In 2009 the Mozilla Foundation chalked up $104 million in revenue[1] from ties with Google, Yahoo, Yandex, Amazon, Ebay and others. I'd imagine there are some large donations in there as well.
I think our current drive to re-architect Firebug is on the
right track, but I could not obtain another year of support
from IBM to contribute to that work.
Clearly, he would have stayed if either IBM or Mozilla offered their "support." Programmers need to eat :x
Google's resources are orders of magnitude larger than Mozilla's.
Google's marketing budget for Chrome is likely larger than Mozilla's entire budget overall.
I can't say anything about this particular hire and what the reasons were there, since I know nothing about it. But in general if money is your goal, Google can outbid everyone else, often by a lot.
In spite of the completely irrelevant lack of marketing money, Mozilla could still have hired John (if he would even have accepted, at this point).
I wasn't expecting this announcement, but it's not surprising. Google is actively developing their dev tools, and Mozilla has...some exploratory experiments, with no concrete roadmap for a feature complete Firebug replacement. I still don't understand the politics behind Mozilla's decisions regarding firebug and switching to developing built-in tools (while giving token support to the firebug crew), but it was a poor one. A clean slate is great in theory, but when you alienate a community and defacto-deprecate a tool with no replacement in sight, this is exactly the kind of thing you should expect.
I will certainly grant that our roadmap has never called for a "feature complete Firebug replacement". Our goal has been to explore new ideas while building out tools that we can ship with the browser. We're also working on improving Firefox's infrastructure for developer tools (a whole new JavaScript debugging interface is underway for SpiderMonkey, for example).
Mozilla has a lot going on and Firebug, for it's part, is an independent project with goals and plans of its own. I wrote about this a bit here:
> In spite of the completely irrelevant lack of marketing money, Mozilla could still have hired John (if he would even have accepted, at this point).
Of course, Mozilla could have hired him in theory. Perhaps it made him an offer. I have no idea. I was just responding to the previous comment, pointing out that as far as money is concerned, I am quite sure Google can offer much more than Mozilla (or basically anyone else, except perhaps Apple, Microsoft, etc. And of course some startups can offer more in terms of shares, but not cash.)
The comment about marketing was a quick way to give an idea of the difference in budget between Google and Mozilla.
> I wasn't expecting this announcement, but it's not surprising. Google is actively developing their dev tools, and Mozilla has...some exploratory experiments
I would say Mozilla's development tools are much more than experiments, but I agree Google has focused on them as a core part of the browser for longer. In part this is because of the existence of Firebug, which made it so Mozilla did not have to focus on such things. But there has definitely been a recent shift in Mozilla on this matter.
There is no politics. Simply put, the developer who first wrote it worked at Mozilla, Firefox's tools aren't designed to replace Firebug and Mozilla coordinated releases with the Firebug team. So many negatives assumptions and unsupported claims when it comes to Firefox, if people wouldn't be so insular they would know what they are talking about.
In 2009 the Mozilla Foundation chalked up $104 million in revenue[1] from ties with Google, Yahoo, Yandex, Amazon, Ebay and others. I'd imagine there are some large donations in there as well.
[1] http://www.mozilla.org/foundation/annualreport/2009/faq.html