> Mitchell Baker did not leave the gravy train by stepping down as CEO, she merely moved to a different seat on the gravy train - chair of the Mozilla Foundation
Mitchell has not been a member of the Mozilla Foundation or Mozilla Corporation boards since February 2025.
Bugzilla is a Mozilla product so you’d hope they’d use it themselves (it’s often referred to as “dogfooding”). But Jira is everywhere so I’m sure some project managers argued that it was needed.
And once you have Jira then the same people push for Confluence too. But MediaWiki was the de facto standard before everyone jumped on proprietary solutions like Confluence and Notion. In fact I seem to recall that very early versions of Confluence was just a 3rd party Wiki that Atlassian bought. Or at least there was a Java-based Wiki in their early portfolio.
You also have to bear in mind that organising docs is an endless and thankless job which nobody wants to do. So these things tend to multiply like vermin once someone starts creating docs on another platform. One startup I worked for somehow managed to have stuff scattered between Confluence, Notion and Google Docs despite only employing 50 people. It was crazy.
Another client I recently worked for had Sharepoint, Notion and Confluence as their official tools for documentation.
As for IRC and Slack, every company I’ve worked at in the last 5 years had two of either MS Teams, Zoom or Slack. Literally every company. And that’s in addition to email. Go back further and there was Skype, WebEx, and so on and so forth too.
It’s almost a meme these days to hear the sentence “how would you prefer to be contacted” because so many solutions are competing against each other with overlapping functionality.
Then you have developer-focused tools like GitHub with their own docs and issue tracking too
At this point in time, it’s easier to just accept that each org is going to end up with multiple overlapping solutions because you’ll get new people join the team and they’ll want to use their preferred tool because that’s what they’re productive in and so the spiral continues.
So if Mozilla managed to keep the options down to just 2 for each product category, then I’d say they were doing better than most other organisations.
Bugzilla isn't so much a Mozilla product as something that was home grown at Netscape because there wasn't much else at the time, and they just kept using due to inertia. Though as a developer I'd still prefer that over Jira, but that's probably because I don't really need any reporting functionality.
I've used (and customized) Bugzilla, used Google Buganizer extensively, used Jira for a year and a half, and also built an internal system consisting of a bugtracker + requirements manager + sprint planner + customer management system + manual test tracking tool + knowledge base.
Bugzilla was fine to hack a few extra fields into, but I wouldn't want to build anything around it. Buganizer was actually pretty nice, but suffered from too many competing tools built around it, most of which were just somebody's 20% project, so they kept getting abandoned. Jira wouldn't be so bad if it weren't so slow and annoying to use; only our TPM can keep track of how everything is set up.
The internal system I built was very specialized to our use-cases; it started out as a simple task list and eventually grew into a huge beast. By far the worst part of the system was the manual-test-management system, but that was just a mess due to its very nature. We were able to be very efficient with some of the custom functionality we made.
The problem with that is all nodes stop-start is not a partition!
A partition is when some nodes can’t reach other nodes.
Zookeeper instead has an issue where it does try to restart but the timeout (why?!) is too short, something like 30 seconds. If the majority of your nodes don’t all start within a certain time window the whole cluster stays down until someone manually intervenes.
I discovered this fun feature when keeping non-prod systems off to save money in the cloud.
It also has an impact when making certain big bang changes in production.
Getting into SDRs and ham radio is what brought me back to Windows after running Linux on all my personal computers for more then a decade. For whatever reasons, there's a lot of radio-related software that targets Windows primarily or exclusively.
> This includes major growth in our Boards, with 40% new Board members since we began our efforts to evolve and grow back in 2022. We’ve also been bringing in new executive talent, including a new MoFo Executive Director and a Managing Partner for Mozilla Ventures. By the end of the year, we hope to have new, permanent CEOs for both MoCo and Mozilla.ai... With these changes, Mitchell Baker ends her tenure as Chair and a member of Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation boards.
It's good to know they have brought in new talents.
Note that Mozilla Corporations, Mozilla Ventures, and Mozilla.ai mentioned in the articles are all subsidiaries of Mozilla Foundation. If there are issues with the subsidaries' leadership, they could be easily removed by the foundation. If there are issue with Mozilla foundation's leadership then, according to the bylaws, it's not possible for the foundation's board to be removed unless they self remove.
Section 3.3 Election Of Directors, Term. All directors of the Foundation shall be
elected annually by the Board of Directors and shall hold office until their respective successors are elected and have qualified, or until their death, resignation or removal.
Section 3.5 Removal. Any director may be removed from office, with or without cause, by the vote of a majority of the other directors then in office.
>Section 3.3 Election Of Directors, Term. All directors of the Foundation shall be elected annually by the Board of Directors and shall hold office until their respective successors are elected and have qualified, or until their death, resignation or removal.
The board of directors elects themselves? That is dumb
I'm not sure how you're getting that from a post that explicitly says Mitchell isn't on either board any more.
To help highlight where there are changes and where there is continuity at the top level, here's a table of who was the MoCo CEO, MoCo and MoFo Board Chairs, MoFO President, and MoFo ED over time for the last ten years.
>I'm not sure how you're getting that from a post that explicitly says Mitchell isn't on either board any more.
Ousted doesn't equate to making some changes then walking away in my mind.
It doesn't sound like she was in-amicably forced out over results or the like.
I remember her expanding the number of positions on the board (and the often discussed compensation) not too long (relatively) before they had some rounds of firings. I remember being confused why one or both of the ones that joined said board(it's been a while) seemed...completely unrelated to both Mozilla or it's field of expertise or so.
Wow, I read your informative link. Where are these jobs? I went through a round of interviews last year for Sr. positions, across a number of locations in the U.S., and quite frankly, the average salary for the positions interviewed for was $80k less than most of those in the list, and $230k less than the SWE manager in the list.
The page lists the locations, and the businesses, where these jobs are placed. Unless you live on the coast (or end up in Denver/Austin), you're going to have a harder time reaching these salary numbers.
From my past experience, I can say that Google Cloud services (e.g load balancers) by default blocked traffic from ITAR sanctioned countries. Not just blocking people in those countries from becoming customers of GCP, but blocking them from accessing content hosted on GCP.
I didn't know how that situation had evolved since I last used GCP.
The US used to have "ship mail" options for sending international by boat. Not sure if there was even more discounts for media, and/or if it's still offered.
Mitchell has not been a member of the Mozilla Foundation or Mozilla Corporation boards since February 2025.
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-leadership-growt...