6 ms·

Fair enough, Mozilla desperately needs to develop alternative income streams, their dependence on their biggest competitor seems to be an existential risk

calvinmorrison 6y ago
> Revenue (per year) >2014 $420 million >2015 $420 million >2016 $520 million >2017 $562 million >2018 $436 million I'm sorry, it's just laughable that you need $500 million a year to create an 'open source' web browser. Pathetic
- tomp 6y ago
  Exactly. Sounds like a certain outsourced government website... If Mozilla was smart and didn't spend coin for useless stuff (Pocket?), they'd be able to set up a trust fund with all this money, that would sustain them indefinitely.
- gchamonlive 6y ago
  How about 500 mil yearly to create an OS from scratch? Is that laughable too? The level of complexity to create a modern web browser, specially one that has in-house engines like Firefox, is comparable to a modern OS.
  - calvinmorrison 6y ago
    How much do you think the Debian non-profit makes per year? What about ArchLinux? How many full time developers are paid by the Linux Foundation? It's funny, their budget is much smaller than firefox https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/460503801 https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/460... Maybe all this complexity and constant changes to the web comes from the fact that there are hundreds and hundreds of employees paid to tinker around. Mozilla is effectively a $500 Million dollar corporation, not a non-profit. Money corrupts absolutely.
    - ylyn 6y ago
      > How much do you think the Debian non-profit makes per year? What about ArchLinux? These are distributions. Their main role is to package upstream software. That is different from actually writing an entire OS. You should compare to however much Microsoft pays all of the developers that work on the different components of Windows. > How many full time developers are paid by the Linux Foundation? > > It's funny, their budget is much smaller than firefox That's because the vast majority of Linux development is not done by employees of the Linux Foundation. Only a few top-level maintainers, including Linus Torvalds and Greg K-H, are employed by the Linux Foundation. Most Linux code these days is written by people employed by companies like Intel, Huawei, Google, Red Hat, NXP, Facebook, etc. See https://lwn.net/Articles/839772/ https://lwn.net/Articles/839772/ for example. You would do good by reading a bit before saying things online.
      - pwdisswordfish0 6y ago
        > Only a few top-level maintainers, including Linus Torvalds and Greg K-H, are employed by the Linux Foundation. Most Linux code these days is written by people employed by companies like Intel, Huawei, Google, Red Hat, NXP, Facebook, etc. This supposed to be a defense of Mozilla? There's a /r/selfawarewolves-style obliviousness to what you're saying.
  - dangwu 6y ago
    That complexity is mostly due to Gecko, right? What's stopping Mozilla from switching to Blink? Does using Google's engine conflict with their mission? Edit: Getting downvotes for this honest question. I didn't realize that browser rendering engines held that much control. Apologies for the silly thought.
    - stefs 6y ago
      that would be a monoculture disaster. monocultures are not resilient.
      - Spivak 6y ago
        Not resilient to disease maybe but I'm sure webdevs will be overjoyed at having a much easier time porting sites. The power dynamic that matters is political not technical. Google doesn't really get to exert control over the web with their rendering engine or V8 it's the actual high-level browser policy that matters and Firefox doesn't actually have to follow any of it. Firefox gutted all of their internals with project Servo. If they had instead integrated Blink would it have been any different? I always think it's interesting what things people want to have diverse ecosystems with competing implementations (browsers) and what things people consider that an unnecessary duplication of effort (Wayland compositors).
        ylyn 6y ago
        So you've seen the same person say both of that?
        Spivak 6y ago
        We're on the internet. There's only one other human and the rest are bots. If you go into threads about Wayland the overwhelming public opinion is that having lots of compositors is silly. And then you go into threads about browsers the overwhelming public opinion is that having multiple browser implementations is sacred.
        minikites 6y ago
  - senko 6y ago
    > How about 500 mil yearly to create an OS from scratch? When was Mozilla trying to create an OS from scratch? The closest they came was FirefoxOS which was using Gecko browser engine (existing) on top of Linux kernel (existing) and a host of other existing open source projects, and FirefoxOS was (unfortunately) a dismal failure.
    - gchamonlive 6y ago
      Maybe I wasn't clear enough. The level of complexity of a modern web browser is comparable to that of a OS. It is not an OS though.
- CobrastanJorji 6y ago
  While it's still a lot, software development is only about half of the Mozilla Foundation's expensive (and not all of that is the browser). They spend around $50 million/year on marketing, ~$75 million/year on administration, etc. They publish annual audits and reports (which ironically probably eats up a million bucks on its own).
- stefantalpalaru 6y ago
  >2017 $562 million "On February24, 2017, Mozilla acquired 100% of the outstanding stock of Read It Later, Inc., known as Pocket, (RIL) for a total purchase price of $25 million in cash, and $5 million in deferred payments." - https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2018/mozilla-fdn-2018-short-form-final-0926.pdf https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2018/mozilla-fdn-201...
- pwdisswordfish0 6y ago
  You're leaving out the revenue from the Yahoo lawsuit. When you combine the revenue from actual royalties and the award from the lawsuit, Mozilla's income for the last year we have on record was just under 1 billion USD, and people continue pushing the narrative that Mozilla is more financially insecure than ever. Firefox is certainly at one of the lowest measures of success it has ever seen, but it's also bringing in more money per user than ever. The picture of Mozilla as frail organization just barely squeaking by has been very lucrative. The fact is, Mozilla has been in the current position for the last 10 years, which is one that is far less precarious than it's made out to be, hasn't done anything that substantially ameliorates what precarity does exist, and instead continues making awful decisions that push away both people in its user base and its potential set of contributors, with the kicker being that the purported looming threat of poverty is used as the justification for all decisions made. And they never budge on anything, except to move further down on all measures that they point to. So how smart and well-reasoned are those decisions again? Signed, a lifetime Firefox user (for lack of a better option).
  - matheusmoreira 6y ago
    So what do they use the money for if not actual software engineering? I have a feeling if people start digging they'll uncover a situation similar to Wikipedia.
    - pwdisswordfish0 6y ago
      The problem is cost disease married to managerial incompetence, same as what's afflicting universities and hospitals. They're using the money for software engineering, but they're doing it poorly, including doing a really, really shit job handling unpaid contributors (essentially driving everyone away and thus requiring them to hire others to fill the shoes of the people who stop contributing). They also spend tens of millions of dollars a year on their marketing department -- a bigger budget than Firefox's entire development budget 15 years ago (i.e., when Firefox was actually on an upward trajectory). There's certainly money going into actual marketing, but the returns on that investment are terrible to the point that they'd probably be just as well off cutting the budget in two, keeping one half of it to be allocated for some other purpose, flushing the other half directly down the toilet, and doing no marketing at all (or maybe walking out into the street, handing it to random passersby, and saying, "this is from Mozilla; you should really use Firefox").
- konjin 6y ago
  They aren't using that for the browser, they are using it to push things like women in code. Which is a dark pattern since if people wanted to fund women in code they would give the money to that charity instead of giving it to a browser and have it diverted. But given what we're reading here it's no surprise that the corpse of Mozilla uses dark patters at every possible level to obfuscate what they are trying to do.
- ozim 6y ago
  Well now they have 8% of the browser market. I think you need $500 million a year to barely keep at those 8%. If they drop those millions of revenue I believe their market share will sharply drop. Opera is operating on around $100 million of revenue and they are in 1% range of market share. I bet Microsoft can spend $100 million or less just to be around 7% with Edge since they have Windows. I also don't think Google is spending much more to keep Chrome at around 70% when they own search and YouTube and Android. They need $500 million just to keep head above the water and remember they are swimming with sharks.
  - calvinmorrison 6y ago
    Right, it's a corporation worried about market share, not some open source project that random hackers contribute to.
- AZ-X 6y ago
  This made me smile :-)

calvinmorrison 6y ago

> Revenue (per year) >2014 $420 million >2015 $420 million >2016 $520 million >2017 $562 million >2018 $436 million I'm sorry, it's just laughable that you need $500 million a year to create an 'open source' web browser. Pathetic

tomp 6y ago
Exactly. Sounds like a certain outsourced government website... If Mozilla was smart and didn't spend coin for useless stuff (Pocket?), they'd be able to set up a trust fund with all this money, that would sustain them indefinitely.
gchamonlive 6y ago
How about 500 mil yearly to create an OS from scratch? Is that laughable too? The level of complexity to create a modern web browser, specially one that has in-house engines like Firefox, is comparable to a modern OS.
- calvinmorrison 6y ago
  How much do you think the Debian non-profit makes per year? What about ArchLinux? How many full time developers are paid by the Linux Foundation? It's funny, their budget is much smaller than firefox https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/460503801 https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/460... Maybe all this complexity and constant changes to the web comes from the fact that there are hundreds and hundreds of employees paid to tinker around. Mozilla is effectively a $500 Million dollar corporation, not a non-profit. Money corrupts absolutely.
  - ylyn 6y ago
    > How much do you think the Debian non-profit makes per year? What about ArchLinux? These are distributions. Their main role is to package upstream software. That is different from actually writing an entire OS. You should compare to however much Microsoft pays all of the developers that work on the different components of Windows. > How many full time developers are paid by the Linux Foundation? > > It's funny, their budget is much smaller than firefox That's because the vast majority of Linux development is not done by employees of the Linux Foundation. Only a few top-level maintainers, including Linus Torvalds and Greg K-H, are employed by the Linux Foundation. Most Linux code these days is written by people employed by companies like Intel, Huawei, Google, Red Hat, NXP, Facebook, etc. See https://lwn.net/Articles/839772/ https://lwn.net/Articles/839772/ for example. You would do good by reading a bit before saying things online.
    - pwdisswordfish0 6y ago
      > Only a few top-level maintainers, including Linus Torvalds and Greg K-H, are employed by the Linux Foundation. Most Linux code these days is written by people employed by companies like Intel, Huawei, Google, Red Hat, NXP, Facebook, etc. This supposed to be a defense of Mozilla? There's a /r/selfawarewolves-style obliviousness to what you're saying.
- dangwu 6y ago
  That complexity is mostly due to Gecko, right? What's stopping Mozilla from switching to Blink? Does using Google's engine conflict with their mission? Edit: Getting downvotes for this honest question. I didn't realize that browser rendering engines held that much control. Apologies for the silly thought.
  - stefs 6y ago
    that would be a monoculture disaster. monocultures are not resilient.
    - Spivak 6y ago
      Not resilient to disease maybe but I'm sure webdevs will be overjoyed at having a much easier time porting sites. The power dynamic that matters is political not technical. Google doesn't really get to exert control over the web with their rendering engine or V8 it's the actual high-level browser policy that matters and Firefox doesn't actually have to follow any of it. Firefox gutted all of their internals with project Servo. If they had instead integrated Blink would it have been any different? I always think it's interesting what things people want to have diverse ecosystems with competing implementations (browsers) and what things people consider that an unnecessary duplication of effort (Wayland compositors).
      - ylyn 6y ago
        So you've seen the same person say both of that?
        Spivak 6y ago
        We're on the internet. There's only one other human and the rest are bots. If you go into threads about Wayland the overwhelming public opinion is that having lots of compositors is silly. And then you go into threads about browsers the overwhelming public opinion is that having multiple browser implementations is sacred.
      - minikites 6y ago
- senko 6y ago
  > How about 500 mil yearly to create an OS from scratch? When was Mozilla trying to create an OS from scratch? The closest they came was FirefoxOS which was using Gecko browser engine (existing) on top of Linux kernel (existing) and a host of other existing open source projects, and FirefoxOS was (unfortunately) a dismal failure.
  - gchamonlive 6y ago
    Maybe I wasn't clear enough. The level of complexity of a modern web browser is comparable to that of a OS. It is not an OS though.
CobrastanJorji 6y ago
While it's still a lot, software development is only about half of the Mozilla Foundation's expensive (and not all of that is the browser). They spend around $50 million/year on marketing, ~$75 million/year on administration, etc. They publish annual audits and reports (which ironically probably eats up a million bucks on its own).
stefantalpalaru 6y ago
>2017 $562 million "On February24, 2017, Mozilla acquired 100% of the outstanding stock of Read It Later, Inc., known as Pocket, (RIL) for a total purchase price of $25 million in cash, and $5 million in deferred payments." - https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2018/mozilla-fdn-2018-short-form-final-0926.pdf https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2018/mozilla-fdn-201...
pwdisswordfish0 6y ago
You're leaving out the revenue from the Yahoo lawsuit. When you combine the revenue from actual royalties and the award from the lawsuit, Mozilla's income for the last year we have on record was just under 1 billion USD, and people continue pushing the narrative that Mozilla is more financially insecure than ever. Firefox is certainly at one of the lowest measures of success it has ever seen, but it's also bringing in more money per user than ever. The picture of Mozilla as frail organization just barely squeaking by has been very lucrative. The fact is, Mozilla has been in the current position for the last 10 years, which is one that is far less precarious than it's made out to be, hasn't done anything that substantially ameliorates what precarity does exist, and instead continues making awful decisions that push away both people in its user base and its potential set of contributors, with the kicker being that the purported looming threat of poverty is used as the justification for all decisions made. And they never budge on anything, except to move further down on all measures that they point to. So how smart and well-reasoned are those decisions again? Signed, a lifetime Firefox user (for lack of a better option).
- matheusmoreira 6y ago
  So what do they use the money for if not actual software engineering? I have a feeling if people start digging they'll uncover a situation similar to Wikipedia.
  - pwdisswordfish0 6y ago
    The problem is cost disease married to managerial incompetence, same as what's afflicting universities and hospitals. They're using the money for software engineering, but they're doing it poorly, including doing a really, really shit job handling unpaid contributors (essentially driving everyone away and thus requiring them to hire others to fill the shoes of the people who stop contributing). They also spend tens of millions of dollars a year on their marketing department -- a bigger budget than Firefox's entire development budget 15 years ago (i.e., when Firefox was actually on an upward trajectory). There's certainly money going into actual marketing, but the returns on that investment are terrible to the point that they'd probably be just as well off cutting the budget in two, keeping one half of it to be allocated for some other purpose, flushing the other half directly down the toilet, and doing no marketing at all (or maybe walking out into the street, handing it to random passersby, and saying, "this is from Mozilla; you should really use Firefox").
konjin 6y ago
They aren't using that for the browser, they are using it to push things like women in code. Which is a dark pattern since if people wanted to fund women in code they would give the money to that charity instead of giving it to a browser and have it diverted. But given what we're reading here it's no surprise that the corpse of Mozilla uses dark patters at every possible level to obfuscate what they are trying to do.
ozim 6y ago
Well now they have 8% of the browser market. I think you need $500 million a year to barely keep at those 8%. If they drop those millions of revenue I believe their market share will sharply drop. Opera is operating on around $100 million of revenue and they are in 1% range of market share. I bet Microsoft can spend $100 million or less just to be around 7% with Edge since they have Windows. I also don't think Google is spending much more to keep Chrome at around 70% when they own search and YouTube and Android. They need $500 million just to keep head above the water and remember they are swimming with sharks.
- calvinmorrison 6y ago
  Right, it's a corporation worried about market share, not some open source project that random hackers contribute to.
AZ-X 6y ago
This made me smile :-)