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Mozilla Foundation Launches Mozilla Corporation
An anonymous reader writes "MozillaZine is reporting that the Mozilla Foundation has created a commercial subsidiary to continue development of Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird. Don't let the word "commercial" scare you, the new Mozilla Corporation (as it has been dubbed) will be owned 100% by the Mozilla Foundation. The change is mostly a legal/tax thing to avoid the problems of pursuing revenue-generating avenues while remaining a non-profit. There will be no change to the development process and end-users won't notice much difference either. See also the Mozilla Foundation press release about the Mozilla Corporation and the Mozilla reorganization FAQ."
It's not enough that Mozilla, this irresponsible pet owner who constantly loses its pets to suspicious ends, is now making a corporation. Its first pet, Phoenix, just vanished. Its second pet, a fox, got set on fire and presumably died. Its two birds are both in bad shape -- one is on fire and one got hit by lightning.
Would you really invest in such a corporation? How can a dinosaur be trusted to manage a corporation, when it can't even keep its own pets safe??
The change is mostly a legal/tax thing to avoid the problems of pursuing revenue-generating avenues while remaining a non-profit.
Hmm... This is unusual.
1. Fix this legal/tax thing
2. Avoid the problems of pursuing revenue-generating avenues
3. ???
4. non-profit!
The problem with Slashdot memes is that YOU INSENSITIVE CLOD!
That's what I've been saying for years! =(
-Bill GatesFor once the slashdot cliche actually works...
Making money is not a bad thing for such a product. It gives the project insurance against the evils that will be thrown against it--patents, hacks, clones.
My prediction is that firefox will develop more and more commerical-like features: Bundling with certain software, branding for certain services, etc.
IE will likely develop more open-source-like features: listening to user, more standards compliance, more open APIs.)
In most battles, the enemies become more and more like each other in the end. For example, in politics, as the election draws nearer both candidates spirial toward the center.
There's no reason that that a non-profit corporation can't have revenues. In fact, they can have massive revenues. The profits just can't accrue to private profits. So there's really only two reasons I can think of for this change: (1) the folks at Mozilla want to start getting rich, and/or (2) they want to attract private investment (which neccessarily entails revenues accruing to the investors).
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
I think one of the underlying reasons for this is Google. It's not explicitly stated that this is the reason, but that's what I read between the lines when reading the FAQ about the reorganization. After reading Mitchell Baker's blog, I'm almost certain of it (though he doesn't explicitly state it either).
I think we will be seeing some more serious collaboration between Mozilla and Google now.
This may be cause for a tiny bit of concern, considering what has been happening over at devianART, with the ousting of jark (one of the two original founders) by the corporate entity.
The lesson of deviantART is that once the corporation starts pursuing profits, and this becomes more important than the community, the origins of the foundation and the original purpose and driving force of the community may become lost.
Excuse my speling.
Making The Bar Project
Sometimes I could almost wish one of these press releases would say our aim is to make the Internet a shittier place for everyone and to gouge the public so deep that their children's children will still be paying off the debt. I wouldn't approve, but at least it would reduce the entropy of the data stream.
It's not that I suspect the Mozilla corp of anything untoward, and short of omitting it entirely, I can't think of a better way to to say what they appear to be saying.
All the same, it's a bit semantically null, innit? Where's the point of a FAQ if you fill it with meaningless platitudes?
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
One might also wonder how everyone who has contributed to Mozilla's development because it was a project they believed in will feel. A lot of people have contributed to Mozilla through the years, and now Mozilla is going to profit?
In the end, I guess this is what it takes to take the battle with Microsoft to the next step.
But will Mozilla now lose the funding it receives from Google, IBM, Sun, and so on? Until now, hasn't Mozilla simply received donations from these and other large companies who didn't want to see Mozilla die?
Clever signature text goes here.
Fix the issues with filtering/moving emails around in your folders in Thunderbird? I'm getting close to being forced to abandon Thunderbird. I send an email and I cannot copy it into the sent folder (and I must have copies of my sent email) The filters stop functioning and I have to shutdown and restart Thunderbird to even manually copy the email to the correct folder.
Don't take this as a flame, I've used Netscape Messenger/Thunderbird since around 1997, but I am starting to have way to many problems... I've seen bug reports about this for several years now, yet no fix gets released. (Thunderbird hardly gets any new releases compared to Firefox)
My programming skills are minimal otherwise I would try myself to fix it...
Anyone know of another email client? (mainly for windows, Eudora, Pegasus, and Outlook) are either not options or I do not like them.
I like Thunderbird... It's a shame that it's such a task to use with this problem...
If the Mozilla Corporation should go wrong, the Foundation can just re-start to release the official Firefox/Thunderbird versions themselves, including any improvements dome by the Corporation in the mean time. That's the power of Open Source: Even if the corporation gets evil, it cannot suddenly remove the code. The only possible weak point would be the trademark, but I hope the trademark rights remain at the Foundation.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
I'm no business or legal expert, and I'm not completely sure about what IPO means exactly.
Does becoming 'IPOed' that mean big mean Microsoft can come along and buy the whole thing? Or does IPO mean the company offers shares to be bought, but keeps a significant amount for itself to prevent that kind of thing from happening?
All this stuff aside, a Corporation sounds like it's much more capable of kicking ass than a Foundation, even if there's no real difference.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
I disagree as well. Unfortunately, very few people continue to do "the right thing" when there is money to be made to not do "the right thing", i.e. insert ads, stop blocking certain pop-ups, add propriatary code. I am not saying this will happen, but up until now the insentive for adoption has been the opposite of what the insentives will be now.
Also, when money becomes available, like flies to shit, people whose only interest is money immediatly try to get involved and usually succeed.
- I like pudding.
Going IPO means your shares are publicly traded, and you have a duty to your shareholders to make money. That can mean that you make decisions based on money rather than what is best for your product. In games, it usually means rushed releases and unfinished products. In software it can mean anything from a rushed release to signing a deal with Gator to include their software in your browser for extra money. That is obviously a worst case scenario.
/. ++
Yipes.
An Initial Public Offering of stock (i.e., an "IPO") is done when there are venture capitalists or owners who want an exit strategy to realize their investment proceeds (i.e., "cash out"). These are traditionally only used by large companies, though, in the "tech boom", small companies were boosted with cash so that they could function like large companies through outside investment. IPOs are very expensive and time-consuming, so they are mostly only used for large businesses.
Another strategy that owners use to get out of the business is an Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP). These can be used by large and/or small businesses. It's not as glamourous and it takes a while. There's no immediate "cash out".
Both an IPO and an ESOP are similar in that the owners are giving up some sort of control. With an ESOP, owners are giving up some control to employees. With an IPO, owners are giving up some control to the public.
99% of businesses are small businesses and thus do not have the interest nor funding nor capability to do an IPO.
Mozilla Corporation will likely be a small business run by a small group of people who are passionate about developing Mozilla to its fullest potential.
Twist of events: I imagine it is necessary for Mozilla to make a profit under the for-profit side to keep their nonprofit 501(c)(3) status. Sometimes organizations started for humanitarian purposes end up taking in too much cash (and, by that, I don't mean a lot..because the limits are low) and have to do this for tax reasons.
That's it.
I have asked Mozilla Foundation for a copy of their 2004 Form 990, which would reveal how much money they took in from Google. Rumor has it that it's tens of millions. I'm curious about whether they filed a 990-T to pay taxes on this unrelated business income. Mozilla is late with their 2004 filing, just as they were with their 2003 filing. It's clear that there is a massive jump in income from 2003, which was appropriate for a nonprofit, to 2004, which promises to be more interesting. There is no question in my mind that the 501(c)(3) tax-exempt public charity status is not the ideal vehicle for laundering Google's lucre. It raises too many eyebrows.
The sellout to Google is quite substantial. We all know about the prefetch for the Google search bar, and how you can disable this in about:config under network.prefetch-next if you don't like collecting cookies from places that you never visit.
What's not commonly known is that this configuration option does not affect the behavior of terms entered in the address bar. If Firefox cannot parse the URL, it will go to Google and pick up the number one site, and then take you there directly. It's like a built-in "I'm feeling lucky."
Convenient? Sure, assuming that a huge percentage of surfers haven't a clue about the difference between search terms entered in a search box, and a URL entered in an address bar. Studies show that this is indeed the case.
Explorer does something similar, in that a search term in the address bar will take you to a search preview, assuming that you don't have Active Scripting disabled. But arguably, this is more benevolent than what Firefox is doing with Google. The way that Firefox is doing it gives Google much more control over web traffic patterns. It makes it much more important to be number one on Google for your selected keywords than it is to be number one on MSN for the same keywords, if everything else is equal.
And it's not like Google's first result is always the best. Recent studies show wide disparity between various engines for the top results.
Moreover, all the several-year-old Google bombs still work. Except one, that is. I made a Google bomb for "out-of-touch executives" that led to Google's corporate executives page. It was doing great in all the engines for the first half of 2004, and even got mentioned in the New York Times in June, 2004. But then Google defused this particular bomb by doing a hand job on their algorithm in July, 2004. It disappeared in Google, and I took my links down. But it was a great bomb nonetheless, and is still doing fine in Yahoo and MSN.
So Google cannot even claim that their mathematical methods are untainted by self-interested sabotage in certain cases. That makes them evil. And with Firefox going along with their game plan, that moves Firefox one step closer to the dark side.
Yeah, but when the Mozilla Corporation and Foundation having so many ties, how do we know that the Foundation is really looking out for it's best interests instead of just providing cover for the Corporation? The Foundation doesn't look independent enough.
You were pissed off, and decided to have your revenge. Daniel is your name, Slander and lies against Google is your game.
You basically have no credibility what so ever when you talk about Google.
These are exceedingly lame. They are terms hardly anyone uses or links to, so it's no wonder Google doesn't have any high-ranking links for those. The only value of "Google bombing" is for the fun of it.Clever signature text goes here.
This is outrageous. There's absolutly no law against non-profit organizations seeking, earning, and keeping revenue. The real story here is that Mozilla has become profitable, and is moving so that those in control can take advantage of it. This is not how successful open source projects should behave. They should not beg for donations so they can advertize (see spreadfirefox), and any profits they earn should go back into the project, then to the developers, and then into the open source community.
Let me preface my next statement by saying that I love and use firefox exclusivly, but it's time for firefox to fork so it stops fucking up the mozilla foundation.