
Mozilla Discloses Past Relationships with Facebook - rebelwebmaster
https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2018/06/11/our-past-work-with-facebook/
======
mankash666
A politico/Frontline style investigative documentary needs to be happen on the
inner workings of Mozilla. Their financial reports are full of red flags
(~$130M on marketing and operations in 2016 consutituting ~33% of
expenses!!!).

Their posturing is much too similar to politicians - 'we work for you the
people's good', and any and all criticism squashed away swiftly under the
guise of moral superiority.

~~~
bzbarsky
Where did you get this 130M number? I see $47 million on marketing in
[https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2016/2016_Mozilla_Au...](https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2016/2016_Mozilla_Audited_Financial_Statement.pdf)
and $60 million on "General and administrative".

How much marketing spend do you think Google had on Chrome in 2016?

How much should office space for the number of people Mozilla has cost, in
your opinion?

[Disclosure: I work for Mozilla, on Firefox, not in marketing.]

~~~
mankash666
60+47 = 127, that I rounded up to ~130, for marketing and _operations_.

How much did Atlassian spend in marketing, or GitLab? Almost nothing (by
design). How much does GitLab spend on office space? Almost $0 as they choose
to do wisely with their money than feed an overpriced San Francisco real
estate market.

Indeed these are extreme examples, but I hope you realise 33% of expenses on
non-core activities isn't typically tolerated in for profits. It certainly
shouldn't be the norm for a non profit.

Mozilla's US compensation for devs averages out to ~$137K/year. Are you
telling me that Mozilla is justified in staying in the most expensive zip code
(for operations) by choice, and choosing to underpay it's developers by
design? I can keep going, but the numbers don't compute, they're fishy

~~~
bzbarsky
60 + 47 = 107, not 127.

> How much did Atlassian spend in marketing, or GitLab?

Are they competing with companies that are spending hundreds of millions of
dollars a years on marketing the competing product?

> but I hope you realise 33% of expenses on non-core activities > isn't
> typically tolerated in for profits

According to [https://vtldesign.com/digital-marketing/content-marketing-
st...](https://vtldesign.com/digital-marketing/content-marketing-
strategy/percent-of-revenue-spent-on-marketing-sales/) Microsoft spends 18% of
_revenue_ on marketing/sales. Oracle, 20%. Twitter, 44%. Salesforce, 53%.
Apple, 7%.

Mozilla spent $47 million out of $520 million in revenue on marketing. That's
9%. More than Apple, less than Microsoft.

Do you know what's in the "General and administrative" bucket? I don't know
exactly what would go in there, but maybe it would.

> Mozilla's US compensation for devs averages out to ~$137K/year.

Where did you get this number, pray tell me? Dividing Mozilla's "Software
development" number from the financial statement by the estimated total number
of employees gives me significantly larger numbers than that, and not all
those employees are in the US.

> Are you telling me that Mozilla is justified in staying in the most
> expensive zip code (for operations)

Mozilla has multiple office locations, in different places which are variously
expensive or not, plus a number of remote workers.

> and choosing to underpay it's developers by design

I would like to see some evidence for this claim, please, if you expect me to
treat this as anything other than an attempt to troll me.

------
ptx
So they say that users could import their Facebook contacts onto their Firefox
OS phones and that information wasn't shared with Mozilla, but what about the
"adaptive app search"[1] on Firefox OS? That was implemented by querying a
third-party service, "Everything.me", run by a different company.

Did that service get access to contacts? (Aside from the implicit access by
way of your contact searches from the system search bar presumably being sent
to them as app searches.)

[1]
[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=H9zwf0VMVDI](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=H9zwf0VMVDI)

------
hajile
Needed the access for Firefox OS APIs. Nothing to see here.

~~~
cityzen
“In fact, in one case, our engineers noticed the overly broad access and
requested that Facebook limit it.” Yes, something to see here.

~~~
hajile
An African American man shouldn't have to thank a cop for not harassing him.
Instead, police should do their job. I'm certain you don't thank every driver
that doesn't hit you either.

Likewise, companies shouldn't expect me to thank them for being responsible.
All they need to know is that being irresponsible carries consequences (eg.
all the people leaving Facebook). Facebook giving overly-broad access to
everyone under the sun is well-known (and the only reason Mozilla posted in
the first place).

