Firefox-Based Start-Up Gets Off The Ground

rudy_wayne writes "ZDNet is reporting that a new version of the Firefox Web browser is coming your way, but not from the Mozilla Foundation. 'When we launch our own services, in about a month or so, we'll be looking to offer the must-have companion to Firefox,' said Bart Decrem, Round Two CEO and a former staffer at the Mozilla Foundation. 'We see tremendous room for innovating on top of the Mozilla and Firefox platform, and we see ourselves as the first company outside of the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation that's fully dedicated to serving Firefox users.' Round Two planned a corporate launch Monday night with the promise of bringing 'a new crop of products and services that will enhance your Firefox experience.'"

Comments

Re:right... so in summary,

[David Ziegler]

Right, except you only copied/pasted the part that you wanted to. The quote is actually talking about how they are sponsoring those projects, providing servers, bandwidth, and money.

While Round Two--formerly known as MozSource--puts the finishing touches on its own products, the company is sponsoring development of several other Firefox extensions.

These include FlashGot, which lets Firefox work with third-party download managers; Bandwidth Tester, which lets people determine their connection speed; and SwitchProxy, which lets people surf anonymously with Firefox by configuring Firefox to work with multiple Web proxy servers. Round Two is providing developers of these extensions with technical resources including Web servers, bandwidth, project management resources and some financial support.

(Emphasis mine.) They're also supporting (again, from TFA):

Round Two also said it was supporting StockTicker, TinyURL Creator, Copy Plain Text, Extension Uninstaller, Lorem Ipsum Content Generator, OpenDownload, Open Long URLs, Search Plugins and Secure Password Generator.

They're also developing their own extensions (which presumably you can buy):

As for Round Two's own extensions, Decrem said the company was considering antivirus software to integrate with Firefox.

Now, whether that (and possibly other future products) is useful, sure, let's debate that. But don't read the article and completely misrepresent what's written.

Re:Open Source Competition

[xenotrout]

The commercial Wine forks are able to use restricted licenses because Wine used to be licensed under a BSD-type license. Though Wine is now licensed solely under the GNU LGPL, the commercial versions used a BSD licensed version as their code base.
The Mozilla license (MPL) requires availability and redistributability of source code (BSD licenses do not). It seems legal, though, with a program under the LGPL or MPL, to create and not provide source for add-ons which can run with unmodified binaries (or modified binaries with source code available).

RoundTwo is not for geeks!

[The One KEA]

Disclaimer: I'm one of the mods on The Extensions Mirror, which is now hosted by RoundTwo.

Folks, from what I have read on their site, RoundTwo is not appealing to geeks. They're not trying to force geeks to pay for stuff that they can get themselves, i.e. extensions and support and the like. I get the impression that they are offering extension support and bundling for corporations which want to adopt Firefox but also want a centralized entity that they can moan at when it doesn't work.

Their stance of 'adopting' extensions and providing infrastructure for the developers to leverage for that purpose is genius, IMO - it gives the extension authors the resources to improve and maintain their extensions, and it gives RoundTwo a direct line to the authors, which makes it far easier to get the author's attention if something is broken, which is critical if they really intend on creating Firefox 'distributions' with extensions bundled in, like what bdeonline is doing with Black Diamond Firefox.

Sure, they've got the usual amount of marketing jargon out there right now, but considering that they've been supporting Mozilla software for a while now, I suspect that this is going to be the core of their business model.