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The Mozilla Foundation
gemal writes "We're very pleased to announce the creation of the Mozilla Foundation, a non-profit organization that will serve as the new home for mozilla.org. The Mozilla Foundation will continue mozilla.org's work of coordinating the development of the Mozilla codebase. With an independent non-profit as the legal home for Mozilla, we will also promote the distribution and adoption of Mozilla applications and technologies. In addition, we will raise funds to ensure Mozilla's long-term survival." Update: 07/15 21:47 GMT by T : Yablo writes "MozillaZine is running a blurb about how since earlier today, when the Mozilla Foundation was created, AOL has laid off all the Gecko developers. Ex-mozilla.org has a list of the casualties."
off the front page of the site. Moz continues to get its support, they're just polishing up a bat to hit Gates with a few times.
The World's Worst Webcomic!
From http://www.mozilla.org/press/mozilla-foundation.ht ml:
"To help launch the new organization, America Online has pledged $2 million in cash to the Mozilla Foundation over the next two years. AOL will also contribute additional resources through equipment, domain names and trademarks, and related intellectual property, as well as providing some transitional assistance for key personnel as they move into the new organization."
You know, Microsoft's street address also says a lot about their mentality.
I'm running a 1.8 laptop and it's not sluggish.
I'd say AOL wants to be rid of Mozilla. I wonder where this leaves Netscape? Is Netscape 7.1 the last browser release from this former browser company?
its sluggish because the event loop in mozilla which handles PREvents isnt that hot. with applets and javascript it tends to send invalid events to objects which dont exist and corrupt the stack. well known problem, no fix. :1 436
:
4 36 #c19
the event handling code probably needs a good overhaul. see my bug for more info
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=21
particularly this comment by a sun engineer
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=211
the code in my bug can demonstrate it -- just download and run the class/html file and click ok to corrupt your event Q/stack. may crash the browser or may just hang it.
Its basically a move.. If it was a fork, AOL would still be controlling the project. A new non-profit has been created which is taking control of the codebase.
http://www.haxwell.org
We just launched Mozilla Marketing and a marketing mailing list. So we're going to start marketing Mozilla's products much more proactively. Please join us in this effort by joining the new marketing mailing list.
From http://www.mozillafoundation.org/press/mozilla-fo
(emphasis added). Since the Mozilla Foundation is applying for 501(c)(3) status, contributions are not yet tax deductible. Which raises the interesting question, i.e., should 501(c)(3) status be granted? In particular, should contributions by AOL to the Mozilla Foundation be tax deductible when AOL will use any work performed by the "public benefit corporation" in its Netscape product? Is this a way for a for profit corporation to fund research in a tax-deductible way?
Perhaps a counter-argument is that given the license used for Mozilla (I forget which it is; it may be important), *anyone* could use the work... but could anyone use it in for-profit software?
I haven't thought this throught, but it might be an interesting issue.
Only Women Bleed (Sex, Sharia remix)
I use both and prefer Mozilla (better features). Safari is ooh-pretty, but Mozilla gives me better control over things, particularly via the PrefBar that one can download at XulPlanet. I love the new "Kill Flash" button.
sulli
RTFJ.
So, where can I donate PayPal money to this foundation?
:-)
We'll get a PayPal (or similar) link up there as soon as possible. Don't spend the money meantime
Thanks for offering to donate!
Gerv
(gerv@mozilla.org)
mozdev.org is independent of mozilla.org and always has been, so they should not be affected by this announcement in any way (besides benefiting from any positive press Mozilla receives).
Note that mozdev.org has recently completed a very successful fundraising drive.
Apologies for the less-than-perfect technical nature of the new website - it was done in a bit of a hurry. Still, looks better than the old one, huh? :-)
invalid HTML.
Hopefully fixed in CVS; waiting for the site to sync.
Gerv
(gerv@mozilla.org)
And why did Mozilla get rid of the dino/dragon splash screen?
Because we didn't have image rights to the green dino.
Gerv
(gerv@mozilla.org)
Watch the geeks continue to frequent it for about 23 seconds after the first pop up advertizing appears at mozilla.org.
;-)
I can assure the 2 people out there who a) read this deep into this thread, and b) actually think there's some non-zero chance of this happening, that mozilla.org will not have pop-up advertising.
Anyway, who would see it? Everyone uses Mozilla's popup blocker.
Gerv
(gerv@mozilla.org)
A $2 million endowment can last forever. If wisely invested, the dividends on $2 million can pay $50 000 per year and still grow. Not enough to employ fulltime developers, but probably enough for bandwidth costs.
I believe their mailing lists/newsgroups were having problems because of a DOS attack. From what I hear, they are being set back up. More info is available in the project owners mailing list archives.
Well one (mozilla) is a suite of applications (browser, mail, composer, chat, etc.) all in one. and firebird is just the browser for those who, like me, just want a fast browser that does what it's told (standards complaince).
Marketing through mail-list? Are you serious?
:-)
I think you have the wrong end of the stick. It's a mailing list for discussing and co-ordinating marketing, not one for marketing on
Gerv
(gerv@mozilla.org)
This is an issue, but not much of one.
To the extent they actually spend money, it would have been deductible to AOL anyway as a business expense.
The question comes up when they give more in a year than they spend. That lets them (1) accelerate the deduction to the present for spending in the future (provided they make the donation now) and (2) let the money accumulate and earn interest tax-free, since it will be owned by a tax-exempt.
So it is an issue, but other people do get away with similar things. Our good friends at Fannie Mae, for example, set up the Fannie Mae Foundation to run ads they previously ran themselves, with similar effects; this has been somewhat controversial.
IAAL, so the "sneaky" aspect counts as a plus in my book.
I Can't Believe It's A Law Firm, LLP does not necessarily endorse the contents of this message.
I thought this was already how they operated. I'm guessing this is just a formality?
Very much not. Up to this point, mozilla.org was not a legal entity.
Gerv
(gerv@mozilla.org)
Your java installation and Mozilla both need to have been built with the same version of GCC. The Linux distros have mostly transitioned to GCC 3.2 but the commercial stuff often doesn't move as fast as the community on these infrastructure changes. That said, recent distro builds of Mozilla have been built with GCC 3.2. You just have to doublecheck where you are downloading your JRE from to be sure it's been built with 3.2 as well. The Blackdown guys have GCC 3.2 builds of Java 1.4.
> isn't the sum of $2m bugger all in real terms?
It is. A developer with a nominal salary of $50k each (not too high, really, for a good developer) costs about double that once you factor in the taxes the employer has to pay on the salary (FICA, etc), the benefits the employee gets (health insurance, etc) and such sundry items.
In real terms, a single decent developer probably costs about $120k per year.
So the $2 million is something, but more money will have to get raised if the mozilla foundation actually plans to employ developers itself.
[...]I would be surprised if people still didn't continue to develop Mozilla (even if it's at a slower pace).
;)
Even slower? Molasses on a cold day comes to mind
I didn't miss the wink but it still sounds like you were agreeing with the "slow" pace of development comment. I don't really think it's very slow. Even just comparing features (including support for emerging web standards) with the popular IE browser, I don't think our development pace is slow.
But beyond just new features, if you look at the actual code change (about 80,000 lines changed in the last year) and the bugs fixed (about 9,000 bugzilla records resolved as fixed in the last year,) it's seems wrong to call that slow.
I think we've been moving at a pretty good clip this last year with the addition of great new features like junk-mail controls, NTLM auth, find as you type, link pre-fetching, download manager, major improvements to usability of killer features like pop-up blocking, and tabbed browsing, much improved look and feel, more complete support for web standards, much better website compatibility and big gains in performance.
If you don't think much has changed or that we're moving too slow, then go download Mozilla 1.0 (from about a year ago) and use it side by side with the latest release, Mozilla 1.4. Compare that to the improvements that Microsoft has made in the last year.
--Asa
Sorry to hear about this tragedy, but at least there's a good opportunity for some super-easy, quick cash while in between jobs!
... that's probably a small portion of what you were earning at Netscape/AOL per year, but it's enough to keep you alive for a few months, right?
... especially if you don't mind being on the bleeding edge with a barely-tested port of gcc 3.3 to the 68k-amigaos architecture!
Maybe you laid-off Gecko folks should check out the AmiZilla project, and pitch in to port Mozilla to the much-maligned Commodore Amiga!
As of now, there's a booty of over $4,000 to be earned
Definitely your expertise could be of benefit to these intrepid folks