750 people is a total number. Number of people involved into developing Firefox is way less.
$200 millions are the aggregated expenses of ALL software 'development' efforts of Mozilla Corporation like VPN, Relay, Pocket, mozilla.social, etc. And there are a lot of interesting expenses which are billed as development. According to Lunduke (1) who dived into the details a bit, there are many very questionnable expenses which are not related to Firefox development.
So the questions is still very open, how much does Firefox development actually costs? Developing Thunderbird costed around $2 millions in 2021 (2).
I read the article. It frames "left-of-center" organizations as bad an inappropriate for a tech company. It criticizes Mozilla of supporting social justice causes. It questions why is Mozilla spending money on anything other than it's product.
Absolutely nothing about this reporting is unbiased. He even goes into race and looks into Action Research Collaborative about how the founder has "problems with white people".
Anyone reading this will clearly read the article as right-wing, and maybe even far right-wing biased.
Asking why a tech company whose only product of note is slowly dying, why they are spending money on unrelated advocacy, is entirely reasonable though?
All you have done is convict him conclusively of having an opinion while not liberal. Guilty as charged. I am unclear why that is such a problem.
Theres no such thing as unbiased, so lets set that impossible-to-meet standard aside.
Anytime Mozilla comes up here, the question comes up about supporting Firefox development without the pile of other stuff they do. There is no way to do so. Perhaps their lack of focus is a concern that crosses partisan lines, and ignoring those concerns simply because of tribalism is unwise?
The issue is that his bias creates bad reporting. There is always bias as you mentioned, but his is so bad that it clouds his judgement. There are many users who use Mozilla's products not because they are superior (though I think firefox is), but because they have a great mission. In fact, anyone supporting open source does it because of the mission, not the quality of the product. In most cases, proprietary products are better.
Mozilla is not just a tech company, and far right individuals like Lunduke can't understand that because their bias clouds their reasoning.
Lunduke's reasoning is so clouded, he is a climate denier. That enough should disqualify him as a serious person.
Okay, I read the article. He's a right-wing nutjob with a persecution fetish ranting about a few 5 and 6 figure expenses of a company that spends 9 figures on software deployment and has an axe to grind about the values of the organizations behind those expenses.
Wow the self-righteous literally-an-activist-group hippies of the browser world are self-righteous about other causes? How could we have ever predicted this.
OK, let's assume that the Mozilla engineering team is 500 people. I could not find reliable numbers, but this looks like the right ballpark. Let's assume that an engineer, on average, costs $250k/year; the cost for employer is much higher than just the salary. This is already $125M. There are also people other than engineers needed to run an org. Build infra also costs something. Let's assume that Firefox could keep being developed, as the sole product, for $200M / year.
Then let's assume that a Firefox user would be willing to pay, on average, $5 / mo, or $60 / year, to support the project. More in richer countries, less in less well-off. This would mean that about 3.4 million of paying users would suffice.
Worldwide, Firefox has 362 million users [1]. Only 1% of users would have to pay an equivalent of a hamburger a month to sustain Firefox. If 5% paid, it would be a price of a cup of plain coffee per month.
Now we need just one teeny tiny thing: somebody capable of organizing this.
What evidence do you have that 1% of users would be willing to pay a subscription to Firefox? Given that the alternatives are free and probably already installed, and given the friction involved with signing up for a new subscription, I suspect the actual percentage is much less.
I don't have any evidence, but a hypothesis that 1% of Firefox users care enough to keep it afloat looks more realistic than if it turned out that 100% of users would need to shell out $30/mo.
Numbers of voluntarily paying users in open-source projects are usually pretty low, so 1% looks like the right ballpark, and is worth further research, as opposed to rejecting the approach outright as unrealistic.
I'm speaking about the existing user base, who do not need converting. Also, you speak of browsers as of indistinguishable commodity goods; they are not. The pressure that Google exerts to slowly strangle ad-blocking extensions in Chrome will likely make more people consider alternatives.
Also the question is still open, how many of those people are relevant for Firefox development. There are a lot of people working on other projects of Mozilla Co.
Mozilla tries very hard to not to answer those questions. They could have made a separate fund for Firefox development just like they did for Thunderbird. For comparison, Thunderfird team was 24 people in 2022 and development costed $2 million.
Better save your efforts into making sense of Mozilla's shady politics and economics and invest effort into promoting https://ladybird.org/ - a truly independent browser developed from scratch by a non-profit.
My idea was to show that even if we use rather conservative estimates, with some safety margin, running Firefox development on users' donations / subscription looks very viable.
Also, donating to a non-profit is tax-deductible in the US, so some donations can be larger as a tax optimization.
So instead of Google paying Mozilla directly, you suggest that users pay Mozilla through an appstore while giving a 30% cut to Google?
Secure, anonymous cash payments would make so many things much easier. Want to read this paywalled article? Please pay €0.05. Download this application? That'll be €5.
Of course the anti-terrorism crowd would never let that happen.
The Wikipedia page [1] links to an annual report from 2022 [2] where it is stated (page 6) that the expenses for 2022 for "Software development" were about 220 Million Dollars [X], though I guess that the entry includes software other than just Firefox and there is no breakdown.
