GingerbreadMan wrote:I was under the impression that it didn't take more than time and effort to get a project like Firefox together.
Then you are naive. Let's assume (and this is a big assumption) that none of the mozilla devs want to get compensated monetarily for the time they spend on mozilla. And I don't mean "make the big bucks," I mean just paid for the vast number of hours they spend working so that all of us benefit. Because let's be honest--time is money.
Even if you exclude the amount of money that would reasonably compensate the devs for their work, mozilla still needs a ton of money to pay for a) their many web domains, b) the outrageous amount of bandwidth they use, c) for web hosting or servers, d) I don't even know what else.
And of course the devs should be compensated if they desire. Why? Because with their skill, they could easily abandon this "non-profit" cause for a better paying, for-profit one. But they don't. And I think they should be rewarded for that.
In the end, this is an extremely expensive endeavor that has for a long time relied heavily on voluntary donations. I'm not surprised that they had to add to that paying sponsorship or some sort. I think they should have disclosed what they were doing, but I don't fault them for doing something to keep this great organization from going belly-up. It's either that.... or make people pay for their firefox.
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