7 ms·

Honest question: what in the world does Mozilla do currently with $375 million a year?

ihnorton 10y ago
As of 2014: $212 million on software development (presumably mostly salaries?), another ~$100 million on marketing/administration/etc. They appear to put away from $10 to $70 million per year from 2010-2014, and had about $140 million in investment assets (again, 2014). https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/documents/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/documents/
- jordigh 10y ago
  But that's the foundation, not to be confused with Mozilla Corp. I've honestly never really understood how the two are actually related and how Mozilla can be both a nonprofit and a corporation. Talking to some Mozilla employees in IRC and in person, they never seem to think too hard about this either.
  - Sylos 10y ago
    Yeah, I don't quite understand that either. What I know is that the for-profit is a subsidiary of the non-profit, and they only have it, because non-profits have some legal restrictions which they couldn't quite work with. I think, that's for example how much cash they are allowed to have on the side. And while I would like to understand it better for curiosity's sake, I'm personally okay with it being the way it is, on the basis that people who understand this stuff better than me don't seem to complain about it. Like, seriously, journalists just love to report how evil the innocent-thought Mozilla is, and often even drift off into pure nonsense to do so. So, if there really was anything to be said about their for-profit side, I figure, I would have heard of it by now.
  - yeukhon 10y ago
    Corp was established to accept business contracts and pay taxes under business tax laws, rather than non-profit tax laws (the famous anecdote of IRS at one point in the early days tried to convince Mozilla don't worry about paying as non-profit). But as Mozilla continued to grow, they hired more people and formed a whole corporation where people are paid to work on Mozilla's core projects like FireFox and keeping Mozilla secured. The confusion often occurs at figuring out the outreach programs. Foundation does some outreach, but Mozilla Corps as a whole also do outreach program. For example, I think people who manage ambassadors are Mozilla Corp employees, but correct me if I am wrong. Furthermore, there are developers hired specifically to work on Foundation applications last. My info could be wrong by now...
  - ihnorton 10y ago
    > The Foundation has a wholly-owned for-profit subsidiary, Mozilla Corporation (the Corporation). The Corporation serves the non-profit, public benefit goals of its parent and the vast Mozilla community. ... > The consolidated financial statements include the accounts of the Foundation and its wholly-owned subsidiary, the Corporation (collectively “Mozilla”). All significant intercompany accounts and transactions have been eliminated. IIUC, receiving revenue would be more complicated if the transactions were undertaken directly with the not-for-profit foundation. Certainly many "non-profits" do receive transactional revenue, i.e. hospitals, but in that case they often have a number of subsidiaries -- for example one subsidiary actually employs the physicians, another signs funding contracts with the NSF/NIH and distributes grant revenue, a holding company owns the buildings, etc. Accounting is complicated (perhaps more accurately: "the tax code is complicated").
rockdoe 10y ago
Pay about 1000 employees and host a ton of infrastructure for a bunch of open source projects (including of course Firefox, but also things like Rust, Valgrind, Opus, etc.).
- amenod 10y ago
  And hopefully saves some part of that for rainy days when search deals will no longer be this profitable.
  - rockdoe 10y ago
    I think the Firefox OS project was just that, but it didn't work out.
    - amenod 10y ago
      I am not talking just about projects, but about cash in the bank. Once the funding stops you should have enough funds to bridge the gap until you find the next big project. Hopefully as great as Firefox and Rust are. Kudos to Mozilla!
      - Brakenshire 10y ago
        Yes, in principle they should be able to put away enough to operate in perpetuity (albeit on a small budget). It would be interesting to know whether it's happening, presumably the finances are public so it shouldn't be too difficult to to find out.
        rockdoe 10y ago
        https://static.mozilla.com/moco/en-US/pdf/Mozilla_Audited_Financials_2014.pdf https://static.mozilla.com/moco/en-US/pdf/Mozilla_Audited_Fi... 90M USD cash, 140M USD investments in 2014.
        Sylos 10y ago
        Yeah, the Finance Report does have a 2 year delay, though, so some guesswork is still necessary...
ComodoHacker 10y ago
Keeps the Web a little more free, I'd say.
hnbroseph 10y ago
maintaining their byzantine build system for firefox and related projects. it's pretty nuts.
digi_owl 10y ago
Fund a bunch of SJW projects that will never bring anything but grief?
- cocotino 10y ago
  Most Mozilla projects are senseless, and they are burning cash as if there were no tomorrow, but the SJW mention makes little sense to me.
  - yeukhon 10y ago
    I have to agree that there are ambitious projects did not turn out well (like FireFox OS, Persona and a few others) and there are ones still thriving but the community is not quite as impacting as the authors intended. There are also ones did make good impact with very little noise like django-secure got merged into Django 1.6. Rust is probably the most notable project built by Mozilla after Firefox at this current stage.
    - zanny 10y ago
      They just gave up on Persona too soon. It was going to be an incremental change, not an overnight revolution, but I imagine they never each approached major juncture points for developers (github, stack overflow, etc) about adopting it.
      - yeukhon 10y ago
        I tried Persona, great concept, the adoption rate was differently very slow. I don't know if they ever reached out to large players and encourage them to adopt, but I think believe even if GitHub did, that wouldn't matter much. Mozilla did not want to keep running Persona as the sole IdP in the Persona platform, it did only to encourage development and early adoption. Even internally I don't think all sites went to Persona, but the large one differently did though. With that attitude I was fearing a major migration which could kill motivation.
- ben_jones 10y ago
Scarbutt 10y ago
I don't know, but they should really step up their marketing game.
aphextron 10y ago
Have you seen their SF office? That's probably a cool million/year alone if not more.
phonon 10y ago
Pays (at least one person) over a million dollars a year? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker#Mozilla_Foundation_and_Mozilla_Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker#Mozilla_Foundat...
- sylvinus 10y ago
  Would you prefer her to work somewhere else for 3x that?
  - phonon 10y ago
    A. Where? B. Maybe?
Sylos 10y ago
Well, Firefox's architecture is currently being completely thrown over for Electrolysis, they are heavily working on their implementation of WebExtensions, and Servo+Rust are starting to take off at the moment, too. Other than that, Thunderbird could certainly do with a bit of cash and Firefox OS is also currently being rolled out on a few TV sets, so could certainly use some financing to fix up initial bugs. And if they really have nothing else to finance, they often also just redistribute money to other smaller open-source projects...
- rogerdpack 10y ago
  Apparently Thunderbird could since didn't they split it into its "own separate" project recently (meaning, stop funding it)? ...
_pmf_ 10y ago
> Honest question: what in the world does Mozilla do currently with $375 million a year? Halfheartedly trying to catch up with Chrome. Interesting and great, but ultimately Yak shaving exercises like supporting Rust.

As of 2014: $212 million on software development (presumably mostly salaries?), another ~$100 million on marketing/administration/etc. They appear to put away from $10 to $70 million per year from 2010-2014, and had about $140 million in investment assets (again, 2014). https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/documents/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/documents/

jordigh 10y ago
But that's the foundation, not to be confused with Mozilla Corp. I've honestly never really understood how the two are actually related and how Mozilla can be both a nonprofit and a corporation. Talking to some Mozilla employees in IRC and in person, they never seem to think too hard about this either.
- Sylos 10y ago
  Yeah, I don't quite understand that either. What I know is that the for-profit is a subsidiary of the non-profit, and they only have it, because non-profits have some legal restrictions which they couldn't quite work with. I think, that's for example how much cash they are allowed to have on the side. And while I would like to understand it better for curiosity's sake, I'm personally okay with it being the way it is, on the basis that people who understand this stuff better than me don't seem to complain about it. Like, seriously, journalists just love to report how evil the innocent-thought Mozilla is, and often even drift off into pure nonsense to do so. So, if there really was anything to be said about their for-profit side, I figure, I would have heard of it by now.
- yeukhon 10y ago
  Corp was established to accept business contracts and pay taxes under business tax laws, rather than non-profit tax laws (the famous anecdote of IRS at one point in the early days tried to convince Mozilla don't worry about paying as non-profit). But as Mozilla continued to grow, they hired more people and formed a whole corporation where people are paid to work on Mozilla's core projects like FireFox and keeping Mozilla secured. The confusion often occurs at figuring out the outreach programs. Foundation does some outreach, but Mozilla Corps as a whole also do outreach program. For example, I think people who manage ambassadors are Mozilla Corp employees, but correct me if I am wrong. Furthermore, there are developers hired specifically to work on Foundation applications last. My info could be wrong by now...
- ihnorton 10y ago
  > The Foundation has a wholly-owned for-profit subsidiary, Mozilla Corporation (the Corporation). The Corporation serves the non-profit, public benefit goals of its parent and the vast Mozilla community. ... > The consolidated financial statements include the accounts of the Foundation and its wholly-owned subsidiary, the Corporation (collectively “Mozilla”). All significant intercompany accounts and transactions have been eliminated. IIUC, receiving revenue would be more complicated if the transactions were undertaken directly with the not-for-profit foundation. Certainly many "non-profits" do receive transactional revenue, i.e. hospitals, but in that case they often have a number of subsidiaries -- for example one subsidiary actually employs the physicians, another signs funding contracts with the NSF/NIH and distributes grant revenue, a holding company owns the buildings, etc. Accounting is complicated (perhaps more accurately: "the tax code is complicated").

rockdoe 10y ago

Pay about 1000 employees and host a ton of infrastructure for a bunch of open source projects (including of course Firefox, but also things like Rust, Valgrind, Opus, etc.).

amenod 10y ago
And hopefully saves some part of that for rainy days when search deals will no longer be this profitable.
- rockdoe 10y ago
  I think the Firefox OS project was just that, but it didn't work out.
  - amenod 10y ago
    I am not talking just about projects, but about cash in the bank. Once the funding stops you should have enough funds to bridge the gap until you find the next big project. Hopefully as great as Firefox and Rust are. Kudos to Mozilla!
    - Brakenshire 10y ago
      Yes, in principle they should be able to put away enough to operate in perpetuity (albeit on a small budget). It would be interesting to know whether it's happening, presumably the finances are public so it shouldn't be too difficult to to find out.
      - rockdoe 10y ago
        https://static.mozilla.com/moco/en-US/pdf/Mozilla_Audited_Financials_2014.pdf https://static.mozilla.com/moco/en-US/pdf/Mozilla_Audited_Fi... 90M USD cash, 140M USD investments in 2014.
      - Sylos 10y ago
        Yeah, the Finance Report does have a 2 year delay, though, so some guesswork is still necessary...

ComodoHacker 10y ago

Keeps the Web a little more free, I'd say.

hnbroseph 10y ago

maintaining their byzantine build system for firefox and related projects. it's pretty nuts.

digi_owl 10y ago

Fund a bunch of SJW projects that will never bring anything but grief?

cocotino 10y ago
Most Mozilla projects are senseless, and they are burning cash as if there were no tomorrow, but the SJW mention makes little sense to me.
- yeukhon 10y ago
  I have to agree that there are ambitious projects did not turn out well (like FireFox OS, Persona and a few others) and there are ones still thriving but the community is not quite as impacting as the authors intended. There are also ones did make good impact with very little noise like django-secure got merged into Django 1.6. Rust is probably the most notable project built by Mozilla after Firefox at this current stage.
  - zanny 10y ago
    They just gave up on Persona too soon. It was going to be an incremental change, not an overnight revolution, but I imagine they never each approached major juncture points for developers (github, stack overflow, etc) about adopting it.
    - yeukhon 10y ago
      I tried Persona, great concept, the adoption rate was differently very slow. I don't know if they ever reached out to large players and encourage them to adopt, but I think believe even if GitHub did, that wouldn't matter much. Mozilla did not want to keep running Persona as the sole IdP in the Persona platform, it did only to encourage development and early adoption. Even internally I don't think all sites went to Persona, but the large one differently did though. With that attitude I was fearing a major migration which could kill motivation.
ben_jones 10y ago

Scarbutt 10y ago

I don't know, but they should really step up their marketing game.

aphextron 10y ago

Have you seen their SF office? That's probably a cool million/year alone if not more.

phonon 10y ago

Pays (at least one person) over a million dollars a year? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker#Mozilla_Foundation_and_Mozilla_Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker#Mozilla_Foundat...

sylvinus 10y ago
Would you prefer her to work somewhere else for 3x that?
- phonon 10y ago
  A. Where? B. Maybe?

Sylos 10y ago

Well, Firefox's architecture is currently being completely thrown over for Electrolysis, they are heavily working on their implementation of WebExtensions, and Servo+Rust are starting to take off at the moment, too. Other than that, Thunderbird could certainly do with a bit of cash and Firefox OS is also currently being rolled out on a few TV sets, so could certainly use some financing to fix up initial bugs. And if they really have nothing else to finance, they often also just redistribute money to other smaller open-source projects...

rogerdpack 10y ago
Apparently Thunderbird could since didn't they split it into its "own separate" project recently (meaning, stop funding it)? ...

_pmf_ 10y ago

> Honest question: what in the world does Mozilla do currently with $375 million a year? Halfheartedly trying to catch up with Chrome. Interesting and great, but ultimately Yak shaving exercises like supporting Rust.