Hacker News Reader

Comment by jimnotgym | Hacker News Reader

I think you need to qualify that statement

They only survived at all because they owned a stake in Auto Trader Group which was sold off for £600m, allowing their non-profit parent to continue operating. Since then they are just about breaking even with subscriptions. They also (very controversially) employ many unpaid interns to do journalist jobs.

Lots of industries employ lots of unpaid interns. Journalism, Acting, Museums, Charities, Sports teams, Political parties, etc.

On one hand, if people are happy to do work for free, a company would be stupid not to make use of it. On the other hand, governments should probably outlaw it since it really is just a loophole to pay less than minimum wage. ("Volunteer for 2 years for free, and then we'll give you a minimum wage paid position" = "On average over your career, you get less than minimum wage")

Just about breaking even may be seen as good financial management for a not-for-profit in an industry in massive decline.

Their news operations are subsidised to the tune of ~£30m/yr by the charitable trust that owns them. Not in and of itself problematic, but accumulating a sizeable enough endowment to sufficiently fund operations isn't an option for most orgs.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2019/aug/07/guardian-broke...

Mozilla corporation is owned by a non profit. Having a sizeable endowment is hard, but that sweet sweet google money has totaled over a billion dollars so its not like they didn't have the opportunity.

Yes, that totals a couple billion dollars at this point. Mozilla's mismanagement of that money is really unfortunate. Up until 2012 Mozilla ran just fine on about 100MM a year. Why they didn't care to save any significant portion of the Google dollars is beyond me. If they had simply been a somewhat leaner organization they would be in a far better place right now.

> ...accumulating a sizeable enough endowment to sufficiently fund operations isn't an option for most orgs.

And one of the claims / complaints of TFA is that Mozilla had a massive income for many years, and could have built up an endowment; but instead chose to live "hand-to-mouth", spending their income on useless failed projects that have nothing to do with Firefox. (And CEO pay of course.)

> that have nothing to do with Firefox

Not arguing against the overall point but Thunderbird has nothing to do with Firefox either and is still a thing Mozilla's reason for existing is not just their browser.

I get the point you're putting across, but you chose a terrible example. Mozilla cut thunderbird loose years ago, after neglecting it (Thunderbird remained XUL-based long after Mozilla decided that XUL was a technological dead-end). Yes, Mozilla's mission to to make the internet better for all users - not just the web. But I think they forgot what their mission is sometime back.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com