Looking Into Mozilla's Financial Success 129
NewsCloud writes "'Thanks to the Google agreement, the Mozilla Foundation went from revenue of nearly $6 million in 2004 to more than $52 million the next year [similar revenue is expected in 2006]...In 2005, the foundation created a subsidiary, the for-profit Mozilla Corporation,...mainly to deal with the tax and other issues related to the Google contract...By creating a corporation to run the Firefox project, Mozilla was committing to be less transparent. In part, that is because Google insists on the secrecy of "its arrangement and agreements," said board member Mitch Kapor.' The NYT article compares this approach to Wikipedia's ongoing fundraisers and raises the issue of transparency in open source projects. i.e. should Firefox's 1,000 to 2,000 developers and 80,000 evangelists have full knowledge of how revenue is spent as well as the extent to which Google is able to influence strategy vs. other stakeholders."
amusing (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, well, bring that up on the Slashdot if you want some suggestions on where to spend the money. Maybe even ask the Google about it, since that's where the money came from.
I don't know why use of "the" here amuses me so much, but it makes the author seem very unfamiliar with the companies and products they are writing about.
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I thought the author was insinuating that Mozilla was putting its money into the 1980's, Soviet, thought-controlled, mach 6 capable, stealth fighter piloted by Clint Eastwood. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083943/plotsummary [imdb.com]
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Yes, well, bring that up on the Slashdot if you want some suggestions on where to spend the money.
Sure, I'll make a suggestion. $52M spread over 1000 developers means an average compensation of $52,000 per developer -- naturally, scaled based on the relative contributions of each. So some may only make $100 while others may make $1M. Even if you consider their entire 2004 revenue of $6M is taken up by expenses and that it holds true today, that still leaves an average of $48,000 per developer. Shouldn't this be the way contributors to open source get rewarded? Or will they make nothing except for
Mozilla Summer Of Code? (Score:2)
Mozilla could even extend it far beyond Mozilla (why not KDE, Gnome, GCC, Perl (Javascript on Parrot?), etc. pp.?)
Btw. I think the deal with Google is *so* good, that e.g. the KDE guys (Konqueror) should do a similiar deal too.
Bye egghat.
I'd like to see more transparancy (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I'd like to see more transparancy (Score:5, Insightful)
In any case, as much of a paranoid individual I am, I think that Google *has* to be secretive. Google has been targeted by Microsoft, Yahoo, and other huge companies which have a long history of play really really dirty. Google has been around a while now and has no real history of being dirty. Their NDA for interviews which slashdotters freaked about, if they had RTFA and then read the NDA, most of them would have seen the articles took clauses out of context, which you simply can't do, and in context it made sense.
If I were a rather new, but large, rich company with a lot to lose, I'd be keeping as many secrets as I could from the companies and people who would love to see me fail.
Know your enemy, and make sure it doesn't know you.
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You have the open source package which is the Firefox code, and you have a separate company which happens to do Firefox coding and distribution, no different to Ubuntu, Redhat or even Novell in terms of Linux. Apart from of course that company got dibs on the name 'Firefox' which strictly literally speaking might not be all that kosher (see another religious reference for all the micr
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Well I'm not sure what you mean by dirty but I certainly wouldn't blindly trust a company that produced the Google-Ministry-for-Truth [google.cn] and Google-For-Domain-Squatters [google.com] projects.
Re:I'd like to see more transparancy (Score:5, Insightful)
I didn't pay for Firefox. It's a rockin' product, but how does the fact that I use it give me any rights to see what deals the owner's / developers of this F/OSS project have? I think the problem is on the other side. Google is a publicly traded company, so they should have their stock holders asking them the tough questions, not bothering a F/OSS project.
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Whom should be considered the forker? (Score:2)
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"a path of secret agreements, proprietary code, and G-strings attached sponsorship"?
Anyone?
(Man, I need to get laid more often)
Opera is not an open source project. (Score:4, Insightful)
I can't imagine the screaming hissy fits if Microsoft made this type of deal with Opera. I doubt there would be any. Opera has no more responsibility to its developers than any other for-profit corporation. And they're free to follow money wherever it may lead.
Mozilla deals are different because the Mozilla non-profit organization is a representation of the community that develops Gecko and the projects they base on it. When a for-profit company is founded with an ambiguous relationship with the original organization, the role of the development community comes into question. Sure, they're still be contributing to GPL code, but will the spirit of the project still inspire such developer devotion, with so much non-paid contribution? Could they?
Re:Opera is not an open source project. (Score:4, Insightful)
What exactly is ambiguous about this relationship. Mozilla has been building search into the browser for about 8 years now. Google has been the default for almost as long. Google, along with other search companies, recently (a couple of years ago) started paying Mozilla for this feature. Mozilla discloses its full financials each year. Mozilla has said, repeatedly, that the bulk of revenue comes from search partners and that the majority of search revenue comes from (obviously) the default search service. Where's the ambiguity?
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There was some outcry when Opera recently decided to change its builtin search engine for its mobile browsers from Google to Yahoo [opera.com].
Re:I'd like to see more transparancy (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, we've been defaulting to Google as the default search engine for about 8 years, long before there was a financial relationship.
Re:I'd like to see more transparancy (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I'd like to see more transparancy (Score:5, Informative)
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I was a volunteer of sorts from the day that Netscape announced that they were to release the code. Though I dived into the slightly later released Raptor code (which became NG-Layout/Gecko). I Participated for idealist reasons, I was highly disappointed with the disrespect for established web standards, and felt that having one extremely dominant browser was a detriment overall.
Although the coding I did was l
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Fundamental difference. (Score:2)
The good guys are the ones that keep these fundamental freedoms. The bad guys would be the ones limiting our computing infrastructure choices and imposing artificial lock ins.
Fill in the blanks as appropriate.
I don't care which commercial deals are agreed between the different entitites supporting differen software projects, if they want to trade first borns it is up to them, I just want software I can migrate if necessary and that does not kidnap my data by fo
Here We Go.... (Score:2)
Given the way money and power corrupt, I'd say there's a fork coming in the next 10 years.
All hail the IceWeasel! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iceweasel [wikipedia.org]
Re:Here We Go.... (Score:5, Insightful)
I expect to get paid, I am not surprised when others do too...
I don't buy this quasi-religious non-corporate ethos as the best justification for open source - it's better engineering because it gets quality unrestricted peer review
I want a quality, well engineered genuinely innovative OS - what better justification?
as long as Google etc... etc... don't suddenly expect to own the code it's great
Re:Here We Go.... (Score:5, Interesting)
The thousands of volunteers who do much of the actual work on Firefox don't expect to get paid in dollars, but they do expect to be "rewarded" with some kind of involvement and input in their own project.
This isn't so much about Google giving money to Mozilla as it is about Mozilla obfuscating its processes from its own volunteers. Google is giving giant amounts of money to Mozilla because of the hard work of the Firefox volunteers. I don't think the volunteers expect a dime of that money, or even a vote on how it's spent, but they'd probably at least like to be able to offer suggestions on how to spend it. As it stands, they aren't even allowed to know what's happening to the money, or what kind of agreements were attached to it.
The obvious response to this complaint is "Well, it's open source; If you don't like it, go fork your own browser!", and I suspect exactly that may happen if Mozilla continues to show this kind of disrespect to the people who are, to a large degree, responsible for the foundation's success.
Re:Here We Go.... (Score:5, Insightful)
What exactly is Mozilla doing to obfuscate its processes? Is providing a dial-in number to the weekly Mozilla planning meetings some kind of obfuscation? How about dial-in numbers for the Firefox meetings and the Gecko meetings and the Support meetings and the Marketing meetings? Is that also obfuscation? How about the public Mozilla wiki that documents all of the product and project proposals, roadmaps, PRDs, buglists, etc.? More obfuscation? And the newsgroups where all of the planning discussions happen, where all of the tricky technical issues are openly evaluated? And an open bug tracking tool where all of our implementation bugs and patches are publicly discussed, reviewed, and explained? Is that just more obfuscation? How about the annual financial disclosures where the community can see exactly how much revenue Mozilla generated? And the announcements of all of our new hires (many, including project and product leads hired from volunteers in the community) All obfuscated?
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I bet a lot of us still have a bad taste in our mouth when our employers tell us to keep our salaries a secret.
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We're actually trying to use our leverage to change "how things work" in the business world. A good example would be our "companion" program. We've partnered with several large companies to build customized versions of Firefox that include new and powerful features to compliment their services. Because these partners find value in Firefox and working with Mozilla, we've been able to convince them that the code for their "companion" should b
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You are blurring the ways that an IBM or Sun interact with GPL'd projects versus mozilla for the sole purpose of disagreeing with my bias. Please, read on....
I want a quality, well engineered genuinely innovative OS - what better justification?
1. That's okay except history is full of organizations where success literally crushes innovation. The specter of failure looms large. So large, no risks are taken.
2. In
Interesting double standard of governance (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Interesting double standard of governance (Score:5, Interesting)
Thus far, Mozilla has done nothing but good things (in my opinion). They have created a nice browser and email client, distributed them as open-source, and have been aggressively promoting their products and FLOSS in general. In short, I trust them... because they have earned that trust with their actions.
So, with regard to this Google deal, I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt, and assume that they are making decisions that benefit the community. So far, we have no evidence of anything shady about the deal. (They have disclosed that the money is in exchange for Google being the default, but not the only, engine in the search bar... which is fine in my book.)
However, I'm not a fool (or at least I like to think so). And if Mozilla is found guilty of shady deals, or "betraying" the community of people who are currently evangelizing and supporting Mozilla, then I will change my stance quickly--as will most others in the community I think. The important point is that because the source-code is available to the community, everyone is empowered to fork the project and ignore Mozilla if that becomes necessary. It would be a shame to loose the Firefox brand, but at least the work that went into the codebase would not be lost.
It is this "power to the community" that makes me not worry so much... both because it means that if Mozilla becomes "evil" we have an immediate counter-reaction... and also because the existence of this possible counter-reaction makes it rather unlikely for Mozilla to ever turn their back on the community.
Re:Interesting double standard of governance (Score:5, Informative)
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I disagree. There is plenty that is shady in Mozilla and it's increasing.
Basically, there is a force within the Mozilla Foundation that's dedica
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How much money do they spend, per cert, verifying that the certs they issue are to legitimate businesses and not to phishing scams?
What does CAcert have to lose if they make a serious mistake, such as issuing a major bank certificate to a scammer?
With free SSL certificates, is there any sort of money trail to follow to hunt down and prosecute criminals who abuse th
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Pretty much the same as when Verisign/Thawte issued a certificate for "Microsoft Corp." to a malware provider, allowing them to sign their code as Microsoft?
In other words, "not a fucking thing".
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Along with every other CA. The backlog is only now being cleared.
Are you arguing that the web would become a more secure plac
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Don't get the idea that I speak for CAcert. I'm just someone that wants to use free SSL certificates and am pissed off that every time I go to use them I have to explain to clients about how to import the CAcert root and try to explain why Mozilla/Firefox doesn't see fit to include this perfectly good certificate.
Actually no, it's you who are arguing that different standards should be applied to those who don't have money.
Actually no, I'm arguing that the standards that you claim to apply have only on
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So you can prove that, through its long and varied life under various project leaders, the CACert root key has never been leaked, compromised, or given to someone who now has a grudge against the project?
No. The standard is a passed audit - i.e. a 3rd party assessment of competence. Yes
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So you can prove that, through its long and varied life under various project leaders, the CACert root key has never been leaked, compromised, or given to someone who now has a grudge against the project?
And you can prove that about Thawte/Verisign? No, all you can prove is that they paid a lot of money to some a group of self-declared accountants with expertise in security -- and that the high-standards enforced by these people led to at least one public instance of a severe social-engineering attack.
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But you still don't answer my key question: are you willing for CACert to be held to the same standard you are holding Verisign to? One mistake and you're out?
But that's not what I've suggested. You're operating on a very simplistic binary model of "trust". Mozilla's list of (you can trust these guys absolutely) certificates creates the wrong impression: especially when you make it hard for CAcert to get included in that list. Wow! CAcert must have done something worse than handing out Microsoft Cl
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Murky (Score:2)
Google's new Motto (Score:2, Funny)
Prediction (Score:2)
scale (Score:3, Informative)
when you look at the products that do scale- or implement something at a very large scale, it takes money. i've not seen an exception yet. i don't care about firefox, google and their deal - as long as the browser works the way i want.
on a side note-- as for what to do with the 'extra' money. i'd love to see it invested in making other open apps - like sunbird and thunderbird great.
Google deal a slippery slope (Score:5, Insightful)
Any time a project gets big and starts bringing in money, it gives up a certain amount of control that each person who works on it previously had. When I heard they were making a for-profit corporation to make secretive deals with massive corporations like Google, I initially thought things were worse than they are. But there's no question that there's a slippery slope in this deal where an open-source project that was previously fueled by the interest of developers could become entrenched and weighed down by the monetary and business aspects in the politics of a company.
The best way to keep things open and developers interested is to release all the information except that which Google requires be kept secret. It's already pretty clear the type of revenue that is coming from the Google. When things get this large, it's easy for those interested in developing to fall out of touch with something that resembles Microsoft a lot more than a community undertaking.
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Tricky isn't it? We all want Firefox (and open standards) to beat Flash, Sliverlight etc. to beat coporate lock in.
But is that open standards browser now a corporate lock in?
But, but... "do no evil"... we can trust google?
I say take their money, buy some good developers, then run ;-)
monk.e.boy
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What corporate lock-in? We've been providing built in search in Mozilla applications for the better part of a decade. We have always provided multiple search services and an easy mechanism for adding additional services (there are about 12,000 alternative search services here: http://mycroft.mozdev.org/ [mozdev.org] )
You don't have to trust Google. You can decide whether or not you trust Mozilla to pick reasona
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We did this for both 2004 and 2005 and will be doing it for the 2006 year financials (and then 2007 after that.) There is nothing secret here except the specific financial details that Google will not allow to be disclosed. It's not that hard to look at the Mozilla financials, read the statements from Mozilla explaining that the overwhelming majority of Mozilla's r
Financials (Score:2)
Could you provide a link that shows the depth of these financials? I don't think anything can prove your point better than the numbers themselves can.
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http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/mitchell/archives/
- A
Open it up, who cares if Google wants secrecy (Score:2)
What's the point of the secrecy in the google deal anyway?
How about Mozilla opens the kimono? If Google likes secrecy more than the deal itself, I'm sure that MSN or Yahoo or another competitor will be happy to take their place...
And this is surprising because? (Score:2)
Hmmm...a couple hundred/thousand contributors in the dark and a $52M bullseye. I'm not a lawyer, but if I was I'd probably be busy trolling for anyone wanting to class-action -iti
I'm glad (Score:5, Interesting)
I would also say that there is no danger for the community, it'd be really easy to fork it if things really got that bad... hell, we already have Ice Weasel...
They don't need influence (Score:2)
Some will claim that only a small percentage of the overall developer base will be interested in it, but this is still an invalid position. If they want to participate in those ki
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The fact is, if they're taking in that much income then they chose a wise strategy - one of several possible ones - for dealing with the tax implications. The IRS doesn't like nonprofits that take in ever-larger piles of cash without (somewhat) commensurate outlays, so this is a cash-management strategy as much as anything. Could the foundation start donating wildly to other open-source projects?
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Well.... (Score:2, Funny)
Aren't we all?
More social networking features... (Score:2)
They could call it... Mozilla Navigator...
No, but seriously. How about paying some major contributing developers, and maybe hire some on full time to develop better web standards support, instead of fucking around with features like social networking and offline browsing. Features that are way out o
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sometimes they just make shit up (Score:3, Insightful)
And this follow from what? There is nothing about the existence of the Mozilla Corporation that commits us to being less transparent. That's just bunk and it makes no sense given how transparent we are from our development process and planning to our financials.
As far as the details of specific financial relationships with search partners, those were never disclosed in detail (long before the creation of the Mozilla Corporation, in Mozilla Foundation days) and probably won't be since our various partners weren't then aren't now willing to divulge the specifics of their financial relationships with anyone. Mozilla is as transparent as we can be around those relationships, releasing our annual financials and explaining that the bulk of it comes from relationships with various search partners including our default search, Google.
The article overall is fine, but that line is just fiction.
One source of income they don't talk about... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:One source of income they don't talk about... (Score:5, Insightful)
In my opinion that's exactly the wrong way to look at it, at least when we're talking about Amazon affiliate links. Instead, I look at it this way: Whenever you buy a n item at Amazon.com without using an affiliate code, you're throwing money away - you could be using an affiliate link and donating that money to someone you wanted to support. The fact that Mozilla sets that affiliate ID to a reasonable default (support the browser you're using) when you explicitly use the built in Amazon search box is a feature, not a bug.
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How, precisely, is it a feature to do something without my consent? I don't object to donating to a cause I support - I object to donating without having consented to doing so. It doesn't matter if the company is Mozilla or Microsoft, the principle remains the same. (I know that makes me unusual nowadays - not only in havi
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No matter how much you try and spin it - to do so is wrong.
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Why would it not be entirely simple to allow users to opt in? You know, that concept that we generally like to cheer, not forcing users to opt out of using specific functionality?
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Somehow I don't see the other option (default to donating to Amazon.com) as being better than what they have now. If you want to use a different affiliate link, you can always click through to Amazon.com from somewhere else.
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If you buy a lot of stuff from Amazon it is worth opening your own Amazon associate account and putting your own id in there. I'm sure it is against Amazon's terms of service but I've done it for over a year and Amazon has given me the refe
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That's true, to some extent, but Amazon charges you the same price whether you use a referral code. If you don't like Amazon's referral-code based marketing plan, buy your books at Barnes & Noble [bn.com]. Amazon happens to have paid for a search toolbar in the official Firefox package - if the Mozilla Foundation wants to accept their money for that (and they do), they only have the choi
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1. One does not offer the greatest benefit to Mozilla by purchasing through the Firefox affiliate link; instead, their revenue would probably be a lot higher if you just donated to them directly. There would be fewer accountants to pay, and fewer books for them to keep. By donating directly, one can eliminate entire fucking corporations from the money trail (*cough* Amazon), and displace any of the needless workers they
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I strongly doubt that you'd see a noticeable price drop if Amazon ended their affiliate program. If we ignore affiliate sales for a moment, we can see that Amazon is competing with other online stores re
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I agree.
Thank you for pointing that out.
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Whenever you buy an item at Amazon.com without using an affiliate code, you're throwing money away
Unless, of course, you own AMZN shares ...
Should they ???? - YES ! (Score:3)
Yes.
Open source was a method that is unheard of for creating and publishing things some time ago, and its proving that it is an unprecedented success, as it was pitted against hulky big proprietary method-using corporation's stuff and coming out stronger every day.
Some non-it sectors and foundations are going to employ open source methods for doing things. Manufacturing, hardware was recently discussed. If it goes like this, we can find many stuff being further developed by open source methods, imitating its success in i.t. So, it is changing our world.
Now hear this - privacy, finance and transparency are the present issues to integrate with open source, but when they are once integrated with it, and a transparency by ensuring privacy and a usable financial method is achieved, then there will be no reason not to implement these methods in areas from manufacturing to government.
in short, i am telling that the methods invented in open source foundations can be the key to revolutionizing the governmental systems in the world, getting much more closer to direct democracy and full transparency concepts.
Funny... (Score:2)
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Advertise Firefox (Score:2)
After a certain point, the only way to grow a brand is through advertising.
The Firefox adoption rate amount techies (and friends and families of techies) has probably peaked. The only way non-techies will learn the benefits of Firefox is through mass market advertising.
Some will probably be agast at the thought of open source revenue being funneled to mass market, for-profit companies. But I believe these ends justify these means.
Ad
So...who makes what? (Score:2)
These same questions have been around for quite a while but it's still fun to revisit them. While I don't think that the money will stop people from contributing their time, I do think they have
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No one at Mozilla is getting rich. I'd wager that most people at Moz
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Remember that link you threw out for Mozilla's financials? There's an interesting line there in which the company details its "Total Functional Expenses", including many of those things you mention: remuneration, telephone, travel, conferences, consulting fees, etc. Sum total in 2005: $2.96M.
Assuming Mozilla Corp has doubled in size between 2005 and 2006 financial
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All that being said, nowhere did I claim that Mozilla was "breaking even". If we were, how could we have had $29M on hand at the end of 2005.
Finally, my post was
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And I totally agree re your replying to bogie.
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You seem to be assuming that all the money is being spent. The Mozilla financials (which are public) show that this is not the case. A significant portion is being saved.
Which is a good thing -- it means that if at some point in the future Google demands something that is not consistent with the Mozilla Foundation mission Mozilla can walk away from the arrangement and continue to operate off the savings while looking for another revenue stream.