You have no idea what it takes to have _hundreds_ of engineers and supporting teams to work on a multi-million lines of code application that needs to be shipped to a giant group of users.
What do you think Mozilla is? A bunch of hackers in a room? It is a global company with 1200 employees. In a dozen offices around the world.
How do you think money disappears? You think Firefox and all the other things Mozilla does happen by itself? That this is all free? That this does not cost any money? ....
The question you need to ask is if the chrome (browser) and codec team in Google add up to 1200. Or the IE+Edge and __add_MSFT_GRP__ add up to 1200.
Further, do those groups cost their parents $500M/year?
Please stop talking.
The remaining expenses are fluff. In a corporation, one wouldn't be allowed to have non-essential expenses far exceed essential ones. In a non-profit, this philosophy needs doubling down on.
I might be completely wrong, but Mozilla seems to be subsidizing the whims of a corrupt few at the top.
Your napkin "calculations" make zero sense. Go read the financial report.
"""Mozilla seems to be subsidizing the whims of a corrupt few at the top"""
Ah it is clear what your real intent is.
And what might that intent be? Are you suggesting Mozilla's top brass are bonafide angels doing God's work, above public scrutiny? They seem to position themselves as champions of the people and freedom, much like politicians
A similar thing could be happening to Wikimedia Foundation's finances.
There is so much interesting going on in the linked post, I really wish this community would be able to have a mature discussion about that.
If you're a software engineer @ Mozilla and earn less than ~$190K/annum ($225M/1200 employees), your boss is exploiting you. OR Mozilla routinely pays actual engineers far lesser than what their top brass spend on whims.
[1]: https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2016/2016_Mozilla_Au...
The other expenses break down into mostly marketing ($47M) and "general and administrative" ($59M). The first one makes sense - it's a small budget for a global presence. G&A usually includes office rent, which I'd bet is a huge chunk.
Let's do the math: SF is ~$80/sq.ft. Usually assumed is $175 sq.ft/engineer. That's $16M of those $59M. Then there's utilities, insurance, etc. Let's call it $20M.
Then there's legal expenses - those usually go into G&A. Given that in 2016, Mozilla squeezed $1B of payments out of Verizon ($375M/year until 2019), I'd assume some lawyers made a good chunk of money. Given the huge jump in G&A from 2015, I'm willing to attribute the entire difference ($20M) to legal costs. This was a huge one-time event, it would make sense.
Now we've explained $40M of those $59M. So, at this point, we're debating if the remaining $19M could possibly have been extracted nefariously. Likely, no, because there's more costs. And if you have 1,200 employees, costs add up quickly.
Meanwhile, the only evidence you've brought for your accusation is "because I believe it's true". That's not even close to meaningful. You're certainly entitled to your own opinion, but the facts we all share say otherwise.
2. Not all of them are devs, and devs are (typically) the most expensive. Which should further increase the average US compensation for devs to MUCH MORE than $140K
3. GitLab has hundreds of employees but they choose to have a lean real estate footprint, especially in exorbitant zip codes like SF to keep costs low. Obviously, Mozilla isn't concerned by minutiae like over paying for real estate
4. Why does Mozilla need a ~$50M marketing budget? HUGE RED FLAG!!!
5. Self adorned morally upright Mozilla squeezing out a $1B to squander on __insert-here__ is a crime against humanity. They neither have a moral edge over Verizon, nor does money in their coffers benefit humanity. It empowers the senior management in much the same way as government funding empowers the morally bankrupt politicians at the helm.
In conclusion, Mozilla's budget breaks down into 66% software (whose costs still don't make sense given their global developer footprint), and 33% B.S. overhead.
If one digs deeper, (I'm guessing) you'll find the senior management @ Mozilla to be earning orders of magnitude over junior developers - like a private corp. Further, even private corps have no tolerance for 33% of their budget being squandered!! [Atlassian, Gitlab, ...] are famous for having almost $0 in marketing budget, while a not-for-profit like Mozilla THAT HAS NOTHING TO SELL thinks it OK to wash $50M down the loo.
We need a politico like organization to go deep into Mozilla's inner workings as these numbers DO NOT COMPUTE
As for PR/marketing, it might be worth remembering Mozilla's mission: "...to ensure the Internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all"
Yeah, kinda needs marketing.
But really, your mind is set. It's part of a conspiracy to enrich the Mozilla leadership. If that helps you sleep at night, go for it.
Mozilla makes money disappear. Their 2016 revenues were in excess of $520M, and their claimed output was the Quantum browser.
The two largest R&D verticals seem to be their browser and the codecs group. That still doesn't account for expenses of $520M in 2016, and much much more in 2017.
Where is all the money going, Mozilla?