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?
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.
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.
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?
(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.
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.
It’s sad. When I discovered the Linux Action Show back in 2006 or 2007, he seemed like a fun and interesting person. But it’s amazing how quickly that perception proved false. And his Twitter feed in 2020 was a dumpster fire.
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.
Which is so fascinating given the involvement of people like Brendan Eich, and also descending from noted Libertarian and capitalist Marc Andreesen
I mean, the neolib Californian ideals of the internet was anarchist so always anti-gov but not anti-corporate. That’s how you end up with compromise points in the Mozilla manifesto like this:
Commercial involvement in the development of the internet brings many benefits; a balance between commercial profit and public benefit is critical.
Worth mentioning that Eich came from the Netscape days and was highly influential on a technical level.
Oh yeah for sure. Foundational on the browser, and with developing JavaScript. But a shit person. I guess the Prop8 business was finally a bridge too far, PR-wise
Disregard everything below. I mistook the comment about neo-liberalism for a quote from this guy.
I’m leaving the text up for context, but this criticism is misdirected.
==
It says everything you need to know that he (I suspect deliberately) confuses neo-liberal for left-wing ideology.
Neo-liberal = capitalist with a smoking jacket and a fancy degree on the wall.
SV is absolute rife with anarcho-capitalist ideology. I can only dream of a version of SV that actually carries some measure of economically liberal ideology.
My guess is this guy is confusing social liberalism with economic liberalism. But, of course, that’s the entire right wing schtick these days.
I might be confused but Lunduke doesn’t mention neoliberalism or left-wing ideology in that article - I did.
Of course neoliberalism is to the right of what I’d consider to be left-wing and it works very much hand in hand with conservatism but it’s usually socially liberal. I think Mozilla definitely fits a weird bill, it’s hard to pinpoint because the principles are largely about individual rights yet the addendum definitely feels atleast socially liberal. That said, it seems most of the causes they support are left-wing.
To do that they need to make sure they have adequate funding and make sure they don’t incur some huge financial liabilities somehow. The Internet Archive failed at that last part when they decided to lend out ebooks that are under copyright without many limits (and potentially with their Great 78 Project regarding music as well).
I wrote that then deleted it cause I wasn’t sure how you address it internationally. Where PBS is broadcast in the USA, the internet is open to the world.
But, you’re right! It should be publicly funded. I’d have no problem with my tax dollars going towards that.
True, I don’t know how this would work for international stuff, but this is human knowledge and history, it’s something we should be archiving and not tossing to the wind.
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.
For me it’s not boot licking but recognizing that IA made a huge unforced error that may cost us all not just that digital lending program but stuff like the Wayback Machine and all the other good projects the IA runs.
Exactly. Less bootlickering and more “Leopards Ate My Face” material. This was heavily forseable. If they did this as a protest against copyright and announced it from the start, it would be one thing. But this was just incompetence and ignorance at a level that will likely ruin them.
How is licking the boots of the copyright office helping the people? I don’t give the first fuck about individuals trying to hoard up IP anymore; IP hoarding-- and the very concept of IP in the first place-- is fuckin bullshit, fuck 'em if they got a problem with that take. We already have to pay through the nose for too much else in society, so why are you licking copyright-uplifting boots?
Authors have the right to be compensated for their work. There are many things that are wrong with current copyright, but denying artists compensation for their work is not the way.
Wouldn’t you also be mad if your salary was denied?
I live every day of my life under a regime that steals my wages, calls it ‘profit’, and then in my face, gets away with pocketing it, with STEALING IT; that shit is ALREADY happening. At this point, it’d just even the playing field. If you want me to have solidarity with my fellow worker, you cannot have it both ways where you expect me to uplift the tools of capitalist theft too. Fuck out of my face if all you have is platitudes to capital.
And your attempted redress is bootlicking the mechanics by which capitalists steal from all of us. Sinclair was right; it really is impossible to get you people to understand shit when your material conditions are dependent on your not. And then you just smug around like you said some prosaic shit I am so sick of y’all.
With FF being one of the last bastions of actual web-freedom on the internet, it wouldn’t surprise me for people to start digging for things in an effort to get rid of them once and for all. Especially with Google’s new attempt at web-DRM.
Not many browsers left that aren’t chromium/webkit based. Feels like it’s only a matter of time before Google succeeds where Microsoft failed back in the early 00’s…
For those of us that remember IE6, this isn’t a fairy tale no matter what Mozilla says. We need a non-majority web browser or we’re going to pay (again).
In a way I agree with you, but it’s kind of well known that Mozilla depends a lot on Google from earning money. So I’m not sure that if Google pushes the DRM project, Mozilla will bite the hand that feeds it.
But the good thing is that we will probably see that very soon :)
Uhm, aren’t all questions raised in that text completely on point?
I’m as far left as it gets but none of these expenses make any sense to me. The CEO pay is bonkers. Wtf are they doing? Why does the CEO deserve to basically collect the entirety of donations for… basically just extending a cash cow deal with Google?
I don’t give a damn if the author is on the right but so far this looks sus as fuck.
Firefox being as good and fast as it is probably more an accomplishment of individual teams inspite of company leadership and that should be called out.
Can’t sell yourself as the underdog if you’re got almost half a billion in assets.
Thanks for sharing your knowledge and providing new data points instead of just coming up with reasons to assume my questions had malintent. Appreciated!
All good. I have no idea about these taxforms, but since the compensation didn't show up on the pro-republica form analysis but is visible in the 990 form from mozilla itself, I went and tried to find out what's going on. No idea if I am right though. Don't know US taxlaws at all.
I am not a fan of high compensation overall on the C-Level. What I'm worried about most with these types of companies is being destroyed from within. That's generally heralded by bringing in high cost outside consultancy firms.
I don't see that yet on their balance sheet. No idea what Mozilla Corp. does, but the Mozilla Foundation is still doing things I am aligned with.
But as with all things, constant vigilence is key. More and more it feels like there's barely anywhere left to invest time or money in. Fediverse is truly a ray of sunshine at the moment. But I wonder how long that'll last until it's been subverted by commercial interests.
A CEO that brings lots of money and consistently gets to lower the share of your flagship browser seems like a good candidate to destroyed from within. How can Mozilla stay independent when most of their money comes from these 'royalties' and most of it is from Google? We're talking hundreds of millions agains 7 mil in donations that barely pay for the CEO. How are they gonna push back against this webDRM shit google is trying to pull (or any other thing)?
I feel the same as you, I've been using Mozilla/Firefox since forever, because I felt they were doing things I'm aligned with. But I don't know anymore. I don't know if they are doing it or they have started to become just muppet opposition.
Enshittification spreads fast, once it takes roots its to late. But it sure seems like, lately, it's an all out attack on any freedom left on the internet
If Google is successful with their garbage webDRM, I feel we might actually get a sort of reset back to the early 2000s internet for those that care to get out of that corporate hell hole the "internet" has become.
And thanks to the Fediverse we might not even need something like Google ever again. But then they'll start attacking the infrastructure itself. Make it prohibitively expensive to run such instances, etc. Attack them with content that gets instances banned, etc.
No matter where one looks, it feels it's an all out war on any minor comfort or freedom left to the non-ultra-rich-ultra-connected.
So. As for Firefox. What's a good alternative? I'm very fond of the container thing they got going, but everything else can be replaced, I believe.
Agreed. The only official Mozilla response to Google’s WebDRM that I’ve seen was on the git page where the Firefox engineer raised the concern. Mozilla’s Google liaison shot down the statement opposing WebDRM as “premature” since it is currently “only a proposal” (by a working group of Google engineers).
Hell, when they were Netscape they lost to IE. IE became the default that it did because Netscape Navigator would take 5 minutes to boot up, and would load pages slower too.
You're merging two different events into one.
I'm talking about the rise of IE. When it was an outright better browser. You're talking about events that happened when it was at its peak popularity, but was an outright outdated browser, coincidentally just when Chrome was ramping up.
Just like Firefox is now over Chrome.
Except now, with Google doing things MS never even dreamed of, there isn't whisper of any investigation or sanctions from the EU.
Copyright is no longer functioning properly, if the Internet Archive cannot survive under it.
IP holders are pushing their luck, lately.
Edit: Lately it feels like everyone is underestimating the power of librarians. Anyone working against librarians is on the wrong side of whatever they’re on about.
“Fuck you, I’m doing library stuff.” should be a valid legal defense.
You should probably read the article. The case is only about how the Archive did more than just library stuff—they made a ton of copies and gave them out for free, then argued that the cost of maintenance somehow made that act legal.
Internet archive turned themselves into an ebook piracy site rather than a digital library. They distributed unlimited copies of books for free. And then Internet Archive defended it with something in the lines of:
It costs a lot of money to make, and distribute, digital copies of books without the permission of the copyright holder... therefore it should be legal for The Internet Archive to do it.
That’s a really terrible misrepresentation of what happened.You should probably investigate this matter more. This article is supremely biased and basically outright wrong.
The quote you gave, for example, is an almost cartoonist level of distortion of the facts.
[IA] professes to perform the traditional function of a library by lending only limited numbers of these works at a time through “Controlled Digital Lending,” … CDL’s central tenet, according to a September 2018 Statement and White Paper by a group of librarians, is that an entity that owns a physical book can scan that book and “circulate [the] digitized title in place of [the] physical one in a controlled manner.” … CDL’s most critical component is a one-to-one “owned to loaned ratio.” Id. Thus, a library or organization that practices CDL will seek to “only loan simultaneously the number of copies that it has legitimately acquired.”
…
Judging itself “uniquely positioned to be able to address this problem quickly and efficiently,” on March 24, 2020, IA launched what it called the National Emergency Library (“NEL”), intending it to “run through June 30, 2020, or the end of the US national emergency, whichever is later.” … During the NEL, IA lifted the technical controls enforcing its one-to-one owned-to-loaned ratio and allowed up to ten thousand patrons at a time to borrow each ebook on the Website.
[…]
The Publishers have established a prima facie case of copyright infringement.
First, the Publishers hold exclusive publishing rights in the Works in Suit …
Second, IA copied the entire Works in Suit without the Publishers’ permission. Specifically, IA does not dispute that it violated the Publishers’ reproduction rights, by creating copies of the Works in Suit … ; the Publishers’ rights to prepare derivative works, by “recasting” the Publishers’ print books into ebooks …; the Publishers’ public performance rights, through the “read aloud” function on IA’s Website …; and the publishers’ display rights, by showing the Works in Suit to users through IA’s in-browser viewer
Bold added.
It’s pretty much not in dispute that Internet Archive distributed the copyrighted works of the publishers without permission, outside of what even a traditional library lending system would allow.
Internet Archive’s other projects like the Wayback Machine may be good but how they handled their digital lending of books during the pandemic was not. They removed the limit on the number of people that can borrow a book at a time, thus taking away any resemblance to traditional physical lending. You can argue that copyright laws are bad and should be changed (and I’d agree) but that doesn’t change the facts of what happened under the current law.
I’ve never seen someone self-report a failure of Amerikan History like this before. You must’ve missed THE ENTIRE Civil Rights Movement segment, or just tuned it out because it made you or someone close to you uncomfy to think about-- like I’ve asked another person in this thread, what the fuck do you think CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE means???
Laws can very well be wrong, in a moral sense, and quite a few of them still in existence today are, but trying to argue that in court is usually a bad idea.
They should. But you can’t exactly be surprised if you get in trouble because you broke the law, no matter how stupid you think that law is.
I think it’s stupid that you can’t always turn right on a red light. Plenty of people would agree. I’ll get a ticket if I do it anyway, and it’ll be my own fault.
Libraries also make a ton of copies and give them out for free.
This is just wrong.
If a library has purchased two copies of a piece of digital media - an ebook, for example - which patrons can check out online, only two people can have it checked out at once, and when the checkout period expires, the content is no longer available to the patron. Now a copy is freed up for the next person to check out.
No, they don’t. If you’re referring to their ebook selections, they pay for a specific number of licenses to an ebook, then only allow a specific number of patrons to check those ebooks out at any given time. They do this using DRM, to ensure that patrons have their access removed when their checkout period is up. Because refusal to comply would run them afoul of copyright laws and their ebook licensing.
Libraries also make a ton of copies and give them out for free.
No, they don’t. If you’re referring to their ebook selections, they pay for a specific number of licenses to an ebook, then only allow a specific number of patrons to check those ebooks out at any given time. They do this using DRM, to ensure that patrons have their access removed when their checkout period is up. Because refusal to comply would run them afoul of copyright laws and their ebook licensing.
If the law doesn’t maintain a carve-out for librarians to do their work; then the law is a shit law, and it needs to be broken.
No carve out is needed, because DRM allows libraries to stay within the bounds of their license agreements. The Internet Archive refused to follow industry standards for ebook licensing, because they aren’t a library.
There’s an older legal principle in play here: anyone trying to shut down libraries needs to fuck right off.
While I agree with the idea, the internet archive isn’t a library. It was masquerading as a library to try and avoid lawsuits, but did a piss-poor job of it because they flew in the face of the licensing agreements and copyright laws that legal libraries are bound by.
I love the Internet Archive as a resource. I use it once or twice a week. But pretty much everyone who heard about their ebook scheme agreed it was an awful idea. They painted a giant legal target on their backs, and now they’re pitching a fit because the book publishers called them on it.
The Internet Archive refused to follow industry standards for ebook licensing, because they aren’t a library.
It’s worse than that. They did use “Controlled Digital Lending” to limit the number of people who can access a book at one time to something resembling the number of physical books that they had. And then they turned that restriction off because of the pandemic. There is no pandemic exception to copyright laws, even if that would make sense from a public health perspective to prevent people from having unnecessary contact at libraries. They screwed themselves and I can only hope that the Wayback Machine archives get a home somewhere else if they do go under.
But pretty much everyone who heard about their ebook scheme agreed it was an awful idea.
That’s a false consensus in my opinion. Assuming ‘everyone’ agrees, will rarely ever be correct.
You are correct in saying that IA is not a library. In my opinion it should be treated as one, if not better. it provides free knowledge, much like a library, but unlike a library you do not have to give back because of the ability to produce a nearly infinite amount digitally.
the point of lending has become useless for anything that can be digitized. i think copyrighting needs to end. creating and not sharing “intellectual property” is an attack on humanity. the arguments in support of copywriting are all rooted in the same concept that copywriting itself is mostly based on: greed. before it was a resources issue as well. it still is but with diminishing requirements that should and could be trivial in this digital world we have now.
Libraries buy either physical books, or licenses to ebooks, and can only lend out as many of them as they own at a time. IA skirted the line by lending out self-digitized versions based on how many physical books they had, which was a grey area, but technically maybe not illegal.
They then disabled that lending limitation.
There’s really nobody who would argue that taking a CD, ripping it to MP3s, and providing those for unlimited download is anything except piracy, and the people suing IA are claiming same goes for books. And it is rather hard to find a compelling legal reason why it isn’t.
Loads of people don’t consider copying something and giving it to someone else as piracy. Only I’m very recent time has this been met with violence from well funded organizations.
If buying isn’t owning, pirating isn’t stealing. Just another branch of the habitually pocket-ran and stolen-from finally adopting that stance, from where I sit.
Expanding piracy, a pretty brutal form of robbery, to include ignoring digital media copyrights only really makes sense if you’re trying to vilify nonviolent criminals. I haven’t heard good arguments for more than 5-10 year copyrights.
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.
I don’t really care if someone fights in both directions if their points are valid. Misgendering or not, mozilla has had some troubling developments internally and it’s good people shed light on it.
Shedding light with bias is the whole problem with media in the current landscape. They’re never done objectively. All it does is provide a feedback loop within the echo chamber, further dividing people with the result of “see, I told you the other side is bad.” Motivations matter. Lunduke has, in the past, proven where his motivations are. If he actually reported on all political, economic, technological goings-on in an objective manner, given he is a pretty good communicator, then I’d withdraw my opposition to him. Until such time, I keep to my opinion of him and have no interest in his articles. I can form my own opinion of Mozilla independent of what Lunduke or FOX News or MSNBC tries to get me to ingest.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I read through it and I don’t know what the issue is?
There seems to be an issue with Mozilla supporting diversity and inclusion. Also he has an issue with them having enough money to run the business. I.e. not living paycheck to paycheck.
They really fucked up and it’s so heartwrenching watching it all happen. I was following the story since it started and I just can’t believe they allowed anyone to download copyrighted books without a limit in 2020, without asking anyone for permission or whether it’s legally viable. Everyone knew they were losing this, and they gave publishers a convincing reason to sue them. by crossing the “legally grey” area to literal piracy.
FWIW, OpenLibrary is a good source of book metadata at least, even if it fails its goal of letting people read books on it.
Unlimited free distribution of copyrighted media is something I’m all for, but that’s a really tall order in terms of political capital for getting the law changed, a few protests aren’t going to do it, basically every elected official would strongly oppose it, you’d have to replace them all first.
Full access to currently published copyrighted books was way too much. Even Google just showed snippets or showed abandonware books. They really should have settled.
First time encountering one! I’m almost impressed how you can write about something as technical as Linux in the writing style and cadence of shady medical supplement ads for the elderly, including bolded accusatory questions and poorly-supported italic statements placed mid-sentence.
lunduke.locals.com
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