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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."
We're pleased to be dumping Mozilla, er, forming the Mozilla Foundation. This money pit, er, worthy cause is something we'd love to see the back of, er support.
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!
Now that there'll be an official, legal, centralized authority, does this mean that the plugins/modules will finally work with each other?
AOL can now write off on its taxes the development money it spends on mozilla as donations to a nonprofit?
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.
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.
I think Mozilla needs some PR people. I was watching C-SPAN the other day and the issue was spam. Lots of callers were complaining about pop-up windows as well. I really wanted to tell them about Mozilla, but it was a taped show :(
Anyway, there is a lot of frustration out there and the Mozilla people really need to get the word out that they have a competitive product. Place some ads in the weekly magazines, some big newspapers, and get a buzz going. Open up a Paypal account that we can donate to so Mozilla can get an ad in the New York Times.
The site describes Firebird as "The Best Browser, Bar None", with a similar claim for Mozilla. Not only is this confusing to a newcomer, it's also a bad idea; Moz 1.4 is WAAAY more reliable than Firebird (great as the latter is), and I wouldn't recommend it to newcomers.
When Firebird reaches Moz's level of stability, THEN it might be wise to push it to new users. But Mozilla gives a better impression.
..is the "BSD is dying" guy racing to find the Search and Replace function in his text editor.
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
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...
One thing that the Mozilla Foundation could do to raise money is set up a "Cobrand Support Center" where people can contract them to create and support branded versions of Mozilla.
If the price were not too high, I imagine a lot of technology companies could impress their users with a branded web browser that's better than Internet Explorer.
"As a complimentary service to our customers, we offer them the SuperTechnologyCompany Web Browser which has features that prevent spam and popups..."
Engineering and the Ultimate
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!
I liked that they said their money was going for salaries. This is refreshingly honest. Most press releases from organizations steer away from the fact that everybody needs a little $$ to survive.
This is better than trying to make us believe that first they save the whales, then go for profitability..
Harpo Tunnel Syndrome--my wrist feels funny.
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)
Let the "Mozilla is dead" postings start in 3..2..
I guess Mozilla's ready to actively try to knock IE down.
/preemtive anti-flame strike. Personally, I'll stick to Opera (ID'ing as Opera too) as my primary browser, just personal preferance.
The technical aspects aside, I don't think the companies are in this for winning a war on Microsoft. But they do want there to be alternatives so IE can't exercise (read: abuse) monopoly power, particularly since the browser is the primary control of the Internet experience influencing all kinds of other services (searches, default bookmarks, passport integration etc.)
They're interested in supporting Mozilla to ensure it stays a viable alternative, but I hardly think they'll use more money than they have to in order to compete against a "free" product. "free" in the meaning of "at no apparent cost to Joe Sixpack"
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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?
There is absolutely no reason for you to donate. Nobody is forcing you to do so. On the other hand, if everybody applies the same philosophy, most OSS projects will depend solely on the goodwill and the mutable live conditions of their developers Or on companies looking for a cheaper/better software development process).
This is very different from donnating to Mandrake, a for profit company in continuous state of finnancial turmoil. As thousands upon thousands of other OSS software, Mozilla is not sold, does not carry spyware or anything allowing for a money flow.
The point is, some people will feel grateful enough to donate money or resources to some projects. Some will feel grateful but won't have nothing to donate. Some will feel grateful but won't donate, period. And some won't feel anything but will use the software anyway. None of these are unwelcome, the software is open and free to use, no strings attached.
As for, They need to make a lot better case for themselves if they're going to warrent a piece of that pie, I believe you can download a new case every night, here...
So, where can I donate PayPal money to this foundation?
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.
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!
You need GNU tools to build Mozilla, so it should be called GNU/Mozilla. I've already changed my GNU/Linux GNU/Mozilla User-Agent string to reflect this.
As for the IP donations - that is pretty much worthless anyway since it is a free, open-source project.
Not at all. The IP donations include the mozilla.org trademark and domain name, which are very far from worthless. They also include the MPL license.
Gerv
Honestly, I'm not sure if that's what it means or not. Certainly that's what it looks like -- "Thanks for all the hard work, guys, but we've sold our souls to Bill, so here's some cash, and good luck" -- but there is IMO a real possibility that AOL will keep funding the project for some time to come. It was a seven-year deal they signed with M$; and seven years may be a long time in Internet years, but it's not forever. (Seven years ago, IIRC, was when the browser war between Netscape and IE was really heating up. We may be long past that time, but clearly people still remember it, and lessons learned.) AOL knows perfectly well that it's in their best interest to continue having an IE alternative, especially since M$ announced just days after they signed the deal that they were folding IE completely into the OS. I'll be very surprised if AOL cuts the Mozilla Foundation loose completely.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
In a world where the mighty browsers sleep...this tranquil city is about to experience an awakening.
! !!!!!"
[show pic of giant Mozilla eye]
"Oh no, Mozilla has gotten loose, it will run amok in the city!" [Mozilla roars and tramples over a Time-Warner-AOL building]
The Government had one chance to stop it, but it was too late.
[Control-center with lots of flashing lights and buttons]
"Damn it, get Gates on the phone. Tell him we need a supply of BSODS to help freeze this monster. And we'll need detonators -- a thousand Internet Exploders should do the trick"
This well-kept secret has been revealed to the masses.
[CNN interview soundbytes]
Stallman: "It cannot survive without the GPL!!!"
ESR: "I said this from the beginning...with many eyes, all bugs can see better. No wait, that's not how it goes."
Tux's agent: "My client refuses to do an interview unless there's some serious herring involved."
They stopped innovating. They denied it existed. They were foolish. The revolution is now!
[Mozilla stomps on Microsoft sign]
"Mozilla...IEeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!
(Cue Kashmir riff...no puffy this time...please)
From the parent:
> what happens in a few years when the Foundation has A) run out of money, and B) hasn't gotten any significant donations?
From the site:
> AOL, IBM, Sun Microsystems, Red Hat, and other companies will continue to support Mozilla through the Foundation.
I wouldn't worry. Me thinks these companies et al will stop supporting Mozilla when Internet Explorer has a user base of <5%. These are big competitors of Microsoft. Either way, if the money dries up, I would be surprised if people still didn't continue to develop Mozilla (even if it's at a slower pace).
There will always be alternatives.
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...
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.
> 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.
These guys can't even figure out what they product is! I go to the link and I can get Mozilla 1.4 "Best of 2003", or I could get Firebird, "Best Browser, Bar none!"...uh, so which is it? What's the difference? What are you working on? What will my $ go for? Anyone got a new whim project that is going to be better that they want to start before finishing the others? Screw that, I'll send my $30 to the Opera folks, at least they know what they are building.
Companies using Mozilla and paying zero will also not be as prevalent as companies using IE and paying zero so it is basically a wash.
Slashdotter are stupid and biased.
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)
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 !
Mozilla needs to start advertising - in popup ads. What better way to get your message across? "Hate pop-up ads like this one? Do you know there is a browser out there that allows you to block pop-up ads? It is called Mozilla, and we have a lot of other great features too. Mozilla is absolutely free! Try it out today. [url to mozilla.org]"
Yeah, it is a little like spammers sending you an email on how to stop spam, but I like the idea.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
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)
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.
Starving, illiterate children in the world and people are going to give money to AOL-backed, Netscape-backed Mozilla which competes directly with Microsoft? The only thing brilliant about this is that Bill Gates is slapping his forehead wondering how he didn't think of making a charitable organization of Longhorn.
Firebird rules. Thunderbird rules. But they're software. I'll be giving my non-profit dollars to the local food bank, as usual.
And since non-profits are exempt from the Do Not Call list, does that mean I'll be getting phone spam from AOL?
Chr0m0Dr0m!C
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)
AOL, IBM, Sun Microsystems, Red Hat,
Note that these competitors of Microsoft don't have:
- US$4e10 cash reserves
- revenue cows like Windows & Office to bring in money without lifting a finger
AOL has been scrambling to compete with MSN, surviving on razor-thin margins (Time Warner is the bigger, stronger part of the company).Sun can't afford to develop competitive successors to its UltraSPARC hardware in a timely fashion. Meanwhile, Lintel servers are eating into the UNIX server business, making the market much smaller than it was once (the flip side is that Lintel make Wintel look expensive, even if Wintel is cheaper than Solaris/SPARC). These days, the one reason to go with Sun over Linux on clusters is for HA 64-way high throughput machines connected to SANs. Despite the margins on that class of machine, not everyone needs one, and there are ferocious competitors like IBM, HP and SGI with which to contend.
Red Hat is only now barely getting profitable, mainly selling Linux services. They certainly don't have oodles of money to throw around.
IBM is really the only financially strong player in the whole deck.
Despite my pessimistic tone, I'm a Mozilla (and now Firebird) user and wish the project success. I will continue to be a Mozilla advocate because I want to see open standards on my computer instead of yet another road to getting ruled.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
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"?
What an enthusiastic way of saying "we all just got fired."
Or to put it in context, maybe they all got tshirts saying:
What grand news... :-(
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
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"
You didn't really submit an editable page to slashdot, did you?! Whoo boy, if I were the editor of that one, I'd password protect it real quick. (Unless you want to get the new contact info of Mr. Goa Tse.)
sulli
RTFJ.
[...]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
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.
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
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
Especially in regards to pop-up blocking, remember that AOL/TW depends on advertising in many areas of its corporate structure. Pop-up blocking is NOT an area that AOL/TW wants to tout, for this reason. Good for the consumer, yes ... but the consumer isn't the primary source of income for them.