There's Mozilla Foundation (where making a browser is not on the road map) and Mozilla Corporation (which makes money by making a browser to finance the foundation).

Mozilla Corporation revenue is about half a billion, most of it coming from Google and only 2% (from what I found) going to the foundation. The foundation gets most of its money from Google as well, but separately, and the foundation's revenue is about 10% of Mozilla Corporation's. So overall over 90% of Mozilla's budget goes to software development and to cost centers that are associated to Mozilla Corporation.

That vast majority. And Firefox is massively profitable, too (with a rising share of income not coming from google, up to 15% the last time I looked).

Software development was 220 out of a total 425 M$ of expenses. General and administrative coming in second at 108 M$.

I don't know exactly what comparable software companies invest, but assuming that the 220 is entirely SWE salaries this seems appropriate overhead to my mind.

Edit, all of this is 2022:

https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2022/mozilla-fdn-202...

> assuming that the 220 is entirely SWE salaries

With 750 employees for Mozilla Corp, that's unlikely. Even if 80% are developers that would be $350,000 salary on average.

good rule of thumb (at least in Europe) is that whatever your developer salaries are, double it to get closer to the actual operational cost.

There's lots of hidden costs, licenses, insurances, computers/servers, email hosting, document editing suites; that's before you get to the big stuff like office space and social contributions. -- then there's managers, HR etc;

Anyway, it's a reasonable rule of thumb. YMMV.

This is how it is in Denmark as well. Here the general rule of thumb is that any non-managing employee is 70-100k in expense a year. For some specialist workers it’a a little higher, but that is the general cost when you include sick days, vacation, cost-centers like HR, IT and so on.

Somewhat ironically that metric is often used to cut-costs on the long term budget at an increased expense to hire tempts when a team is understaffed for whatever reason. (I’m not sure if “temp” is the correct word for when a team of nurses is staffed to only function within the law when nobody is on vacation/sick. It’s what Google translate gives me for “vikar”.)

In the US that kind of nurse is specifically known as a "travel nurse" because they work on short term contracts and travel from hospital to hospital but in general describing these sorts of workers as "temps" is accurate.

Cool thanks, I was thinking a “temp” might be more like an intern or something.