100% agree with that. Maybe Mozilla's greatest skill really is in PR and that it is a rotten organization inside (which so many comments on HN seem to imply), but I don't buy that. When you try to do good, you always put yourself in a vulnerable position. As soon as you make a single mistake, people love to point the finger and criticize for being a hypocrite and not living up to your standards. When an evil company does something good, we applaud them. When a good company makes a mistake, we bash them.
As a consumer of the web and a developer on the web, Mozilla is one of the few "big" players in the web ecosystem that I see who are really fighting for keeping the web open.
We were just having this discussion with a friend the other day, on the topic of the anti-trust hearings. What if the web didn't evolve to be open like it was today, but instead had followed the evolution of the mobile space, dominated and fully controlled by only two players? What if it was impossible to run a website from a server in your bedroom but instead had to submit your website to some corporation and wait a couple of days before some semi-human reviewer approved it (or not)? The transformative power of the web on global society would never have been as big as it has been if it had evolved in that model.
For that reason alone, I applaud Mozilla and I decided to start donating today. I would hate for the web to be under the tyranny of some corporation because that would be such a loss for humanity. And we need people and organizations that put up the fight against the Googles of this world.
Nah Mozilla's PR is mainly due to historical stuff, not to new marketing (post FxOS era more or less)
The org inside is.. like many old orgs, half rotten, half fine. There's a lot of good engineering and even good leaders, thought the ones that are genuine tend to be pushed aside over time for ... more evil reasons, friendship, money, wrong color, you name it. You like you said when you try to do good you put yourself in a vulnerable position and its valid externally just as well as internally as I'm sure you're aware (all companies have this problem to some extent and Mozilla is in my opinion on the "worse side" of the slider atm)
Note also that Mozilla Corp is not Mozilla Foundation. Pretty much none of your donations go to the web browser itself.
As a consumer of the web and a developer on the web, Mozilla is one of the few "big" players in the web ecosystem that I see who are really fighting for keeping the web open.
We were just having this discussion with a friend the other day, on the topic of the anti-trust hearings. What if the web didn't evolve to be open like it was today, but instead had followed the evolution of the mobile space, dominated and fully controlled by only two players? What if it was impossible to run a website from a server in your bedroom but instead had to submit your website to some corporation and wait a couple of days before some semi-human reviewer approved it (or not)? The transformative power of the web on global society would never have been as big as it has been if it had evolved in that model.
For that reason alone, I applaud Mozilla and I decided to start donating today. I would hate for the web to be under the tyranny of some corporation because that would be such a loss for humanity. And we need people and organizations that put up the fight against the Googles of this world.