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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."
And how about it being the new home of the Open Directory Project too? Just a thought..
Never email donotemail@WeAreSpammers.com
Does this mean that Netscape (rather, AOL-Time-Warner) is withdrawing its support? Will they still be providing facilities, network connectivity, etc. or will the Mozilla Foundation have to raise all that on its own? Will Netscape be providing any money to the Mozilla Foundation?
This is nothing but a Good Thing(TM). Congrats to the Mozilla team on their (apparent) independance. In other news, check out the redesigned web page.
Isn't it ironic that the top cells don't render the way they meant in Mozilla 1.4? They shouldn't be using tables for layout!
I guess Mozilla's ready to actively try to knock IE down.
The World's Worst Webcomic!
AOL can now write off on its taxes the development money it spends on mozilla as donations to a nonprofit?
1. Why should I give money to Mozilla when I don't give money to and other open-source software I use? Why do they need it? What will they use it for?
2. Would said contribution be tax-deductible (not all non-profit donations are)?
Unfortunately for them, they're competing for my donated dollar against the EFF, the ACLU and (this year) whoever tries to unseat George Bush Jr. They need to make a lot better case for themselves if they're going to warrent a piece of that pie...
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Unfortunately, MS didn't "kill" IE, they've just completed it's total integration into the OS. W(When I say OS, I probably mean Explorer or it's future equivalent) It was already difficult to work around since it was embedded somewhat into Windows. I think the lawsuits caused them to pause; but, I suspect this may have been part of the plan all along. Now, the OS (Explorer) and MS apps will automatically handle html, xml, etc. without calling up a special browser app...
they don't need to understand what they're doing. all they need to do is give them money (which they've done) and bundle moz with their products. if AOL starts shipping their silver spam platters with moz instead of their own browser, word about moz is going to spread damn fast and IE will instantly be threatened.
The World's Worst Webcomic!
So, where can I donate PayPal money to this foundation?
Very nice.
As much as we might hate AOL for littering the physical world with their signup CDs and the virtual world with their users, one has to give them props for continuing to support Mozilla.
You don't seem to get it. This is the golden handshake. (don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out)
Sure 2M sounds like a good deal, but it is AOL/TW's way of completely dumping mozilla. (I'm sure it's cheaper than actually turning off the lights on mozilla as an AOL/TW effort.) Besides, in these deals, the stated money is a bunch of accounting BS. (Stuff like: mozilla developers will get to keep their 4 year old computers. That's 1M right there!)
Watch for the warm fuzzies in this press release to cool once it sinks in that AOL/TW is dumping mozilla for IE, and this deal is their exit strategy for mozilla.
and B) hasn't gotten any significant donations?
Now that it is specifically a Non-Profit organization, donations are just that. Assuming they did the whole legal tax-deductible non-profit group corporation, people will be much more inclined to donate.
Companies making their corporate standard browser a free browser and getting a tax write-off by supporting the browser will be prevelant, I think.
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
I hope that this is the first sleep toward the complet independency from Netscape (read AOL). The Mozilla project did such a great job for all those years, and AOL just kept it down. Well, AOL. So long for all the (mis)help, but Mozilla has to move on.
For every $1 a employee gets paid, a company has to shell out at least $2. Where does this money go?
Employee benefits take a huge chunk out of your paycheck - health insurance and the like aren't free - the company has to pay for them. Also, every dollar you pay in taxes is matched by the company - not in some "matching program", but simply in Social Security, unemployment benefits, and other federal taxes.
Then, after all that is said and done, the company gets around to renting/buying office space, buying support hardware, software, and books, shipping developers to conventions, hiring support staff...
Why would AOL give Mozilla a $2M kiss-off (assuming that were actually what is happening here) when they could give Mozilla a $0 kiss-off instead?
Someone may have been clued in enough to know that doing so would generate immense ill-will. Besides, Mozilla is a viable product... just not one well suited to AOL/TW's core business (as you say).
Additionally the $2M can be written off for tax purposes. Small, but it doesn't hurt.
I guess the real question is how much funding has AOL given the Mozilla project over the past few years? Is $1M/year an improvement or a reduction in funding? And to be totally cynical -- even if it is an improvement, remember it's only for two years. Will they be able to make up the money if AOL doesn't continue funding after that time period is up?
Honestly, I'd pretty much read this as AOL kicking the project out as well, but unless the above question is answered I can't be sure of that.
> for an app that has a 400+MB footprint.
The only time I've seen Mozilla have such a footprint is when I've been running memory stress-tests.
Are you sure you're not just adding up the memory of all the threads (which _share_ all that memory)? There are typically 8-10 threads, and 40-50MB sounds about right for memory usage during heavy browsing.
Let's face it: plugin support in Mozilla is experimental, while Mozilla cannot properly display the "IE-oriented" content. You may repeat the mantra about web standards again and again, but AOL customers do not care about standards. They care that the content they use to see is still there and it's still work on their computers. Period.
Less is more !
I've brought this up before, but where's the professional looking attractive banner ad graphics for Mozilla? I'd slap one of those up on my website (I've got pages that attract more than just slash-geeks) and get the word out that way...
I'm not so artistically minded, so I don't want to create it, but I'll certainly display it!
We will be ramping up our marketing efforts over the coming months. In the mean time you could always use plain text and link to http://www.mozilla.org/releases
--Asa
Not enough to employ fulltime developers, but probably enough for bandwidth costs.
:-)
The problem is, we need fulltime developers
Gerv
(gerv@mozilla.org)
Have to wonder, will netscape in the future have to pay mozilla for the right to produce a closed-source version.
Your question implies that Netscapes 6 and 7 were closed source. This is only partially true - the bits like AIM were closed, but the MPLed bits were open.
In the future, as now, any use of the code by Netscape/AOL will be under the MPL (or another license like the LGPL, if all Mozilla code is available under it, and AOL chooses to use it instead for whatever reason.)
No-one will ever have to pay mozilla.org for the right to use the source. That's what open source means. And no-one will be able to pay anyone for the right to produce a closed-source version - because doing that requires permission from several thousand copyright holders. mozilla.org does not own the copyright to Mozilla.
Gerv
(gerv@mozilla.org)
I make charitable donations every year. I always make sure that my donations go to an organization that is registered as a non-profit so that I can realize tax benefits from my donations. Now I can support my favorite OSS project with these donations. I'm sure that there are many more out there like me as well. Mozilla isn't going to die any time soon.
.-.--
Shed a tear for poor old Netscape - the Internet as we know it wouldn't have existed without it, and it was killed off as much by (proven illegal) business practices as much as technical inferiority. They kept flogging v4 for too long and v6 was bloatware, but I'll never see the name "Explorer" as anything other than an ersatz "Navigator".
Oh yeah, I may live in the UK, but isn't the sum of $2m bugger all in real terms? Assuming those developers are taking a salary of only $50k each, that's 40 developers for a year. Whoopee-shit.
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
This will of course be much more likely if they get the necessary status to make donations tax-deductible.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Parent is funny but I don't think this is a matter of doom and gloom at all. All the big-name IT companies will continue to support MS alternatives, IBM alone could afford to run Mozilla to secure a great Linux browser that isn't WM-specific. Makers of embedded systems, industry groups, ISPs, all can afford a few bucks to run the foundation and probably are more likely to provide support when there's no partisan link to AOL-TW.
This should be VERY good for mozilla, because it's not AOL's project anymore, its a community thing, so various companies will start putting money and possibly man hours into it. Not that it's a non-profit, the man hours, money, servers, bandwidth etc that any companies (or people) put into it can be a tax writeoff, it's basically a charity now.
I have to say, I find it rather surprising that Mozilla should need 2 million dollars to write a brower, and even more surprising that they're asking for people to donate even more. The mozilla project has had more full time developers than we've ever had working on KDE, yet konqueror is not far behind (oh, and we did write a desktop too...).
If the mozilla foundantion would like to sponser the forthcoming KDE conference (eg. to discuss how we could make use of any reusable parts of their code base) I'm sure they'd be most welcome.
Rich.
, 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
We will organize as a tax exempt charity to provide a nice tax writeof for AOL-TW, while continuing to further their corporate objectives against Microsoft.
To be fair, they do mention that they are seeking 501(c)(3) status at the bottom of the release.
Anybody else sense a trend? Open Source "charitable" orgs as a corporate tax shelter? Once again, you have to hand it to RMS--he was at the cutting edge on this. The FSF was perhaps the first Open Source nonprofit. Something like Mozilla.org will allow corporations to obtain the tax writeof without having to buy into the political stand of the Free Software movement.
It's a win-win for corporations. They can place the unprofitable portions of their business into the nonprofit. They can influence the nonprofits with their money. They can effectively employee people for less than minimum wage.
It will be interesting to see how long it takes legislators to wake up to this, and call for charitable org reform. I wager that at least one generation (20 years) will pass and get fat off these exemptions before anything happens.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Exactly.
To the Mozilla Developers. Take this opportunity to be radical. Let's go back and view what the browser is and what it could be. I suggest that they take a look at things like:
DashBoard.
Haystack
and Echo.
Information begs to be consolidated and made useful. We can do more with the browser then just view static stateless pages.
Two words: Active Scripting
I didn't even know this could be used on a website until someone enabled it in order to watch interactive baseball stats. He got a virus shortly thereafter, of course, and couldn't use his computer for almost a day; but that doesn't stop other people from complaining that their browsers don't have this 'feature'.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
As I wrote over a year ago:
...
I am preparing an analysis for a client. That analysis is whether they should adopt mozilla as a platform on which to base a product.
Moz is not yet in the sort of position enjoyed by linux or apache. For both of these, it is very clear that they will survive and prosper regardless of what any specific player might do. This gives a warm fuzzy feeling for any party considering building on linux of apache. The same is not yet true, imo, of moz.
First, the majority of the funding for moz currently comes from a single player.
Second, moz was born from an existing ambitious proprietary project, and in its infancy became an even more ambitious project which was only made possible because the money was there. That's not the way most open source projects evolve.
The above two factors remind me of several GPLed platform type projects from which the principal sponsor withdraws with ill effect. These situations leave those who built on them in a position that is at least difficult. (Even though it is certainly no where near as technically untenable as it would be with a proprietary platform.)
Interestingly, moz may *never* arrive at the same position as linux and apache, or at least be perceived to be at that position, unless ALOTW change their role, very possibly by *reducing* their funding! So, paradoxically, it may be that it is in the best interests of mozilla (as a platform not a product) for AOLTW to reduce their funding of moz, even if they do not otherwise want to!
Things *do* seem to be headed in the right direction. Last I looked, there were about 5 contributors of record that were not funded by AOLTW for each one that was funded by AOLTW. Obviously the AOLTW funded coders are, on average, putting in a lot more time than the others, but the quality of their collaborative tools and methods, and the trends, are clearly in favor of this contribution ratio continuing to improve. (In this they have, imo, triumphed in a major way. Microsoft are many years behind on this, even as they dabble with "shared source".)
That's another thing; there are many issues with IE, as has been noted by many people (CSS, transparent .png, etc. etc.) not to mention popups. I just can't see why people would choose IE if they knew what firebird offered.
I can't help wondering, if people just got the word out, more people would use mozilla, and thereby mozilla would get more money in it's coffers. If mozilla can get a relatively large user base (Say, 10-20%) then I would hope they wouldn't have a problem getting funds.
I really didnt see this one coming but considering how AOL now is going to bundle IE with their aol software
:)
(Funny how the courts tell MS to unbundle it from the os.. so MS goes and gets it bundled into what people consider their pc's os on a huge # of pc's)
Wonder if AOL would warm up to Mozilla if the states sued AOL to unbundle a browser with their software and give people a choice of what to use.
Since netscape is no longer a viable alternative I can only hope that Mozilla and to a lesser degree Opera become a prevalent browser across all forms of operating systems.
However there is still the problem to be fixed where 90% of the webpages out there are IE compatible on a first basis and all other browsers come in second for support.
Course Linux Gaming Warcry I busted my butt to the bone to get it to works across Moz,Opera, and IE. And I'm just a flunky html geek