>Our mission is to ensure the Internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all. An Internet that truly puts people first, where individuals can shape their own experience and are empowered, safe and independent.
> We’re awarding $225,000 to technologists and media makers who help the public understand how threats to a healthy internet affect their everyday lives.
> In a world where biased algorithms, skewed data sets, and broken recommendation engines can radicalize YouTube users, promote racism, and spread fake news, it’s more important than ever to support artwork and advocacy work that educates and engages internet users.
I guess that's somewhat related to their mission. Although they seem to be taking on more of an activism / PR role with this project.
My guess is that it's largely people within Mozilla responding to the popular outrage against Russian 'bots', fake news, and the alt-right.
The Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation have vastly different budgets and staff, and have very different ways of supporting the same mission.
The Foundation focuses on advocacy and movement building around internet related topics (i.e. Privacy & Security, Digital Inclusion), while the Corporation focuses mainly on Firefox, Research projects (Rust, WASM, WebVR), standards work, and other "product" related things.
Why not (serious) social science projects? Don't have today's sociologists have anything to say about this or do they need a few more decades for warm up.
I would argue that we are at a point where it's more important to raise awareness of the dangers of algorithmic bias and other AI issues because the public is not aware of them. Art is provocative and fits this role nicely.
To answer your question directly though, there is "serious" work like that from people like Veale and Skirpan; also orgs like AI Now are very serious about this area.
This would roughly fund 1-2 technical staff to work on one project for one year. Probably just 1 staff if the project involves statistical methodology work, data collection, and modeling to empirically assess society impacts rather than writing yet another safe AI / AGI risk essay.
Not a normative judgment, just thinking about what people think this labor costs vs. what it actually costs.
If for that money one can get only one manyear in the bay area due to the cost of living, wouldn't it make much more sense to hire 4 people for a year elsewhere?
I would guess it is closer to the cost of 1 engineer, maybe below. Conservative estimate of the average engineer at a company in the bay area is above 100K in cash compensation plus the cost multiplier of an employee is easily 2x once you account for benefits and other employer costs.
Mozilla Corporation is different from Mozilla Foundation. The Foundation runs off of donations and occasional cash infusions from the corporation. Basically, the Foundation's work doesn't affect the engineering budgets at all.
This is a really important study that should be conducted by an organization with a strong engineering culture and as little bias as possible. Who would be better then Mozilla to do this? I really don't trust academia to do this with all of its misplaced incentives.
> I really don't trust academia to do this with all of its misplaced incentives.
We've really learned to repeat the anti-'academia' meme. There is no "academia"; Mozilla is an organization; "academia" is millions of people around the world in every place and environment imaginable. It's absurd to assume all these people are the same or coordinated somehow.
Given the absurdity, one might ask: Who would be interested in discrediting everything produced by every college and university?
While I believe there are real dangers AI can cause, I don't know how you'd go about proving such a thing without recreating the problem in a different constructed variant.
Psychology and sociology are 'soft' sciences because you can't test people psychologically and sociologically in 'hard' ways without seriously crossing some serious ethical boundaries.
It could be argued that a lot of the decisions being made that back the design in contemporary infrastructures already are engaged in this sort of testing and behavioral modification, in ways that seem innocent from the onset, but yet still propagate across social systems in ways that are far too chaotic and complex to forecast.
Trained algorithms, even if they are not designed for directed impact, can be manipulated via data fed into them to have a targeted impact. To be trained is to have bias.
I don't know if I would use the word 'inflict' when one is inferring intents.
I think if there were more transparency concerning these systems and their affiliated organizations, that would obviate the need to add another layer of reasoning, which would reduce the number of unknowns, rather than increase.
Of course, that requires cooperation and trust. Which brings one back to the question of intents. Which can conflate intents meant to 'inflict' (harm?) or intents meant to grow, develop, inspire, progress.
If anyone is interested I would recommend Alexandra Meliou. She does research at UMass and her work explores making data and large data manipulation more transparent, and also therefore does some amount in quantifying bias and diversity. I attended a talk by her and it was very enlightening.
Why is Mozilla investing in this study? It’s a good cause but should Mozilla be the one doing this? I feel bad when they are doing this but I still can’t use Firefox on macOS because they won’t implement support for keychain and then they go ahead and stretch themselves thin on these things.
I mean it’s all good and fine but please also focus on the one thing you are supposed to be doing primarily.
As much as I love firefox, I'm sad to say that the executives who run Mozilla Corp are of a self-serving variety.
Not in terms of material greed so much as in terms of craving social status. It's apparent in their meetings if you watch and listen.
What I mean to say is, the people in charge of the purse strings are chasing after ego boosting "social good" type stuff over improving the tech and improving the internet. Stuff that will grab a few headlines and make them feel warm and fuzzy when they tell people about "their" company at dinner parties.
The rank and file employees are some of the most awesome people on the planet though.
"Why is an organization spending their money on things that I personally don't care about? Large groups of people can only do ever one thing at a time and problems can always be solved faster by throwing money at them."
Yeah, it was a really low content post, for sure. It didn't have much to do with the article at all - or even the same organization, technically.
And in every topic like this, ones about Mozilla's spending (or sometimes Chrome or any other org that has a popular, free product), someone feels the need to say "but why not this one bug that I harp on?" really, really consistently.
Treating users this way "harping about a bug" is a surefire way to lose market share. I wonder if this is really the case. I didn't know about the organisational structure. For a lot of people Mozilla IS Firefox.
How was it low content? In a post about spending am I not allowed to specify my opinion about the spending? You can think of me as some entitled jerk and that's your opinion and I myself doubt I might be acting like one. "But" I would expect that you would allow me to at least say how I feel about it. It's not a technical debate, there can be multiple points of view not necessarily right or wrong.
No, you really don't. You donate to the Mozilla Foundation, who are the non-profit parent company who do these kinds of things, not build Firefox. Firefox is made by their subsidiary Corporation, who cannot accept your donations.
The Corporation doesn't even need your donations anyway; they make a lot more revenue than the donations Mozilla receives.
However, the more you donate, the larger the whole company is allowed to grow while legally being a non-profit. Also, the more is donated, the more they are allowed to transfer between the Foundation and the Corporation.
But you are still not ultimately donating to Firefox. You are donating to the Foundation, who need the money more in the first place so that the whole can legally remain a non-profit, even if they earn more revenue.
Whether or not you feel they should have more money to work with is up to you, but I note that quite a few people seem to wish that Mozilla could do pie-in-the-sky stuff like manage their own user clouds and VPNs and search engines while not remaining motivated by shareholder profits.
Well, the email that asked me to donate very much implied that I should donate to keep Firefox going and fight the good fight. I might have misunderstood it and since my money is not needed, I should consider donating to something else in the future.
Feel free, but I don't see why you would draw the conclusion that your money is not needed from what I said (even if Firefox has enough revenue to work with for now, your donations keep the whole organization viable as-is; you're just not directly donating to Firefox).
This corruption we've sown has now taken root
in a void of trust.
What's growing there?
The fight against hatred looks like hate to me.
Define acceptable enemies.
Prejudices of the past have been defaced,
so new ones form to take their place.
Outrage gone viral. Social disease.
Save us from ourselves, algorithms please.
Attacks of anonymous authorship.
Suppressed voices decry censorship.
And it's rubbing off on me:
this modern sort of hatred.
Where calls for unity are really calls to blame:
attempts to silence and to shame.
Dissenting voices we hoped to render mute,
that we wished we'd crushed.
Am I one of them?
We "the people" united for the cause.
But did no one else here think to pause
and question if the cause is just?
Tribe loyalty our proxy for trust.
Black and blue. Who matters? Which lives?
Circled wagons on all sides.
What we oppose is how we're defined.
The price of safety is to toe the line. And it's rubbing off on me:
this modern form of hatred.
Now virtue is an act to be signaled and seen.
Social capital is currency.
Those villains we thought we'd crushed under boots
into ash and dust.
Are they really gone?
Right and wrong sides of history.
Are there consequences we cannot foresee?
Does asking that make me the enemy?
Empty rhetoric and sophistry.
The backlash is the truth no one can hide.
Institutions, leaders, and "experts" tried.
No one believes the noble lie anymore.
Tabula Rasa lies broken on the floor.
And it's rubbing off on me:
this brand of modern hatred.
When justice is only meant for peoples,
does the individual become evil?
The hope we had for a world of peace and truth
left to die and rust.
Are those two at odds?
And it's rubbing off on me:
this brave new modern hatred.
Not everything is beautiful that's true:
the darkness within me and you.
This is an unpopular opinion here, but the facts stand.
Mozilla makes money disappear. Their 2016 revenues were in excess of $520M, and their claimed output was the Quantum browser.
The two largest R&D verticals seem to be their browser and the codecs group. That still doesn't account for expenses of $520M in 2016, and much much more in 2017.
Browser engineers aren't exactly cheap. 250k for a good C++ Dev is reasonable. Assuming 100 engineers (a very conservative estimate), that's 25 million in just pay alone. 50 million including codec. Now add in the costs of infrastructure, community engagement, DevOps, Marketing etc. and the costs will quickly balloon. Browsers are critical infrastructure like operating systems. Their complexity is on the same level as OSes, perhaps even more. It's exposed to hostile code everyday, you don't want people who don't know what they are doing to work on it. This isn't some sort of dating app where the only vulnerability you have to worry about is a code injection in the birthday form field.
So the true benefit (to the community) is about $50M +- 10%. Heck, let's double it and call it $100M.
The remaining expenses are fluff. In a corporation, one wouldn't be allowed to have non-essential expenses far exceed essential ones. In a non-profit, this philosophy needs doubling down on.
I might be completely wrong, but Mozilla seems to be subsidizing the whims of a corrupt few at the top.
Unlike at GOOG, MSFT, AAPL, Firefox isn't a loss leader or cost for Mozilla that can be subsidized by other products. Before criticizing their finances, go find an organisation that can afford to even build and maintain a full-fledge cross-platform browser with mobile support for less than that. Browsers are not simple things. You have to create an entire ecosystem of software and development tools to go along with it as well as maintaining full legacy support. Most software of similar complexity are all built by organisations with deep pockets.
And what might that intent be? Are you suggesting Mozilla's top brass are bonafide angels doing God's work, above public scrutiny? They seem to position themselves as champions of the people and freedom, much like politicians
This is an unpopular opinion here, but I'm tired of these attacks.
You have no idea what it takes to have _hundreds_ of engineers and supporting teams to work on a multi-million lines of code application that needs to be shipped to a giant group of users.
What do you think Mozilla is? A bunch of hackers in a room? It is a global company with 1200 employees. In a dozen offices around the world.
How do you think money disappears? You think Firefox and all the other things Mozilla does happen by itself? That this is all free? That this does not cost any money? ....
Convenient spin that questioning Mozilla's finances equates to hating Mozilla. It's trivial to quell doubts with facts, but a slippery slope to label doubts as hate and shift the conversation to positive marketing and spin.
I've ABSOLUTELY read the fabled financial report [1]. Things get even more suspicious if one nit-picks on it. Software development cost Mozilla $225M in 2016 and other expenses $135M. An unacceptable amount of expenses go into non-core activities!
If you're a software engineer @ Mozilla and earn less than ~$190K/annum ($225M/1200 employees), your boss is exploiting you. OR Mozilla routinely pays actual engineers far lesser than what their top brass spend on whims.
$190k/y cost doesn't mean an engineer earns $190k/year. Not even close. I'd guess that means they're around average $140k/year income - which really isn't that high for engineers, especially since they have a large presence in the Bay Area.
The other expenses break down into mostly marketing ($47M) and "general and administrative" ($59M). The first one makes sense - it's a small budget for a global presence. G&A usually includes office rent, which I'd bet is a huge chunk.
Let's do the math: SF is ~$80/sq.ft. Usually assumed is $175 sq.ft/engineer. That's $16M of those $59M. Then there's utilities, insurance, etc. Let's call it $20M.
Then there's legal expenses - those usually go into G&A. Given that in 2016, Mozilla squeezed $1B of payments out of Verizon ($375M/year until 2019), I'd assume some lawyers made a good chunk of money. Given the huge jump in G&A from 2015, I'm willing to attribute the entire difference ($20M) to legal costs. This was a huge one-time event, it would make sense.
Now we've explained $40M of those $59M. So, at this point, we're debating if the remaining $19M could possibly have been extracted nefariously. Likely, no, because there's more costs. And if you have 1,200 employees, costs add up quickly.
Meanwhile, the only evidence you've brought for your accusation is "because I believe it's true". That's not even close to meaningful. You're certainly entitled to your own opinion, but the facts we all share say otherwise.
2. Not all of them are devs, and devs are (typically) the most expensive. Which should further increase the average US compensation for devs to MUCH MORE than $140K
3. GitLab has hundreds of employees but they choose to have a lean real estate footprint, especially in exorbitant zip codes like SF to keep costs low. Obviously, Mozilla isn't concerned by minutiae like over paying for real estate
4. Why does Mozilla need a ~$50M marketing budget? HUGE RED FLAG!!!
5. Self adorned morally upright Mozilla squeezing out a $1B to squander on __insert-here__ is a crime against humanity. They neither have a moral edge over Verizon, nor does money in their coffers benefit humanity. It empowers the senior management in much the same way as government funding empowers the morally bankrupt politicians at the helm.
In conclusion, Mozilla's budget breaks down into 66% software (whose costs still don't make sense given their global developer footprint), and 33% B.S. overhead.
If one digs deeper, (I'm guessing) you'll find the senior management @ Mozilla to be earning orders of magnitude over junior developers - like a private corp. Further, even private corps have no tolerance for 33% of their budget being squandered!! [Atlassian, Gitlab, ...] are famous for having almost $0 in marketing budget, while a not-for-profit like Mozilla THAT HAS NOTHING TO SELL thinks it OK to wash $50M down the loo.
We need a politico like organization to go deep into Mozilla's inner workings as these numbers DO NOT COMPUTE
As for PR/marketing, it might be worth remembering Mozilla's mission: "...to ensure the Internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all"
Yeah, kinda needs marketing.
But really, your mind is set. It's part of a conspiracy to enrich the Mozilla leadership. If that helps you sleep at night, go for it.
68 comments
[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 142 ms ] threadI understand that it may be useful but this is far outside of what I would expect Mozilla to spend its funds on.
>Our mission is to ensure the Internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all. An Internet that truly puts people first, where individuals can shape their own experience and are empowered, safe and independent.
How do they think they'll accomplish that, short of taking over the world's governments?
Hipsters gonna hips.
It looks like they've got too much money too, despite being dependent on Google's handouts for survival.
> We’re awarding $225,000 to technologists and media makers who help the public understand how threats to a healthy internet affect their everyday lives.
> In a world where biased algorithms, skewed data sets, and broken recommendation engines can radicalize YouTube users, promote racism, and spread fake news, it’s more important than ever to support artwork and advocacy work that educates and engages internet users.
I guess that's somewhat related to their mission. Although they seem to be taking on more of an activism / PR role with this project.
My guess is that it's largely people within Mozilla responding to the popular outrage against Russian 'bots', fake news, and the alt-right.
The Foundation focuses on advocacy and movement building around internet related topics (i.e. Privacy & Security, Digital Inclusion), while the Corporation focuses mainly on Firefox, Research projects (Rust, WASM, WebVR), standards work, and other "product" related things.
(source: I'm a Mozilla Foundation staff member)
Why not (serious) social science projects? Don't have today's sociologists have anything to say about this or do they need a few more decades for warm up.
To answer your question directly though, there is "serious" work like that from people like Veale and Skirpan; also orgs like AI Now are very serious about this area.
Not a normative judgment, just thinking about what people think this labor costs vs. what it actually costs.
Can you explain how this is Mozilla "throw[ing] its money away"?
So do various other companies with significant physical presences in the Bay Area (Google and Facebook come to mind).
We've really learned to repeat the anti-'academia' meme. There is no "academia"; Mozilla is an organization; "academia" is millions of people around the world in every place and environment imaginable. It's absurd to assume all these people are the same or coordinated somehow.
Given the absurdity, one might ask: Who would be interested in discrediting everything produced by every college and university?
Psychology and sociology are 'soft' sciences because you can't test people psychologically and sociologically in 'hard' ways without seriously crossing some serious ethical boundaries.
It could be argued that a lot of the decisions being made that back the design in contemporary infrastructures already are engaged in this sort of testing and behavioral modification, in ways that seem innocent from the onset, but yet still propagate across social systems in ways that are far too chaotic and complex to forecast.
I think this is less about AGI/ full AI than it is about learning systems. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligenc...
That said, the impact of this stuff especially in the context of the web is both profound and evolving.
But a lot of useful Science can be done by observing, documenting, cataloging and explaining the effects of AI being already inflicted on us.
I think if there were more transparency concerning these systems and their affiliated organizations, that would obviate the need to add another layer of reasoning, which would reduce the number of unknowns, rather than increase.
Of course, that requires cooperation and trust. Which brings one back to the question of intents. Which can conflate intents meant to 'inflict' (harm?) or intents meant to grow, develop, inspire, progress.
http://people.cs.umass.edu/~ameli/
I mean it’s all good and fine but please also focus on the one thing you are supposed to be doing primarily.
Disclaimer: I donate to Firefox.
Not in terms of material greed so much as in terms of craving social status. It's apparent in their meetings if you watch and listen.
What I mean to say is, the people in charge of the purse strings are chasing after ego boosting "social good" type stuff over improving the tech and improving the internet. Stuff that will grab a few headlines and make them feel warm and fuzzy when they tell people about "their" company at dinner parties.
The rank and file employees are some of the most awesome people on the planet though.
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2016/
Issue list: https://github.com/jfitzell/mozilla-keychain/issues/88#issue...
And in every topic like this, ones about Mozilla's spending (or sometimes Chrome or any other org that has a popular, free product), someone feels the need to say "but why not this one bug that I harp on?" really, really consistently.
How was it low content? In a post about spending am I not allowed to specify my opinion about the spending? You can think of me as some entitled jerk and that's your opinion and I myself doubt I might be acting like one. "But" I would expect that you would allow me to at least say how I feel about it. It's not a technical debate, there can be multiple points of view not necessarily right or wrong.
No, you really don't. You donate to the Mozilla Foundation, who are the non-profit parent company who do these kinds of things, not build Firefox. Firefox is made by their subsidiary Corporation, who cannot accept your donations.
The Corporation doesn't even need your donations anyway; they make a lot more revenue than the donations Mozilla receives.
However, the more you donate, the larger the whole company is allowed to grow while legally being a non-profit. Also, the more is donated, the more they are allowed to transfer between the Foundation and the Corporation.
But you are still not ultimately donating to Firefox. You are donating to the Foundation, who need the money more in the first place so that the whole can legally remain a non-profit, even if they earn more revenue.
Whether or not you feel they should have more money to work with is up to you, but I note that quite a few people seem to wish that Mozilla could do pie-in-the-sky stuff like manage their own user clouds and VPNs and search engines while not remaining motivated by shareholder profits.
Leave all other garbage alone, please.
This corruption we've sown has now taken root in a void of trust. What's growing there?
The fight against hatred looks like hate to me. Define acceptable enemies. Prejudices of the past have been defaced, so new ones form to take their place.
Outrage gone viral. Social disease. Save us from ourselves, algorithms please. Attacks of anonymous authorship. Suppressed voices decry censorship.
And it's rubbing off on me: this modern sort of hatred. Where calls for unity are really calls to blame: attempts to silence and to shame.
Dissenting voices we hoped to render mute, that we wished we'd crushed. Am I one of them?
We "the people" united for the cause. But did no one else here think to pause and question if the cause is just? Tribe loyalty our proxy for trust.
Black and blue. Who matters? Which lives? Circled wagons on all sides. What we oppose is how we're defined. The price of safety is to toe the line. And it's rubbing off on me: this modern form of hatred. Now virtue is an act to be signaled and seen. Social capital is currency.
Those villains we thought we'd crushed under boots into ash and dust. Are they really gone?
Right and wrong sides of history. Are there consequences we cannot foresee? Does asking that make me the enemy? Empty rhetoric and sophistry.
The backlash is the truth no one can hide. Institutions, leaders, and "experts" tried. No one believes the noble lie anymore. Tabula Rasa lies broken on the floor.
And it's rubbing off on me: this brand of modern hatred. When justice is only meant for peoples, does the individual become evil?
The hope we had for a world of peace and truth left to die and rust. Are those two at odds?
And it's rubbing off on me: this brave new modern hatred. Not everything is beautiful that's true: the darkness within me and you.
Mozilla makes money disappear. Their 2016 revenues were in excess of $520M, and their claimed output was the Quantum browser.
The two largest R&D verticals seem to be their browser and the codecs group. That still doesn't account for expenses of $520M in 2016, and much much more in 2017.
Where is all the money going, Mozilla?
A similar thing could be happening to Wikimedia Foundation's finances.
The remaining expenses are fluff. In a corporation, one wouldn't be allowed to have non-essential expenses far exceed essential ones. In a non-profit, this philosophy needs doubling down on.
I might be completely wrong, but Mozilla seems to be subsidizing the whims of a corrupt few at the top.
Your napkin "calculations" make zero sense. Go read the financial report.
"""Mozilla seems to be subsidizing the whims of a corrupt few at the top"""
Ah it is clear what your real intent is.
And what might that intent be? Are you suggesting Mozilla's top brass are bonafide angels doing God's work, above public scrutiny? They seem to position themselves as champions of the people and freedom, much like politicians
You have no idea what it takes to have _hundreds_ of engineers and supporting teams to work on a multi-million lines of code application that needs to be shipped to a giant group of users.
What do you think Mozilla is? A bunch of hackers in a room? It is a global company with 1200 employees. In a dozen offices around the world.
How do you think money disappears? You think Firefox and all the other things Mozilla does happen by itself? That this is all free? That this does not cost any money? ....
The question you need to ask is if the chrome (browser) and codec team in Google add up to 1200. Or the IE+Edge and __add_MSFT_GRP__ add up to 1200.
Further, do those groups cost their parents $500M/year?
Please stop talking.
There is so much interesting going on in the linked post, I really wish this community would be able to have a mature discussion about that.
If you're a software engineer @ Mozilla and earn less than ~$190K/annum ($225M/1200 employees), your boss is exploiting you. OR Mozilla routinely pays actual engineers far lesser than what their top brass spend on whims.
[1]: https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2016/2016_Mozilla_Au...
The other expenses break down into mostly marketing ($47M) and "general and administrative" ($59M). The first one makes sense - it's a small budget for a global presence. G&A usually includes office rent, which I'd bet is a huge chunk.
Let's do the math: SF is ~$80/sq.ft. Usually assumed is $175 sq.ft/engineer. That's $16M of those $59M. Then there's utilities, insurance, etc. Let's call it $20M.
Then there's legal expenses - those usually go into G&A. Given that in 2016, Mozilla squeezed $1B of payments out of Verizon ($375M/year until 2019), I'd assume some lawyers made a good chunk of money. Given the huge jump in G&A from 2015, I'm willing to attribute the entire difference ($20M) to legal costs. This was a huge one-time event, it would make sense.
Now we've explained $40M of those $59M. So, at this point, we're debating if the remaining $19M could possibly have been extracted nefariously. Likely, no, because there's more costs. And if you have 1,200 employees, costs add up quickly.
Meanwhile, the only evidence you've brought for your accusation is "because I believe it's true". That's not even close to meaningful. You're certainly entitled to your own opinion, but the facts we all share say otherwise.
2. Not all of them are devs, and devs are (typically) the most expensive. Which should further increase the average US compensation for devs to MUCH MORE than $140K
3. GitLab has hundreds of employees but they choose to have a lean real estate footprint, especially in exorbitant zip codes like SF to keep costs low. Obviously, Mozilla isn't concerned by minutiae like over paying for real estate
4. Why does Mozilla need a ~$50M marketing budget? HUGE RED FLAG!!!
5. Self adorned morally upright Mozilla squeezing out a $1B to squander on __insert-here__ is a crime against humanity. They neither have a moral edge over Verizon, nor does money in their coffers benefit humanity. It empowers the senior management in much the same way as government funding empowers the morally bankrupt politicians at the helm.
In conclusion, Mozilla's budget breaks down into 66% software (whose costs still don't make sense given their global developer footprint), and 33% B.S. overhead.
If one digs deeper, (I'm guessing) you'll find the senior management @ Mozilla to be earning orders of magnitude over junior developers - like a private corp. Further, even private corps have no tolerance for 33% of their budget being squandered!! [Atlassian, Gitlab, ...] are famous for having almost $0 in marketing budget, while a not-for-profit like Mozilla THAT HAS NOTHING TO SELL thinks it OK to wash $50M down the loo.
We need a politico like organization to go deep into Mozilla's inner workings as these numbers DO NOT COMPUTE
As for PR/marketing, it might be worth remembering Mozilla's mission: "...to ensure the Internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all"
Yeah, kinda needs marketing.
But really, your mind is set. It's part of a conspiracy to enrich the Mozilla leadership. If that helps you sleep at night, go for it.