How many more times in my life am I going to have to sit and watch a non-profit board destroy a piece of software, stagnate a piece of software or fumble a market dominance position, you'd have think we'd have learnt from Mozilla that it just doesn't seem to work.
Vision, talent and accountability to success builds real change in technology, not the sort of at best navel gazing academics and at worst outright leeches who are attracted to non-profit boards.
Not to say that nonprofits are flawless, but they do seem to turn out stuff that's pretty important sometimes even when surrounded by for-profit competitors.
The specific mix of profit and non-profit motives in this particular organization is confusing though, looking at it from the outside.
A for-profit corporation has accountability to its shareholders. If you're a shareholder, you can sell your shares. If enough people are willing to sell their shares at a low enough price, someone will come long and buy a majority of the shares and take over the company, maybe liquidating it. If something egregious enough happens, you might even be able to sue the company or the officers for a breach of fiduciary duty. Either way, the way to stay employed is to make money. If you make enough money, purely money-interested people will be willing to buy the shares of those who have other interests for a high price. For-profit corporations have an incentive to be as good as possible at making money.
A not-for-profit theoretically has accountability to the board, who aren't really accountable to anyone. They can be sued, but only if they do an extremely and formally bad job. The only thing that weeds out bad non-profits is donors.
It seems like there needs to be another type of organization, that can have objectives other than making money, where market forces still cause it to do as good a job as possible at that mission.
You're saying this while the top thread on HN at the same time is how Firefox is artificially slowed down on Youtube lol. That is why they lost market share. Not because they lack the incentive to shove ads in your face, but because companies that run the internet also run Firefox's competition.
Firefox is objectivele fine. Linux is fine, openAI as a research institute would be fine. They aren't stagnant, they're being gutted or undermined by competitors that will not see them succeed.
And who looks out for all of the other stakeholders who don't own shares?
Well, in the US you can have a benefit corporation, or else certification as a "B Corp", which I just learned are different things while googling it to put a link here. Previously my impression was that "B Corp" was a legal status, but that's wrong, it's a certification by a nonprofit. In the US, a benefit corporation has a separate legal status as "a type of for-profit corporate entity whose goals include making a positive impact on society."
Both are kind of a niche thing still. I've seen a few "B Corp" logos among sustainable food companies, like King Arthur flour.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/B_Corporation_(certification...
> Wikimedia Foundation
Please look into the financials of what these organizations actually spend their money on. You're just making huge assumptions that "non-profit = good" and that view of the world will soon come crashing down when you look into those two entities.
As you read the Mozilla ones please repeat to yourself out loud "They had 32% percent of the market share in 2010", just to really drive it home.