That's really, really expensive imo and you could do it for way less, but given their current revenue stream that's 80 years of development if they took in no more money ever!
Now, I don't know how many it would take to program a browser but it's already written so it's not as hard as doing it from scratch so I reckon 20 good devs would give you something special.
Honestly, if someone said to me "Mick, here's $560M, put a team together and fork Firefox and Thunderbird. Pay yourself 250k and go for it"... I'd barely let them finish the sentence before signing a contract :)
It should be at least 100 devs at $250k each, which is still a severe underestimation. Note that there are many different types of mandatory expenses that roughly matches to the direct compensation, so with $150K you can only pay ~$75K. And you cannot attract senior browser devs at $75K annual compensation. This alone makes $25M year and the reality should be closer to $100M, which makes Mozilla's OPEX more plausible.
Firefox has way more than 20 developers. Looking at https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/mots/index.html, if I'm not mistaken in my count, there are currently 147 module owners and peers alone. Some of those might be volunteers, but I think the large majority of them are Mozilla staff. On top of that there are probably a number of further Mozilla staff developers who aren't owners or peers, QA staff, product managers, sysadmins and other support staff…
pkaye|11 months ago
fabrice_d|11 months ago
ItsBob|11 months ago
=== ANNUAL COSTS ===
20 developers at $150k each = $3M
Other staff costs, like pensions etc. = $1.5M
Someone in charge of overall project = $250k (this doesn't have to be the case. He could easily be a dev on $150k but lets run with it)
Infrastructure for testing and whatnot. Lets say Azure (expensive!) = $1M
2 x Marketing peeps = $250k
Other expenses (travel, rubber ducks etc.) = $1M
I literally pulled these figures out my ass (as you can no doubt tell!) but lets add it up:
$3M + $1.5M + $0.25M + $1M + $0.25M + $1M = $7M per year.
That's really, really expensive imo and you could do it for way less, but given their current revenue stream that's 80 years of development if they took in no more money ever!
Now, I don't know how many it would take to program a browser but it's already written so it's not as hard as doing it from scratch so I reckon 20 good devs would give you something special.
Honestly, if someone said to me "Mick, here's $560M, put a team together and fork Firefox and Thunderbird. Pay yourself 250k and go for it"... I'd barely let them finish the sentence before signing a contract :)
summerlight|11 months ago
It should be at least 100 devs at $250k each, which is still a severe underestimation. Note that there are many different types of mandatory expenses that roughly matches to the direct compensation, so with $150K you can only pay ~$75K. And you cannot attract senior browser devs at $75K annual compensation. This alone makes $25M year and the reality should be closer to $100M, which makes Mozilla's OPEX more plausible.
iggldiggl|11 months ago