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How is it that we can have a plethora of different Linux distributions, the Linux kernel, the FreeBSD kernel, the OpenBSD kernel, GIMP, LibreOffice and several

How is it that we can have a plethora of different Linux distributions, the Linux kernel, the FreeBSD kernel, the OpenBSD kernel, GIMP, LibreOffice and several other large projects that are run and maintained by donations and volunteers. Yet somehow Firefox is different? It needs to make money! It needs to make money so much that they keep spinning up all sorts of new projects so that they can make more money, or at least that was the argument for some of what they were doing. At this point in time, if they had taken all the money they spent on their various projects and put it in a trust they would probably be able to fund development without taking in any more money. And it's not like people wouldn't donate to them either, look at how much Wikipedia has pulled in from donations.

glenstein 17d ago
We've got a live one. Most of their expenses are developing the core browser, the side bets (with a few exceptions, notably FirefoxOS, which I think was a GOOD side bet and worth the effort) were not that expensive. They're developing 40 million lines of code, and a lot of the things you're comparing it to actually aren't as comparably large or cutthroat. >At this point in time, if they had taken all the money they spent on their various projects and put it in a trust they would probably be able to fund development without taking in any more money. They already do that, they have a huge endowment set aside. It's obvious that people don't actually care about it because they don't know, and they only mention the possibility to make the accusation, never to give them credit once they discover Mozilla already does this and has been doing it for about 2 decades. >And it's not like people wouldn't donate to them either, look at how much Wikipedia has pulled in from donations. Another delusional argument. Wikipedia brings in a fraction of what Mozilla gets, and with orders of magnitude more users. And that's the best pure online fundraising program on planet Earth. Again, people only think this through to the point of being able to make the accusation not to the point of figuring out if it would actually work or not.
- dingaling 17d ago
  > They're developing 40 million lines of code Isn't half a billion dollars per year enough to maintain that? Over $10 per LoC annually?
- themaninthedark 17d ago
  >They're developing 40 million lines of code, and a lot of the things you're comparing it to actually aren't as comparably large or cutthroat. To get pedantic about it, they aren't developing that much code, they are maintaining that much code. Not that I think LOC is the best metric but here are the figures for 2 of the project I brought up. Linux kernel is ~40M LOC FreeBSD kernel 7.8~9M LOC I would argue that the OS's that run the internet are much more cutthroat than a browser, not just in terms of attack risk but in business terms as well. >Microsoft aggressively tried to destroy Linux in the late 1990s and 2000s. This era included the internal "Halloween Documents" mapping out strategies to fight open source, former CEO Steve Ballmer calling Linux "a cancer," and Microsoft covertly funding SCO Group's proxy lawsuits against Linux users. The larger your codebase is, the greater the attack surface. One of the arguments about the way that Firefox is progressing is that they keep adding more stuff into the codebase. If it's getting too complex, maybe they shouldn't be adding those features... >Another delusional argument. Wikipedia brings in a fraction of what Mozilla gets, and with orders of magnitude more users. Mozilla received 16.9 million from contributions in 2024. Wikipedia took in ~170 million in the same time period. Not sure where you got that Mozilla was bringing in more than Wikipedia through donations? In going through the Mozilla Financials, I don't see where they have a huge endowment set aside, 73% of their revenue is royalties. I did however see that they spent 31 million to buy Acronym(an ad company) and 21 million to buy Fakespot. So that's neat. https://stateof.mozilla.org/pdf/Mozilla%20Fdn%202024%20-%20AuditedFinancials.pdf https://stateof.mozilla.org/pdf/Mozilla%20Fdn%202024%20-%20A...
yencabulator 17d ago
> if they had taken all the money they spent on their various projects and put it in a trust they would probably be able to fund development without taking in any more money. Mozilla Corporation already has funds totaling about $1 billion today. They're simply choosing not to develop Firefox actively.

glenstein 17d ago

We've got a live one. Most of their expenses are developing the core browser, the side bets (with a few exceptions, notably FirefoxOS, which I think was a GOOD side bet and worth the effort) were not that expensive. They're developing 40 million lines of code, and a lot of the things you're comparing it to actually aren't as comparably large or cutthroat. >At this point in time, if they had taken all the money they spent on their various projects and put it in a trust they would probably be able to fund development without taking in any more money. They already do that, they have a huge endowment set aside. It's obvious that people don't actually care about it because they don't know, and they only mention the possibility to make the accusation, never to give them credit once they discover Mozilla already does this and has been doing it for about 2 decades. >And it's not like people wouldn't donate to them either, look at how much Wikipedia has pulled in from donations. Another delusional argument. Wikipedia brings in a fraction of what Mozilla gets, and with orders of magnitude more users. And that's the best pure online fundraising program on planet Earth. Again, people only think this through to the point of being able to make the accusation not to the point of figuring out if it would actually work or not.

dingaling 17d ago
> They're developing 40 million lines of code Isn't half a billion dollars per year enough to maintain that? Over $10 per LoC annually?
themaninthedark 17d ago
>They're developing 40 million lines of code, and a lot of the things you're comparing it to actually aren't as comparably large or cutthroat. To get pedantic about it, they aren't developing that much code, they are maintaining that much code. Not that I think LOC is the best metric but here are the figures for 2 of the project I brought up. Linux kernel is ~40M LOC FreeBSD kernel 7.8~9M LOC I would argue that the OS's that run the internet are much more cutthroat than a browser, not just in terms of attack risk but in business terms as well. >Microsoft aggressively tried to destroy Linux in the late 1990s and 2000s. This era included the internal "Halloween Documents" mapping out strategies to fight open source, former CEO Steve Ballmer calling Linux "a cancer," and Microsoft covertly funding SCO Group's proxy lawsuits against Linux users. The larger your codebase is, the greater the attack surface. One of the arguments about the way that Firefox is progressing is that they keep adding more stuff into the codebase. If it's getting too complex, maybe they shouldn't be adding those features... >Another delusional argument. Wikipedia brings in a fraction of what Mozilla gets, and with orders of magnitude more users. Mozilla received 16.9 million from contributions in 2024. Wikipedia took in ~170 million in the same time period. Not sure where you got that Mozilla was bringing in more than Wikipedia through donations? In going through the Mozilla Financials, I don't see where they have a huge endowment set aside, 73% of their revenue is royalties. I did however see that they spent 31 million to buy Acronym(an ad company) and 21 million to buy Fakespot. So that's neat. https://stateof.mozilla.org/pdf/Mozilla%20Fdn%202024%20-%20AuditedFinancials.pdf https://stateof.mozilla.org/pdf/Mozilla%20Fdn%202024%20-%20A...

yencabulator 17d ago

> if they had taken all the money they spent on their various projects and put it in a trust they would probably be able to fund development without taking in any more money. Mozilla Corporation already has funds totaling about $1 billion today. They're simply choosing not to develop Firefox actively.