[acdha]

This is a silly conspiracy theory if you think about it even a little bit. The grant you're referring to was $15K grant to Buildbot, which Mozilla has used heavily for years, and that was both to update terminology and “also to make improvements so Buildbot works better in the Amazon EC2 cloud” — guess which one is more work? — and $15K is a big amount to an open source maintainer but tiny when you're talking about budgets measured in hundreds of millions of dollars. You don't solve major budgetary issues by going after tiny fractions of one percent when there are individual people making orders of magnitude more money.

Mozilla is also one of the most open companies in our field — given how often we read about far less significant events there, it seems incredibly unlikely that there's some sort of substantial but well-concealed dark funding of “PC work” which has remained secret even after, say, lots of people being laid off or leaving especially when such work would by necessity have visible impacts.