately.
Yes, their current iterative improvements are not as sexy as the big release of Quantum, but to say they’re currently falling behind is the opposite of the truth. They’ve just pulled ahead.
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This is not correct.
arewefastyet.com shows very clearly that although chrome beats firefox in some benchmarks, firefox trades blows with it and is similar to or faster in others.
Chrome also boasts about having the best performance.
Meanwhile, in the real world, running the two side-by-side tends to spell a whole different picture.
Without having read the whole thing, so I’m not sure how clear the article is about it: the important part is that donations to Mozilla go to the Mozilla Foundation, which does the political campaigning/social justice etc. stuff, while Firefox development happens in the Mozilla Corporation funded with search engine deals etc.
So again:
Donations to Mozilla do not go towards Firefox development
And looking independently at what the Mozilla Foundation does: Thank God for the Mozilla Foundation. The do incredibly important work and is as far as I know the strongest advocacy group for a free and open net.
The EFF is probably competitive there. But clearly they’re both on the same side of most issues, so not really a competition.
The author may be a right-wing fellow. Nonetheless, the data he exposes is not fake!
This should not be noteworthy much less be sufficient to make the article seem credible.
The people who tout justifications like this have clearly not paid enough attention in school to learn about things like secondary sources, misrepresenting data, or false extrapolations.
Or they’ve somehow forgotten all about how the far right has been falsely portraying information for years now, and using a kernel of truth to say “See? Therefore everything else I’m saying is also true!” so that the gullible will believe their lies.
Someone’s political beliefs aren’t indicative of how well they can form an argument. People can misrepresent data regardless of their political leanings, this whole talking point in the comments is irrelevant.
That perspective requires a wanton and purposeful ignorance of the right wing misinformation and disinformation campaigns of the last ten years.
It’s only irrelevant if you want to act like the author isn’t part of a political group that frequently lies.
The way you’re framing it seems disingenuous. You act like only people on the right lie and spread misinformation (and they do!). It feels like you’re making a childish jab at the right because you don’t like them.
Left-wing people and right-wing people both lie to you plenty, because political leanings have nothing to do with it.
I’m not claiming the piece itself is truthful, but you’ve got your head deep in the sand if you think the right wing is the only group lying to you, while the left & everyone else is truthful.
You’re acting like I’m not talking about QAnon or MAGA types for some reason. Why?
I’m not saying to dismiss anyone just because you politically disagree with them. I’m saying don’t trust a Nazi when he gives his opinion on Jews.
I’m not saying only one side lies. I’m saying there’s a political contingent that only operates on lies, and this guy is with them.
Stop trying to reduce the situation to talk about someone else. This is a QAnon type author writing falsities based on falsely interpreted data, not Noam Chomsky waffling on if something is a crime or not.
Hey folks - Just want to note that the !Technology mod team is aware of the reports on this post. After some discussion we decided to leave the thread up, since it had already generated a decent amount of good discussion despite the problems with the article itself. However, I do want to make it clear that we do not condone intentionally misgendering people.
If you have any questions or feedback, feel free to reply here or DM me.
Besides the CEO thing, this makes me wanna donate even more to the foundation
And this is one of the many reasons I don’t donate to Firefox. Firefox employees should really fork that project and make it better than what it is now instead of just being Google’s dog + an excuse to pay millions to a single person and hundreds of thousands to random individuals, who have nothing to do with Firefox.
400M in cash could go to a lot of development efforts. They could rewrite Firefox entirely in Rust, make it run on any platform, move the needle on web technologies in a big way, hell, they could make their own damn phone with that kind of money, or even write their own competitor to ChromeOS.
But instead…
And what do you do after three years? Then the cash will be used up.
Mozilla isn’t just developing the Firefox browser. Technology is inherently political - and educating people and influencing actors politically on the free and open web is very important. Firefox is much less likely to mis-align away from their browser users than chrome simply because they don’t have the misaligned incentives like the chrome Browser which is equally made by the largest internet advertising firm of the world.
They even has created FirefoxOS for phone at some point in the past 10 years. But I don’t remember what happened with that.
They tried making a phone already and it failed to gain steam.
It’s worth noting that KaiOS, a fork of Firefox OS, has been successful - particularly in developing markets.
This is reassuring, I’ve been debating installing Ubuntu’s phone OS on my old Sony Xperia. It’s great that it’s not a complete bust to have a nice FOSS OS on phones. Mozilla just didn’t have the resources or wherewithal to follow through with Firefox OS and that’s just how it goes.
What are you on about? This is super confusing to me. Mozilla does a lot of great work. It’s insanely hard to make and develop a web browser… Are you aware of that? Apple probably spends a large fraction of the amount Mozilla does and yet safari benefits more from open source than Mozilla and is still one of the biggest shit piles on the planet.
I’ve heard that it wouldn’t it be possible due to tax laws, but I do wish that you could donate directly to Mozilla Corporation itself. The foundation’s advocacy work is important, but it would also be important to ensure Firefox’s continued development without them having to rely on Google
You could just buy one of their products (Pocket, VPN, etc.) and not use it if you want.
Where does the money from here go?
To the foundation for their advocacy.
