Having to pay lawyers for legal issues shouldn't be a reason to lay off 250 employees. It certainly can cost a lot, if they are getting service from top-legal firms, working on billable hours. But they can choose to stick retain lawyers for important matters such as IP-rights, etc., get help from the community for other legal matters and work. For example debian has the debian-legal mailing list, where a lot of lawyers hang out and are ready to help. I certainly would like to contribute if any questions regarding my area of expertise popped up.
Big law firms also do a lot of pro-bono work. Since Mozilla is a foundation they might also try to exercise these channels.
If an OSS community like Debian can manage this, why shouldn't Mozilla be able to do it.
Covid-19 crisis shouldn't affect Mozilla, everyone is still using browsers while working at home.
There are also other ways to raise money for a corporation, for example Mozilla can go public to raise money to sustain their workforce and finance important infrastructure updates such as Servo engine.
"If an OSS community like Debian can manage this, why shouldn't Mozilla be able to do it."
Debian receives hardware to test and develop on, infrastructure, and other non-monetary support from various corporations that view Debian as a project with strategic value to their businesses. Debian also benefits from only having to package software and forward bugs to the appropriate upstream maintainers -- including Mozilla. I mentioned the lawyers at Mozilla only as an example of something they actually do need money to pay for, and I strongly suspect that Mozilla's legal team has more work to do than Debian's but do not have any first-hand knowledge. Technical work is probably a larger expense for Mozilla than legal, just by the nature of developing and maintaining a web browser that has to support the modern web (which is more application runtime than document delivery).
"Mozilla can go public"
At which point they will be beholden to their shareholders and will have to be even more revenue-focused, which is what I was replying to in the first place.
Big law firms also do a lot of pro-bono work. Since Mozilla is a foundation they might also try to exercise these channels.
If an OSS community like Debian can manage this, why shouldn't Mozilla be able to do it.
Covid-19 crisis shouldn't affect Mozilla, everyone is still using browsers while working at home.
There are also other ways to raise money for a corporation, for example Mozilla can go public to raise money to sustain their workforce and finance important infrastructure updates such as Servo engine.