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Donations only get you so far. Take a mid-sized project, that needs $500k per year (a few devs, very modestly paid, zero expenses). It's a lot of money. It requ
by mgbmtl 9mo ago
Donations only get you so far. Take a mid-sized project, that needs $500k per year (a few devs, very modestly paid, zero expenses). It's a lot of money. It requires a huge user base. Say you have 500k users, and 5% donate $25 per year (I'm optimistic). And that's just $500k US, a few devs, zero expenses. A project that size probably has audit requirements, hosting costs, accounting, legal, trademarks, etc.
I see finances for a few free software projects, and many of them really struggle to get donations year after year, in a way that helps make the project predictable and sustainable.
For the US, people want you to be a 501c3, and then you need a EU equivalent. Canadians are unlikely to give to a US org (especially these days), but the market is too small to setup a local charity. So you need partners. All that has many compliance requirements and paperwork, so you need non-tech employees for the fundraising and accounting.
Eventually your big donors start blackmailing the project if you don't do what they want, and often their interests are not aligned with most users. You need various income sources.
- zihotki 9mo agoWith 1.3b in reserves, it's enough for funding development for many years to come if they fire most of management and close irrelevant to the browser things.
- glenstein 9mo agoIt would be organizational suicide to spend down their endowment just because they can. Right now it exists as a firewall to buy them some time in the event that search licensing goes away, which I think is exactly what they should have done with it. And it's been talked to death before but the idea that the browser side bets are at some prohibitive cost is an unsubstantiated myth, conjured into existence by vibes in comment sections. It's the HN equivalent of American voters who think foreign aid is 50% of the federal budget.
- skywal_l 9mo agoDo you realize what 1.300.000.000$ is? Say you invest most of it in a safe way to get you inflation + 2%. That gives you 26.000.000$ every year. You can pay 100 engineers with this. Firefox is a browser. Sure a browser is complicated but 100 motivated and talented engineers is more than enough to make a good product if you focus on what matters. There is no excuse to what is going on.
- hosteur 9mo agoI dont even think they employ close to 100 FTE devs actually working on Firefox at this point.
- pseudalopex 9mo agoMozilla spent $260 million on software development in 2023.[1] How do you believe they spent it? Vivaldi employ 28 developers to produce an unstable Chromium fork and email program for comparison.[2] [1] https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2024/mozilla-fdn-2023-fs-final-short-1209.pdf https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2024/mozilla-fdn-202... [2] https://vivaldi.com/team/ https://vivaldi.com/team/
- hosteur 9mo agoWell, I do not believe $260 million went to Firefox development. I would be surprised if the majority of that went to other non-Firefox projects like: Various AI initiatives (Mozilla.ai, Orbit, etc.) Mozilla VPN Mozilla Monitor Pocket Firefox Relay Fakespot Mozilla Social Mozilla Hubs ... just to name a few.
- glenstein 9mo agoI think you're probably about as dead wrong as it's possible to be on this front. First they ship millions of new LoC to Firefox on a monthly basis so the engineering efforts are open for all the world to see. Secondly, if more than half(!?!) was spent on, say, Pocket, or Fakespot, then you would see a rise and fall in spending coinciding with the onramp and closure of those programs over their lifetimes. But in reality we have seen a steady upward march in spending, and so the interpretation that passes the sanity check is that they fold these into their existing budget with the existing development capacity they have which is variously assigned to different projects, including(!!) Firefox, where again, their annual code output is monumental and rivals Google. Again I have to note the blizzard of contradictory accusations throughout this thread. According to one commenter the problem is they are biting off more than they can chew and need to scale back all of the excessive Firefox development they are doing (and I recall previous commenters speculating that 30+ million LoC was not evidence of their hard work but "bloat" that was excessive and that they probably could cut a lot of it out without losing functionality). But for you, the obvious problem is they're wasting all that capacity on side projects and not putting enough effort in the browser.
- account42 9mo agoOh no a nonprofit has to do nonprofit things. Can't be done, I tell you. Impossible.