4 ms·

Mozilla, with revenue of $27M last year, is mainly responsible for Firefox and a few related applications [0]. Apache meanwhile, has revenue of less than $1M,

Mozilla, with revenue of $27M last year, is mainly responsible for Firefox and a few related applications [0]. Apache meanwhile, has revenue of less than $1M, and has over 350 projects with huge adoption like Cassandra and Kafka and Lucene and Maven and that eponymous HTTP server [1]. In 2017 Mozilla paid their CEO $2.3M and their treasurer (who only worked 6 months) $1.2M [2]. Mozilla is a foundation which owns a for-profit corporation. That corporation had revenues of $450M in 2018 [3]. I double checked this shocking amount. Most of that revenue comes from their search partner, which was switched back to Google recently [4]. How is all of this possible given the relative contributions of these software non-profits? [0] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/products https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/products [1] https://projects.apache.org/projects.html https://projects.apache.org/projects.html [2] https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2017/mozilla-2017-form-990.pdf https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2017/mozilla-2017-fo... [3] https://www.ghacks.net/2019/11/26/mozilla-revenue-dropped-in-2018-but-it-is-still-doing-well/ https://www.ghacks.net/2019/11/26/mozilla-revenue-dropped-in... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#Google https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#Google

mathattack 6y ago
Putting yourself in front of a search engine and charging money is valuable. And Google likes having a non-threatening competitor around. They still have a thousand mouths to feed.
fergie 6y ago
Revenue: $27M; CEO pay: $2.3M Are these numbers accurate? The first seems very low and the last seems very high? Is it still like this?
- jefftk 6y ago
  Yes, that's wrong. I'm not sure about the CEO number, but Mozilla's 2019 reported revenue was ~$450M.
  - alex_young 6y ago
    The nonprofit revenue in 2019 was $27M. See line 12: https://pp-990.s3.amazonaws.com/06_2020_prefixes_13-20/200097189_201812_990_2020060517178795.pdf?response-content-disposition=inline&X-Amz-Algorithm=AWS4-HMAC-SHA256&X-Amz-Credential=AKIA266MJEJYTM5WAG5Y%2F20200812%2Fus-east-1%2Fs3%2Faws4_request&X-Amz-Date=20200812T141729Z&X-Amz-Expires=1800&X-Amz-SignedHeaders=host&X-Amz-Signature=8500b5035b554f9badb93a3c241764a430ee7a7a03b43a0f053f6d16521865b9 https://pp-990.s3.amazonaws.com/06_2020_prefixes_13-20/20009...
    - jefftk 6y ago
      > Mozilla, with revenue of $27M last year, is mainly responsible for Firefox and a few related applications The 'Mozilla' that is responsible (in the sense of funding) Firefox development is the Mozilla Corporation, not the Mozilla Foundation. I don't think the 2019 annual report is out yet, but the 2018 one gives "In CY 2018, Mozilla Corporation generated $435.702 million from royalties, subscriptions and advertising revenue": https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2018/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2018/
jefftk 6y ago
Apache projects are generally developed by a combination of interested volunteers and corporate-funded teams, not by employees of the Apache foundation.
- Hello71 6y ago
  and why is that?
  - jefftk 6y ago
    The Apache Foundation is organized as a legal entity to host projects, but is intentionally decentralized. Because they have chosen to organize themselves this way, many large companies have chosen to work with them to host collaborative open source projects they care about. It fills a very different niche than Mozilla. Looking at the revenue of the Apache Foundation is about as misleading as looking at the revenue for the Mozilla Foundation. In both cases, development is generally funded through corporations, though in the Apache case the corporations are independent while in the Mozilla case the Foundation owns the Mozilla Corporation.

mathattack 6y ago

Putting yourself in front of a search engine and charging money is valuable. And Google likes having a non-threatening competitor around. They still have a thousand mouths to feed.

fergie 6y ago

Revenue: $27M; CEO pay: $2.3M Are these numbers accurate? The first seems very low and the last seems very high? Is it still like this?

jefftk 6y ago
Yes, that's wrong. I'm not sure about the CEO number, but Mozilla's 2019 reported revenue was ~$450M.
- alex_young 6y ago
  The nonprofit revenue in 2019 was $27M. See line 12: https://pp-990.s3.amazonaws.com/06_2020_prefixes_13-20/200097189_201812_990_2020060517178795.pdf?response-content-disposition=inline&X-Amz-Algorithm=AWS4-HMAC-SHA256&X-Amz-Credential=AKIA266MJEJYTM5WAG5Y%2F20200812%2Fus-east-1%2Fs3%2Faws4_request&X-Amz-Date=20200812T141729Z&X-Amz-Expires=1800&X-Amz-SignedHeaders=host&X-Amz-Signature=8500b5035b554f9badb93a3c241764a430ee7a7a03b43a0f053f6d16521865b9 https://pp-990.s3.amazonaws.com/06_2020_prefixes_13-20/20009...
  - jefftk 6y ago
    > Mozilla, with revenue of $27M last year, is mainly responsible for Firefox and a few related applications The 'Mozilla' that is responsible (in the sense of funding) Firefox development is the Mozilla Corporation, not the Mozilla Foundation. I don't think the 2019 annual report is out yet, but the 2018 one gives "In CY 2018, Mozilla Corporation generated $435.702 million from royalties, subscriptions and advertising revenue": https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2018/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2018/

jefftk 6y ago

Apache projects are generally developed by a combination of interested volunteers and corporate-funded teams, not by employees of the Apache foundation.

Hello71 6y ago
and why is that?
- jefftk 6y ago
  The Apache Foundation is organized as a legal entity to host projects, but is intentionally decentralized. Because they have chosen to organize themselves this way, many large companies have chosen to work with them to host collaborative open source projects they care about. It fills a very different niche than Mozilla. Looking at the revenue of the Apache Foundation is about as misleading as looking at the revenue for the Mozilla Foundation. In both cases, development is generally funded through corporations, though in the Apache case the corporations are independent while in the Mozilla case the Foundation owns the Mozilla Corporation.