In the Firefox 2 release cycle, we had about 1,000 people contribute code. Of that group, about 40 were paid by Mozilla. Literally, we could not ship Firefox without our dedicated community of contributors.

And it’s not just code. We had more than 16,000 people report at least one bug during the Firefox 2 cycle, and more than 10,000 people downloading nightly builds every single day and providing testing and feedback.

That’s pretty crazy! At least I can contribute by reporting bugs and testing the nightlies. Thanks for the info Asa.

They will obviously put the money where they are sure to get the best return. I would like to see more time and effort put into Thunderbird just like it is with Firefox, but they just aren’t able to get the good revenue stream like they do from Firefox.

That is definitely true, but that will amount to a few million at the most. Still dividing that up amongst 90 employees results in a good salary. And don’t get me wrong, I’m extremely glad that they are getting paid well and receiving good benefits because that is what keeps the browser ticking.

In the Firefox 2 release cycle, we had about 1,000 people contribute code. Of that group, about 40 were paid by Mozilla. Literally, we could not ship Firefox without our dedicated community of contributors.

And it’s not just code. We had more than 16,000 people report at least one bug during the Firefox 2 cycle, and more than 10,000 people downloading nightly builds every single day and providing testing and feedback.

But it didn’t stop with the technical folks at code and QA. There are almost 70,000 people who have put up a “Get Firefox” button at their websites and blogs and this accounts for the equivalent of 20-30 million (yes million) ad impressions a week.

Ryan is correct, that we also depend on our paid team. We’re supporting 120 million users and working on the next two versions of Firefox. It takes a lot of time and effort and I’m thrilled that we’ve been able to go from 10 employees when we started the Foundation 4 years ago to about 120 people today. That’s 110 more Mozilla contributors who get to do it full time and collect a paycheck.

I was a volunteer on this project for almost two years before getting hired and even though I was passionate about Mozilla, I was only able to put about 20-30 hours a week into it because I had another full-time job that I hated. When I got hired, I was able to put two to three times that much work into Mozilla.

Being able to hire and pay a competitive salary for a wide range of jobs (from coding to QA to marketing and IT) is another sign that we’re on the right path.

If you’re interested in joining Mozilla full-time, check out our careers@mozilla website at [mozilla.com]

- A

I thought they were volunteers……..

They do have thousands of volunteers, but as Asa once told me…when a deadline is due you can’t always count on the volunteers to be available.

There’s no doubt that the execs get paid a lot more. I’m sure that the CEO is upwards of $500k. The peon developers and testers are probably averaging out $80K to $90K though.