Mozilla Was Ruined Like Sirius Open Source Was Ruined - From the Top Down
The article "The End" was published by Craig Cook 3 days ago. It got published to explain what happened to Mozilla - a story by someone who joined the company in 2011 - the same year I joined Sirius Open Source. As I explained a lot of times (articles and long videos in 2022/23), in 2019 there was a sharp shift - ranging from legality issues to mismanagement. Many colleagues left, some of them in quiet rage/protest (they told me about it only years later). We lost key people - critical both to the company and to its biggest clients (such as public sector clients). I too considered leaving and spoke to my parents about it in search of advice. Then COVID-19 happened and I was just grateful that I worked 100% from home so the pandemic had little impact on my daily routines and it took COVID-19 almost 4 years to catch my wife and I (we both got it in September 2023, at long last).
The story from a Mozilla insider sounds familiar: "Some time in 2020, for the first time since joining, I started to seriously consider leaving Mozilla. I wasn’t quite ready to make that move at the time, but the seed had been planted and continued to grow for the next few years. I didn’t like the direction the company was heading, and the marketing department was especially dysfunctional and corrosive during this period. Recent crops of executive leadership had become increasingly detached from the Mozilla mission and the open source community. They apparently sought to compete with bigger tech companies by running Mozilla exactly like one of them."
In 2019 Sirius (the employer my wife and I had) was trying to impose proprietary software on us and outsourced a lot of things to Google, not just discarded its own equipment to use AWS instead. It was a very unpleasant period to many of us at the company (colleagues complained about patronising, lying management). The gaslighting even caused some colleagues to have health issues, which manifested both mentally and physically. One of them sued the company last year.
If Mozilla went through the same thing Sirius went through, then the company is now "dead man walking" or "zombie". That's what Sirius is in 2026.
Mozilla will never return to its Free software roots. It'll die inside Microsoft GitHub and nothing of value will be left of it. █
Image source: The End: Focal Curve