Firefox alone is like 21 million lines of open source code and I wouldn't be surprised if Chrome was similar. Microsoft, with hundreds of thousands of employees, may of them developers, chose to abandon their long-established browser codebase and hop on Chromium because maintaining a browser engine, probably about 80% of the code, was just too much for them to handle. And that's one single app.
Simply maintaining Firefox takes a couple hundred million dollars a year, and if you scaled back to minimal effort outside of security fixes and critical new features to stay competitive, I don't think you could get it under one hundred million dollars a year. Developers are doing a bit more than coding Firefox of course, there's CI and deployment of new releases every two weeks to hundreds of millions of devices that's all automated and requires maintenance and updates bt the point is that if one project, Firefox, costs hundreds of millions of dollars, how can all of FOSS be as little as 4 billion?
Simply maintaining Firefox takes a couple hundred million dollars a year, and if you scaled back to minimal effort outside of security fixes and critical new features to stay competitive, I don't think you could get it under one hundred million dollars a year. Developers are doing a bit more than coding Firefox of course, there's CI and deployment of new releases every two weeks to hundreds of millions of devices that's all automated and requires maintenance and updates bt the point is that if one project, Firefox, costs hundreds of millions of dollars, how can all of FOSS be as little as 4 billion?