| Let's do some back-of-a-napkin maths here and see if we could... Just for fun of course :D === ANNUAL COSTS === 20 developers at $150k each = $3M Other staff costs, like pensions etc. = $1.5M Someone in charge of overall project = $250k (this doesn't have to be the case. He could easily be a dev on $150k but lets run with it) Infrastructure for testing and whatnot. Lets say Azure (expensive!) = $1M 2 x Marketing peeps = $250k Other expenses (travel, rubber ducks etc.) = $1M I literally pulled these figures out my ass (as you can no doubt tell!) but lets add it up: $3M + $1.5M + $0.25M + $1M + $0.25M + $1M = $7M per year. That's really, really expensive imo and you could do it for way less, but given their current revenue stream that's 80 years of development if they took in no more money ever! Now, I don't know how many it would take to program a browser but it's already written so it's not as hard as doing it from scratch so I reckon 20 good devs would give you something special. Honestly, if someone said to me "Mick, here's $560M, put a team together and fork Firefox and Thunderbird. Pay yourself 250k and go for it"... I'd barely let them finish the sentence before signing a contract :) |
It should be at least 100 devs at $250k each, which is still a severe underestimation. Note that there are many different types of mandatory expenses that roughly matches to the direct compensation, so with $150K you can only pay ~$75K. And you cannot attract senior browser devs at $75K annual compensation. This alone makes $25M year and the reality should be closer to $100M, which makes Mozilla's OPEX more plausible.