I know your intention is probably well placed but we do though need to factor in revenues:
Year Revenue
---- -------
2007 $75M
2023 $653M
I bring this up because G&A of big companies (in general) always outpaces R&D once they hit scale ... and in an ideal situation - your revenues should outpace R&D expense because you're getting economies of scale (which further dilutes the R&D to Other Business Function comparison).
And Mozilla has hit scale / become "big company" - with those kinds of revenues.
The reason why G&A outpaces R&D, is because now you have all kinds of work to do that you don't have to do when your small/underdog, like:
- regulatory compliance
- legal
- privacy
- advocacy
- public relations
- etc...
When you're the underdog, you don't have to deal with these activities and as a result, your expense base is more heavily skewed toward R&D.
[^a]: this was a weird year where their "other" income got a massive one-time boost. I'm not sure what happened. Did they get a $338m grant? If you take that number out the percentage is around 91%
That was the year their lawsuit with Verizon finished and they got paid their remaining due for the Yahoo search deal. Related, I think most their money from 2017 also came from Yahoo.
Imagine if a competent CEO had been at the wheel. Instead of spending quite literally billions on who knows what (certainly not a significantly better, more competitive Firefox), Mozilla could have instead transitioned to an endowed foundation model and built a sustainable, long-term future that could weather a scenario like today’s DOJ case which was not impossible to foresee (US v. Microsoft was in 2001 after all).
Again not diminishing Firefox's efforts but it's difficult not to compare with other _leaner_ open-source projects.
As an example the Linux foundation [0] had 270M in expenses in 2023. Of which even we aggregate international operations and corporate operations the expenditure is less than 21M in G&A equivalent activities.
The Linux Foundation is a bunch of corporate suits trying to steer Linux into their business interests. It doesn't have anything to do with the development really.
I agree with up that you have to take revenue into account as well. However, as an NPO Mozilla has no mandate to grow at all costs.
What’s the benefit of having Mozilla be this huge? How does it compare to the risk of shutting down if their revenue dries up, which is looking like a possibility?
You’re not wrong, but people get this mixed up because Firefox was a continuation of Netscape which did have a 90+% market share in 95. Mozilla however is a completely independent entity that continued to work on an open sourced browser created by a different entity.
This was wild to contemplate and I was about to raise my finger and say "Really?! 'G&A' at that scale?!" but at the same time even if those kinds of roles are over-hired - they have to be responding to need and within a realm they found risk-averse.
Having said that I just have had the same kinds of questions/trouble as OP about Mozilla's wild spending and budget compared to seeing their devs at grungy linux confs in the midwest when I was an undergrad in the 00s.
You did help point out what I really wondered about also and didn't understand, so thanks.
Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit but Mozilla Corporation which develop Firefox is a for-profit entity.
There are other subsidiaries under the foundation umbrella like Mozilla.ai and MZLA/Thunderbird. This isn't something uncommon for large entity and there are many advantages. For example, it gives more freedom in term of decision making and spending to projects that aren't targeting the exact same consumer segment. Think about Thunderbird. Under Mozilla Corporation, it was always in the shadow of Firefox. Now, it's striving as an independent project.
And Mozilla has hit scale / become "big company" - with those kinds of revenues.
The reason why G&A outpaces R&D, is because now you have all kinds of work to do that you don't have to do when your small/underdog, like:
- regulatory compliance
- legal
- privacy
- advocacy
- public relations
- etc...
When you're the underdog, you don't have to deal with these activities and as a result, your expense base is more heavily skewed toward R&D.