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Do they really need 400m?

If you have it, it doesn't matter, you will spend it and scream for more. Look at wikipedia.

Wikipedia collected 162m in revenue (no ads!) and spent 112m dollars! I'd be curious to dig into what % of that goes to core wikipedia and what % goes ancillary projects. You'd have to dig very deeply into their finances to figure that out.

Firefox should set apart a large chunk of that 400m/year in an endowment intended for Firefox to continue and to be independent in perpetuity. That could easily be a multiple-billion dollar endowment by now and their spending and growth from that spending should be on revenue from that endowment.

If you're a company sitting on a large mountain of cash, then your finance team isn't doing its job. Money is there to be used, unless you happen to have some sort of monopoly. And Mozilla obviously doesn't.

Competing with Google and Microsoft funded competitors ain't cheap. And requires more than developers. People don't play that nice, at least not when there's an advantage to playing dirty. And there is.

This question was downvoted but I think it's fair. There's a lot of evidence that Mozilla is pretty bloated as a company, and if they shed a lot of that bloat I see no reason to suppose they couldn't keep maintaining Firefox on a much smaller budget.

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