Not sure how much the devs are paid if any, but the CEO was taking a cool 400K home every year. Their job was to diversify Mozilla so that it wouldn't depend totally on someone that was making a competing product, and utterly failing at that since multiple years.
Last I heard, the IRS was investigating them for claiming deductions as a charitable foundation but funneling money to the Mozilla Corporation.
They've only recently started concentrating on paying developers to reduce the memory leaks, bloat etc after Chrome started eating their lunch in a big way.
How is this a poster child for a good way to develop good and useful software for the masses? In fact, it seems to exemplify the pitfalls and weakness in the model, if nothing else.
Well enough that they can hire a few hundred full-time people, apparently, yes? Including some people who should clearly have no shortage of other job offers (e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Seward ).
> Last I heard, the IRS was investigating them
The IRS is doing an audit (which is not the same thing as an investigation, by the way).
The IRS is also auditing, right this second, Apple, Google, and Microsoft. In fact, last I checked, for companies like Apple or Microsoft they had full-time auditors assigned to them on an ongoing basis.
As far as the memory leaks thing... That's a developer-driven project, like many other things at Mozilla. Most developers there are not paid to do a specific task; they're paid to do the right thing. Just like Google doesn't hire you for a particular project, by the way.
I have a couple of friends that work at Mozilla. They are indeed getting paid, have always gotten paid, and (in all likelihoods) will continue getting paid. You are probably referring to the Bugs for Cash thing they did. And a quick google search shows that, yes, mozilla has made good on that too.
As for the IRS, they were auditing Mozilla's finances. And since when is there an implicit assumption of guilt in an audit?
Last I heard, the IRS was investigating them for claiming deductions as a charitable foundation but funneling money to the Mozilla Corporation.
They've only recently started concentrating on paying developers to reduce the memory leaks, bloat etc after Chrome started eating their lunch in a big way.
How is this a poster child for a good way to develop good and useful software for the masses? In fact, it seems to exemplify the pitfalls and weakness in the model, if nothing else.