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According to Mozilla's most recently released financial reports (https://static.mozilla.com/moco/en-US/pdf/Mozilla_Audited_Financials_2014.pdf https://static.mo
by lambda 10y ago
According to Mozilla's most recently released financial reports (https://static.mozilla.com/moco/en-US/pdf/Mozilla_Audited_Financials_2014.pdf https://static.mozilla.com/moco/en-US/pdf/Mozilla_Audited_Fi...), they spent $197 million on software development in 2013, and $213 million in 2014. $385,000 is a tiny fraction of that.
Developing high-quality software, which runs on as many devices and is compatible with as much content as Firefox is is a hell of a lot of work. And Mozilla isn't just working on Firefox; there's Thunderbird, though that's in the process of being spun off, Firefox OS (also in the process of pivoting), Mozilla Research (Rust, Servo, Emscripten, asm.js, and more). There are continuous integration systems to test all of this against dozens of combinations of platforms and versions, and huge numbers of tests on each (https://treeherder.mozilla.org/ https://treeherder.mozilla.org/, http://buildbot.rust-lang.org/waterfall http://buildbot.rust-lang.org/waterfall, http://build.servo.org/console http://build.servo.org/console), all of which needs to be maintained and triaged. There's standards work, to negotiate new standards in standards bodies with users, other browser vendors, and the like. There's advocacy work, of times when you find bugs that are simply due to broken websites that happen to be relying on other browser's bugs, to reach out to developers and try to get them to change in a more compatible or standards compliant manner.
$385,000 is, what, the yearly salary, benefits, and overhead of maybe two full time engineers in SFO? Complaining about $385,000 given to deserving projects, given the amount of investment and energy Mozilla is actually putting into Firefox and other substantial, valuable projects, is a bit of a stretch.