My bad – that figure was for the Foundation only. Foundation + Corporation was ~10 times higher (I suppose that’s the 90% from Google).
Though it’s mind-boggling in any case. I’m sure there’s thousands of brilliant developers who would gladly work for Mozilla for like $50k/yr if it was truly independent. That’s 750 full-time devs from investment income alone (which was Mozilla Corp’s total employee count in 2020, so I assume that should be about right).
(Investment here, I suppose, is what it says: they’re buying a bunch of stocks and use profits from these for their charitable goals. Kinda like endowment kind of thing.)
Maybe they could offer that amount in some very LCOL area, I guess? But browser and standards development is highly technical, not something you can easily outsource to some offshore sweatshop. So 50k/year is kind of an insult, and even the purest souls would have a hard time turning down 4-10x that compensation at Apple, Google, and other competitors.
Not to mention, there are a lot of non payroll expenses to account for.
Though it’s mind-boggling in any case. I’m sure there’s thousands of brilliant developers who would gladly work for Mozilla for like $50k/yr if it was truly independent. That’s 750 full-time devs from investment income alone (which was Mozilla Corp’s total employee count in 2020, so I assume that should be about right).
(Investment here, I suppose, is what it says: they’re buying a bunch of stocks and use profits from these for their charitable goals. Kinda like endowment kind of thing.)