alt Hacker NewsHm. I'm dumb so you'll need to spell it out for me.
MoFo and MoCo both have contributors, yes. Both have unpaid contributors, which apparently are not who you're talking about. Both also have paid people who work for them. Whether or not you call them "contributors" or "employees" doesn't matter much, I guess. But still, MoFo contributors, paid or not, do not work on Firefox. Firefox is not a MoFo product. Most MoCo contributors do work on Firefox. Firefox is a MoCo product. It's confusing because MoFo owns MoCo, but owning a company does not mean its products are your products, nor that you can freely assist with those products (especially in an arms-length setup involving taxes, which is the very reason for the MoFo/MoCo split in the first place.) MoFo does other things, non-Firefox things, like advocacy and pissing off HN commenters who assume that "Mozilla does X" headlines always mean MoCo is doing X.
One of us is confused. I have that uneasy sensation I get when something is going "whoosh!" over my head, so it might be me.
> Most MoCo contributors do work on Firefox. Firefox is a MoCo product.
This is true.
> But still, MoFo contributors, paid or not, do not work on Firefox.
This is not true, based on what I've read about it. Do you have personal experience with these orgs that suggests otherwise?
Regardless, nothing is stopping Foundation funds from being directed to Firefox development. If someone gave them, for example, $1M that could only be spent on Firefox, they could pay Corporation or an external consultancy to contribute to the open-source Firefox repositories.
This is already happening, either through Foundation or Corporation. One of the biggest Servo contributors works for a FOSS consultancy.
There are corollaries to what I'm describing in most large nonprofits in the US. You get money that a donor requires you to spend in a certain way, and you spend that money that way. If you can't do it with in-house people, you give it to consultants.