[amatecha]

I mean, there are tons of massively successful free (beer and liberty) software that have been around for decades. Why does Mozilla need Meta's or Google's money? Why have other free software products (thinking of OSes like FreeBSD and OpenBSD here) had active, high-quality development for decades without resorting to harvesting user data for profit? Isn't Mozilla a non-profit corporation? Hell, their website's title is "Internet for people, not profit", so what's happening here? And like someone else raised, why isn't there Mozilla and Firefox official swag?!

[themacguffinman]

Mozilla can follow FreeBSD and OpenBSD's example and achieve a marketshare just as negligible as theirs. And just like FreeBSD and OpenBSD, Mozilla can wave goodbye to official support by any major consumer service or software.

Mozilla doesn't have normal swag but they sell Mozilla VPN. You can also donate directly to the foundation. The lack of gear is a little weird though because they used to have a gear store but they shut it down. I suspect not enough gear was being sold to be worth the trouble of selling official gear.

[dralley]

Those projects are funded by engineers from Netflix and Netapp who do make plenty of money off that software.

Nobody does the same with Firefox. Really the only prominent external contributor (that I know of at least) is Martin Stransky of Red Hat who does a lot of the Linux maintainence.