I think WoodenChair's claim is that Mozilla has been organized as a social organization, which has probably been quite good for the philanthropy side. But it doesn't seem to have been particularly good for the product side, as seen from the decline in market share and perceived quality of Firefox. At least perceived quality in the eyes of techies here on HN.

Successful retirement home for failing CxOs maybe but as company Mozilla was successful 15 years ago then managed to completely squander their market lead while eroding public trust in them by various weird partnerships (like multiple times installing 3rd party addons without consent)

> you've written more than 20 paragraphs of comments but I stopped here, because if you think this way about Mozilla, a very successful company and philanthropy, you probably are not making generalizable judgements about others

I mean yeah, if you think Mozilla has been well managed over the past two decades, then yeah we're on different planes of understanding the world.

- The only product it makes that anyone cares about, Firefox, has gone from 30% market share in 2010 to 2% market share in 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers

- It has put itself in a position where the vast majority of its funding comes from its main competitor, Google, who makes Chrome. Conflict of interest much? And now Google is being sued for that in an antitrust case. https://www.pcworld.com/article/2772034/googles-search-monop...

- Despite being a non-profit, its CEO was paid $7 million during a period of layoffs in 2023 https://www.i-programmer.info/news/86-browsers/16844-firefox...

- Mozilla was founded to support the development of an open source web browser. That's a critically important mission. Yet, it spends most of its money not on the web browser (maybe why the web browser is at 2% market share). https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2021/mozilla-fdn-202...

- It has started many other initiatives with a big splash that all fizzled (FirefoxOS, Pocket, etc.)

I don't know, doesn't sound like "a very successful company and philanthropy" as you put it. I would call it a *formerly* "very successful company and philanthropy."

Mozilla the one which:

* lost market share of its product from 30 to 2%

* spends money on fun projects and acqusitions that generate no revenue, while taking away what the users wanted (addons, extensions, customizing) since supposedly this is hard to do

* spends money on politics instead of core product

And many more

You should read a business book too. Focusing on core product (firefox) should be top priority, especially if it is the only real product that generates revenue.

Soon music will stop and there will be no money, since it got spent on everything else.