Is this normal for wiki pages on people?
A few days ago JWZ had a great take on where Mozilla is today: https://www.jwz.org/blog/2024/06/mozillas-original-sin/
http://home.mcom.com/mozilla.org/1998-03-25/party/
That party was a huge milestone in retrospect. It was the day FOSS went mainstream. Shortly thereafter, the dot-com boom ended and the 90s tech parameters got upended and scrambled.
At some point he did write why he bought the club, he was moaning about the state of night life in SF, and a friend said something like "Why don't you do something about it?"... so he did.
Edit: found it: https://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/1998-1999.html
IIRC, he decided a long time ago that he'd had enough of crazy startup life, and bought a nightclub, and somehow kept a nightclub going all that time.
It was spending the fucking money.
Foundations like some cancer groups and the arts have an endowment. Each year they build up their war chest by seeking new funding, but a lot of the money they spend each year is the interest payments on their giant piles of cash. Mozilla could have run in perpetuity on the money Google gave them, but instead they decided to branch out into boondoggles and dipping their hands into the cookie jar.
I could have gotten in on the third big round of hiring at Amazon, but I told my friend I’d rather work until retirement than get rich writing Perl code. People are allowed to have standards, and those standards are allowed to keep you from taking money you don’t feel good about.
If it wasn’t then we would all be sex workers. Most pay for the least work.
Why people might want to adjust the `Referer` behavior of the browser is that it leaks more information than you might think.
As for his personality, I get the impression he was always like that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_referer
Etymology
The misspelling of referrer was introduced in the original proposal by computer scientist Phillip Hallam-Baker to incorporate the "Referer" header field into the HTTP specification.[7][8] The misspelling was set in stone by the time (May 1996) of its incorporation into the Request for Comments standards document RFC 1945[9] (which 'reflects common usage of the protocol referred to as "HTTP/1.0"' at that time); document co-author Roy Fielding remarked in March 1995 that "neither one (referer or referrer) is understood by" the standard Unix spell checker of the period.[10] "Referer" has since become a widely used spelling in the industry when discussing HTTP referrers; usage of the misspelling is not universal, though, as the correct spelling "referrer" is used in some web specifications such as the Referrer-Policy HTTP header or the Document Object Model.[3]
On the other hand, the Google money accounted for around 85% of their income over the years, so if they hadn't been spending it they would have been operating on around 20% of the income for many years while the endowment grew, and likely would not have been able to keep up with competing browsers.
Also, for as much crap as she gets, Mitchell Baker invested over 20% of the Google money Mozilla received during her tenure, far more than was invested by prior CEOs. And before anyone brings it up, all that "woke activist" spending comes from donations, not Google money, which the IRS prohibits them from spending on browser development.
My reading is that jwz thinks there was a possible future where DRM is dropped because it's as useless & impractical to enforce as cryptography export restrictions had been. Mozilla could have contributed to this future by not implementing DRM, but instead supported the outcome we got: DRM is ubiquitous, browsers that don't support it are disadvantaged significantly, and an anti-DRM streaming service (similar to GOG) no longer has any real advantage over DRM-enabled services.
It is possible that no DRM in Mozilla would have resulted in the same outcome we arrived at - Mozilla gave in, so we'll never know. But what does Mozilla even exist for if it's unwilling to stick to its principles?
If Mozilla refused to implement DRM in Firefox, Netflix would have just said “you need Silverlight, Chrome, or the native Netflix app to watch movies”, plain and simple.
It's not like FF is a major browser that needs DRM to compete against Edge/Chrome. Its market share is in the single digits regardless.
If DRM weren't added to Mozilla and Firefox, then they would have continued to languish in marketshare on Windows/Mac and only would have hurt open source users on Linux/FreeBSD/etc.
The long-term gains of Firefox gaining marketshare (shaking up the IE monopoly and allowing web technologies to break stagnation) were worth the short term loss of "principals" on DRM. At least, IMO.