>In reality these projects are far too huge to be purely community projects.
Mozilla is far too huge to not have money. Just 200M from those 600 million per year it took from Google, put in the bank, could pay for 50 developers/graphic designers/ $200K per year to work on it for 20 years. That would have taken care of the engine for 2 decades...
Instead they burnt money in BS ventures, Cxx salaries, events, and so on...
That is way too low to be anything more than maintenance mode. By my estimation [1], you'd want somewhere around 250 full-time equivalents to be able to declare the project in a healthy state.
[1] Take the number I'd estimate for Thunderbird, multiply by 10 for Firefox-scale, then add another 20% to account for the operations that Thunderbird gets "for free" (e.g., maintaining server infrastructure) and accounting for the fact that email standards are far slower in innovation than browser standards.
So? 20 years ago Netscape still had a much larger team, Microsoft too, and Webkit with its small team still beat them in their own game.
Small teams can build whole OSes, browsers, compilers, and whatever they put their mind too. Given good devs/experts, they can do so even better/faster than bigger teams.
P.S. 1 Not that a 50-strong team is small.
P.S. 2 Plus, way of missing the point. The team-of-50, 200K, 20 years = 200M was just an example. 200M is 1/3rd of what Mozilla made in a year for decades. And even those 200M would just be the raw money spent, not invested or anything. They could afford to support a 300-strong team of 20 years with 2 years of their revenue un-invested. And that's with a $200K/year salary, which doesn't have to be...
Kinda wonder what happened after the yahoo buyout. Supposedly Mozilla could have kept all the cash from yahoo's search deal, but still solicited revenue from google by making them the default instead. Where did that money go, and why not just earmark it for Firefox?
Mozilla is far too huge to not have money. Just 200M from those 600 million per year it took from Google, put in the bank, could pay for 50 developers/graphic designers/ $200K per year to work on it for 20 years. That would have taken care of the engine for 2 decades...
Instead they burnt money in BS ventures, Cxx salaries, events, and so on...