It's odd a company of the size of GM cannot roll their own gas station and toad construction network.

What's the purpose of the Mozilla organisation? Is it in creating a analytics platform? Mind that value of GA comes from all the info they have and thus can estimate age, gender, social things, ... of users etc. Building an comparable service is a notable effort with little synergies to what Mozilla does. (Whereas Google can combine with information from other businesses)

I’m a Firefox user but let’s face it, Mozilla doesn’t have to make their own — there are plenty of open-source, self-hostable analytics solutions.

(Also the “toad construction network” made me laugh)

The question is: Why does Mozilla need analytics at all? Sure, counting downloads is good, but what other useful information are they pulling out of analytics?

I think he meant roll as in created their own solution whether it was from open source alternatives or not. The point being - why link what most would expect to be private stats to google, from a web browser, the one thing that perhaps should be a stand alone entity. I get the impression maybe you work for firefox as I find it hard to understand someone who would think otherwise on hackernews - but hey all sorts here am I right?

Maybe it's a condition of their funding deals with Google?

Ah I had no idea, well that explains what happened I guess.