alt Hacker News> Where do the billions of dollars from Google go?
They go to the Mozilla Corporation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#Finances
The Mozilla Corporation then picks and chooses what it finances within the Mozilla Foundation. Their financial statements don't break down how they spend on software development within the Foundation, it only lists out employee salaries, specific directors' salaries and grants to outsiders... but it would seem Thunderbird doesn't get much if they're out begging.
https://stateof.mozilla.org/pdf/Mozilla%20Fdn%202024%20-%20A...
So, as an example, in 2024, it got:
- $498,218,000 from royalties (e.g. Google)
- $66,396,000 from paid services (e.g Pocket, VPN) and advertisers
- $15,782,000 from donations
And it spent:
- $290,448,000 on programmer salaries
- $163,516,000 on manager salaries
- $36,358,000 on servers, cloud, etc.
- $20,258,000 on consultants (e.g. branding consultants)
- $9,573,000 on travel
- $2,192,000 on grants and fellowships
So overall, it didn't spent that much on the stupid doomed side projects! It spent a lot more on flying managers and marketing consultants to nice soirees.
But the real question, not answered by this financial report, is how much programming labour was spent on Thunderbird, versus other Mozilla projects?
My assumption would be that it's very little, given that Thunderbird was separated out of the Mozilla Corporation to MOZLA (or whatever it's called).
On the bright side, that actually makes me a bit keener about donating to it; donating to the Mozilla Corporation seems entirely pointless given donations make up ~2.5% of their income, and less than 10% of what they spend just on manager salaries, whereas giving it to Thunderbird might actually have a positive impact.