The corporation subsidizes the foundation, not the other way around. It's just a question of how much. Here's a toy example that illustrates Mozilla's situation

The corporation subsidizes the foundation, not the other way around. It's just a question of how much. Here's a toy example that illustrates Mozilla's situation. Let's say you have XYZ Corp and XYZ Foundation (501c3). XYZ Corp revenue (search engine deal): $90 XYZ Foundation revenue (donations): $10 Total revenue: $100 XYZ Corp costs (browser dev): $50 XYZ Foundation costs (advocacy, etc): $50 Total costs: $100 You have to spend the 501c3 income on appropriate costs first, so the $10 from the foundation revenue gets put towards the foundation's advocacy costs. The remainder ($40) gets covered by revenue from the corporation. Now let's say you cut $10 in advocacy costs from the foundation, realizing that it's more important to have a viable browser competitor to Chrome than sex doll privacy evaluations. Now the corporation reduces its transfer to $30, and has $10 left over to, say, avoid laying off devs when the search engine deal revenue drops. Fundamentally most of the money is fungible, and wasting money on unproductive initiatives takes money away from making Firefox a viable Chrome competitor.