We know that. Very soon Google will start pushing Chrome so, no money and advertisement for Firefox. Firefox is already a bloated peace of $#$% and the other Mozarela products are just the same.

Not good times ahead for Mozzarela.

Your math is off, unless you expect to hire engineers in the 3rd world. Rule of thumb in the USA is that carrying costs (employment taxes, retirement, health insurance, equipment, facilities, etc) are equal to salary - so unless those engineers are working for less than US$30k/yr, it is unlikely that Mozilla could hire 1,000 of them.

Then there is the cost of additional facilities like data centers plus bandwidth, promotion/advertising, lawyers, etc.

The great thing about the Mozilla Foundation being a non-profit is that all of their financials are audited and available online, just google for "Mozilla Foundation." You will find that last year they saved roughly $25M of their income and spent roughly $21M on software development, $17M on taxes, $6M on advertising and $5M on management and administration.

It appears they spent about $33M this year and are holding onto the rest.

Mitchell Baker, the MF Chairperson, describes the MF expenses in a blog post here...

http://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2008/11/19/sustainability-in-uncertain-times/

The expenses aren't broken out but from the document "2007 audited financial statement for the Mozilla Foundation" (Warning PDF) found here...

http://www.mozilla.org/foundation/documents/mf-2007-audited-financial-statement.pdf

you can see that they spent approx. $20.7M on software development, $6.3M on marketing, $5.1M on administration and $1.1M on services. It also reports $82.2M in net assests.

Google will buy Mozilla.

Still, what on earth are they doing with 80 million dollars a year? Where does all this money go. I don't get it. 

You can hire 1000 full time engineers with that kind of money.

fred - you've got it all wrong. Free software is about freedom not price. Very few free software developers give away their work - many get a paycheck from companies like Redhat, Novell, HP, IBM, Sun and yes, Mozilla. Others get paid in less tangible ways like experience either as part of college or less orthodox methods of getting credentials to get a paying a job.

The last, and probably largest, group of people who work on Free software are those who are "scratching an itch" - they need a tool to perform a task as part of their regular day-job so they take a piece of Free software, enhance it to do the work they need, and then give the enhancements back to the project to maintain for them.

One way or another, EVERYBODY gets paid. Free software ain't communism, if anything, it is the purest form of capitalism ever.

What I don't get is why an open source foundation needs 75 million dollars of revenue. The whole idea of open source software is people developping it for nothing?? What do they do with 75 million dollars? setting up a website and structuring it and lots of meetings?? Boy do I want to be the website host and after meeting caterer for the foundation.