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

Open Source Competition

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't there a risk for their company that anything they implement will be replicated by the open source community?

Re:Open Source Competition

[cuerty]

Like Wine (The Windows API emulator for *nix variants) with Cedega (ex WineX) and CrossOver Office, there is always a space for the development over open source software from enterprises with restricted licences.

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).

Re:Open Source Competition

[notthe9]

That is simply not the case. You really need to get a clue.

I don't like that phrase

[dalmiroy2k]

"'a new crop of products and services that will enhance your Firefox experience.'"

That sounds a lot like Ads and spyware toolbars!
If that happens, I will be returning to IE! ;-)

Re:Want to bet?

[LnxAddct]

Really? Because I see a huge need in the enterprise arena for some sophisticated permissions in firefox along with a central managemnet application for enterprises who want to deploy firefox. As long as the price is right I think it'd be huge. There are plenty of other things that I can think of that would sell well as additions to firefox's base. And as far as Open Source not being able to make any money... please go tell that to Red Hat and Novell and come back to me when your worth even just 1 thousandth what they are. I hate responding to trolls but sometimes it must be done.
Regards,
Steve

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.

Safe haven for non-geeks?

[Neoncow]

Intitial reaction on Slashdot: "They're trying to charge for something we already know and love! Oh noes!!"

Somehow, I don't think this product is targetted towards most geeks. It seems to me that they should be aiming at people who are starting to hear about Firefox. People have heard that Firefox is supposed to solve their security problems and introduce new features to make browsing easy. It's supposed to come with all sorts of cool extentions that you can download and customise your browsing experience.

Most of the cool stuff that geeks do with Firefox is free and easy; we install extensions at a whim, customise the security settings, and tweak about:config to our liking. The problem is, most people find these activties confusing and time consuming.

Extensions: Which one do I choose? How do I know which one has bugs? What do I do if it breaks the browser?
Geeks know that you: a) Try them all! b) Read up on some forums for past experince. c) Backup your settyings and do a quick re-istall!
Well, there you go. People think you need to be a super computer genius to do all of those things.

Perhaps this company could be useful as the AOL of the open source community.

How to make money off of Firefox

[Jokkey]

Make a corporate-friendly, highly manageable release of Firefox: an MSI installer, so it can be easily deployed via Active Directory; management via Group Policy; default settings that don't make a mess of your roaming profile.

If Round Two did this, I imagine that they could make a decent income from organizations that are tired of IE but want something easier to deploy and maintain than Firefox.

Mozilla bug #74085, comment 113 expresses these shortcomings of Firefox better than I did and provides more information on the above issues.

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.