Stupid question perhaps, but I thought Firefox was an open source project?
Why does it need a company with highly-paid executives and HR departments and all that to exist?
If Firefox/Mozilla the company goes out of business then .... nothing changes? Apart from of course a bunch of people sadly lose their full-time jobs and development speed slows dramatically as people are no longer working on it full-time and only volunteers contribute. Maybe some slick marketing goes out of the window and there are no more budgets for server farms to run Pocket (Oh no...</sarcasm>) and other centralised servers for distractions from the main Firefox product etc, but I am sure donations will cover the cost of a few .com domain names to keep those going (I'll stump up the $20 for the first year registrar costs if they need it)
Can everything go back to normal OSS development and distribution with almost-zero overhead (host on github, distribute over torrent/dat etc) if the business fails?
Don't get me wrong: I like Firefox and use it as my main desktop & mobile browser.
The problem is that the modern web is very complicated. Building a modern browser requires a lots of resources and that needs a big team with steady funding.
While the money is available (google) having a team this big requires enterprise level management, which leads to enterprise level shenanigans...
Well web browsers are to complex to maintain by part time Dev unless you have an upstream to rebase on or do not mind in implementing new stuff. You need at least 10 to 20 full time Devs at the minimum and that's if you libaries for all web APIs which clearly Firefox and Chrome are not doing. I wish there was a way to browser modular frankly.
The GP referred to "highly-paid executives and HR departments and all that", not developers.
Still. There are some obvious counter-examples of development of extremely complex projects being community-driven under the aegis of much lighter-weight organisations than Mozilla. LibreOffice is an obvious one; The Document Foundation had (at the last report) total expenses of $679,000, with nearly all of that coming from user donations.
To sustain an independent, cutting-edge, competive browser engine you need several hundred excellent engineers working full-time, at least. No-one's been able to do it with less.
No, it's hard to get. Also tricky is what counts as "the engine" varies from project to project. E.g. Webkit doesn't cover as much functionality as Gecko or Chromium, e.g. the HTTP stack is separate.
Why does it need a company with highly-paid executives and HR departments and all that to exist?
If Firefox/Mozilla the company goes out of business then .... nothing changes? Apart from of course a bunch of people sadly lose their full-time jobs and development speed slows dramatically as people are no longer working on it full-time and only volunteers contribute. Maybe some slick marketing goes out of the window and there are no more budgets for server farms to run Pocket (Oh no...</sarcasm>) and other centralised servers for distractions from the main Firefox product etc, but I am sure donations will cover the cost of a few .com domain names to keep those going (I'll stump up the $20 for the first year registrar costs if they need it)
Can everything go back to normal OSS development and distribution with almost-zero overhead (host on github, distribute over torrent/dat etc) if the business fails?
Don't get me wrong: I like Firefox and use it as my main desktop & mobile browser.