Pay about 1000 employees and host a ton of infrastructure for a bunch of open source projects (including of course Firefox, but also things like Rust, Valgrind, Opus, etc.).
I am not talking just about projects, but about cash in the bank. Once the funding stops you should have enough funds to bridge the gap until you find the next big project. Hopefully as great as Firefox and Rust are. Kudos to Mozilla!
Yes, in principle they should be able to put away enough to operate in perpetuity (albeit on a small budget). It would be interesting to know whether it's happening, presumably the finances are public so it shouldn't be too difficult to to find out.
2.6 million per employee? And infrastructure hosting, especially just for bugtracker / source repo / CI cannot be that expensive.
At that, what are the employees doing? Rust is fantastic and important, but Opus has been pretty done for years, Daala is still DOA, isn't Xiph an independent organization?
I think you made a rather basic maths error, it's 375k per employee.
Firefox still gets an enormous amount of development effort. I think people don't notice because Chrome likely just gets an order of magnitude more.
Xiph is independent but I believe Mozilla employs all the core developers. They're currently working on doing for video codecs what Opus did for audio.
I actually think Firefox is currently seeing more development than Chrome and it's just not as noticeable, because a lot of that development goes into unearthing some of the technical debt that they have (Electrolysis for multi-processor integration, WebExtensions for a proper, stable add-on API), or is an investment into the far-reaching future (Servo).
That being said, I'm not actually that well informed about Chrome's development, so it could also be that I've simply missed some of their development plans...
As of 2014: $212 million on software development (presumably mostly salaries?), another ~$100 million on marketing/administration/etc. They appear to put away from $10 to $70 million per year from 2010-2014, and had about $140 million in investment assets (again, 2014).
But that's the foundation, not to be confused with Mozilla Corp.
I've honestly never really understood how the two are actually related and how Mozilla can be both a nonprofit and a corporation. Talking to some Mozilla employees in IRC and in person, they never seem to think too hard about this either.
> The Foundation has a wholly-owned for-profit subsidiary, Mozilla Corporation (the Corporation). The Corporation serves the non-profit, public benefit goals of its parent and the vast Mozilla community.
...
> The consolidated financial statements include the accounts of the Foundation and its wholly-owned subsidiary, the Corporation (collectively “Mozilla”). All significant intercompany accounts and transactions have been eliminated.
IIUC, receiving revenue would be more complicated if the transactions were undertaken directly with the not-for-profit foundation. Certainly many "non-profits" do receive transactional revenue, i.e. hospitals, but in that case they often have a number of subsidiaries -- for example one subsidiary actually employs the physicians, another signs funding contracts with the NSF/NIH and distributes grant revenue, a holding company owns the buildings, etc. Accounting is complicated (perhaps more accurately: "the tax code is complicated").
Corp was established to accept business contracts and pay taxes under business tax laws, rather than non-profit tax laws (the famous anecdote of IRS at one point in the early days tried to convince Mozilla don't worry about paying as non-profit). But as Mozilla continued to grow, they hired more people and formed a whole corporation where people are paid to work on Mozilla's core projects like FireFox and keeping Mozilla secured. The confusion often occurs at figuring out the outreach programs. Foundation does some outreach, but Mozilla Corps as a whole also do outreach program. For example, I think people who manage ambassadors are Mozilla Corp employees, but correct me if I am wrong. Furthermore, there are developers hired specifically to work on Foundation applications last. My info could be wrong by now...
Yeah, I don't quite understand that either. What I know is that the for-profit is a subsidiary of the non-profit, and they only have it, because non-profits have some legal restrictions which they couldn't quite work with. I think, that's for example how much cash they are allowed to have on the side.
And while I would like to understand it better for curiosity's sake, I'm personally okay with it being the way it is, on the basis that people who understand this stuff better than me don't seem to complain about it.
Like, seriously, journalists just love to report how evil the innocent-thought Mozilla is, and often even drift off into pure nonsense to do so. So, if there really was anything to be said about their for-profit side, I figure, I would have heard of it by now.
Well, Firefox's architecture is currently being completely thrown over for Electrolysis, they are heavily working on their implementation of WebExtensions, and Servo+Rust are starting to take off at the moment, too.
Other than that, Thunderbird could certainly do with a bit of cash and Firefox OS is also currently being rolled out on a few TV sets, so could certainly use some financing to fix up initial bugs.
And if they really have nothing else to finance, they often also just redistribute money to other smaller open-source projects...
I have to agree that there are ambitious projects did not turn out well (like FireFox OS, Persona and a few others) and there are ones still thriving but the community is not quite as impacting as the authors intended. There are also ones did make good impact with very little noise like django-secure got merged into Django 1.6.
Rust is probably the most notable project built by Mozilla after Firefox at this current stage.
They just gave up on Persona too soon. It was going to be an incremental change, not an overnight revolution, but I imagine they never each approached major juncture points for developers (github, stack overflow, etc) about adopting it.
I tried Persona, great concept, the adoption rate was differently very slow. I don't know if they ever reached out to large players and encourage them to adopt, but I think believe even if GitHub did, that wouldn't matter much. Mozilla did not want to keep running Persona as the sole IdP in the Persona platform, it did only to encourage development and early adoption. Even internally I don't think all sites went to Persona, but the large one differently did though. With that attitude I was fearing a major migration which could kill motivation.
"Buildbot: $15,000. Buildbot is a continuous build and integration system which has been immensely valuable to Mozilla over the past few years. Their award will be used to remove the term “slave” from all documentation, APIs and tests, and also to make improvements so Buildbot works better in the Amazon EC2 cloud."
I don't think the documentation part of that is gonna take 15k USD.
