Lunduke

Like I said I don't think she should have the job. But clarity is important and getting the facts right is important. (I also think the CEO comp is a bit of a sideshow, she was working for way below market before she got the increases, but of course, the right thing to do was not to give a non-performing CEO a raise, it was to fire her and hire someone who would perform and pay them market.)

Mozilla's very clearly a case where politics won over engineering. This is true in a very literal and unambiguous way: Former CEO Brendan Eich, an engineer, was fired for his controversial political beliefs (he didn't like gay marriage). He was then replaced by a non-engineer: a lawyer who proceeded to funnel money away from engineering and toward left wing political groups.

That's what a triumph of politics over engineering looks like.

This is all documented in their public finances. Lunduke did a recent article on it: https://lunduke.locals.com/post/4387539/firefox-money-investigating-the-bizarre-finances-of-mozilla (now watch the political activists come out of the woodwork because I've dared to invoke an "alt right" guy's name, and do their best to drown out the point about how Mozilla keeps cutting their engineering budget).

Bottom line, politics won, engineering lost, Firefox is in freefall, and the fate of the open web is in jeopardy because of it.

All I'm saying is let's be clear and specific about what went down here. The problem runs much deeper than Mitchell's pay.

This outlines 3 separate lawsuits against IBM over this: https://lunduke.locals.com/post/6465642/3-anti-white-discrimination-lawsuits-pending-against-ibm-red-hat

Other companies I can think of are Google and Microsoft. Many huge open-source projects have openly promoted specific racial outcomes. I might dig up links later but if you actually care about this stuff, Lunduke is a great source of references.

>Every single one of these policies that I've seen over the last 20 years, including my role as a hiring manager in my past career, were aimed at leveling the playing field and providing equal opportunities to people who aren't in the majority.

That is how it's sold, but in practice it means you have to turn down perfectly good white people (especially white men) to get arbitrary demographic outcomes. If 13% of the population is black and almost none of them study engineering, you won't be able to get 13% representation without passing up on better white candidates. The same can be said about women and other minorities. Different demographics have different preferences and that is reflected in what they study and how hard they work at it. Yet we are supposed to think there is something nefarious if there is even a minor discrepancy in outcomes. Give me a break. This isn't the 1950s. Nobody would risk discriminating against a minority because it could cause a lawsuit. But discrimination against whites and men is not treated the same way, even when it can be proved…

750 people is a total number. Number of people involved into developing Firefox is way less.

$200 millions are the aggregated expenses of ALL software 'development' efforts of Mozilla Corporation like VPN, Relay, Pocket, mozilla.social, etc. And there are a lot of interesting expenses which are billed as development. According to Lunduke (1) who dived into the details a bit, there are many very questionnable expenses which are not related to Firefox development.

So the questions is still very open, how much does Firefox development actually costs? Developing Thunderbird costed around $2 millions in 2021 (2).

1 - https://lunduke.locals.com/post/4387539/firefox-money-investigating-the-bizarre-finances-of-mozilla 2 - https://blog.thunderbird.net/2023/05/thunderbird-is-thriving-our-2022-financial-report/

It's curious and pleasant to see some people taking a stance on this issue, by exploring other venues apart from YouTube.

For example, Luke Smith hosts many of his videos over on Odysee nowadays: https://odysee.com/$/invite/@Luke:7

Also, Bryan Lunduke also moved over to Locals and has generally expressed that it's a more pleasant community: https://lunduke.locals.com/

Of course, i don't doubt that it's akin to financial suicide for anyone who relies on YouTube as their main source of income, but if nothing else, it's nice to see people standing up for their principles, instead of selling out and trying to build their platform on another site that can end their presence at will.

I guess only time will show whether there ever will be any financially feasible alternatives to YouTube, though.

Bryan Lunduke has an article about this myth, actually!

https://lunduke.locals.com/post/4037306/myth-windows-3-1-was-just-a-shell-on-top-of-dos

It’s backed up by another Old New Thing article at https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20100517-00/?p=14013

The TL;DR is that Windows 3.1 effectively replaced DOS and acted as a hypervisor for it, while drivers could be written for Windows (and many were) or DOS (and presumably many more of those were actually distributed). The latter category was run in hypervised DOS and the results bridged to Windows callers.

(Edited after submission for accuracy and to add the Old New Thing link.)

You can try it for yourself. Download SyncTerm and connect to House of Lunduke BBS. I mostly logged in to my local BBS to play door games like Legend of the Red Dragon and The Pit. 100% of the money I earned from my high school job went to paying the insane phone bill I'd rack up calling boards all over the country looking for files. The best was Rusty n Edie's BBS.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/syncterm/

https://lunduke.locals.com/post/264191/the-house-of-lunduke-bbs-is-back-on-line

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rusty_n_Edie%27s_BBS