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A History of Firefox
chrisd writes "Firefox module owner Ben Goodger has written what I think is a very interesting post about how Firefox came into being. It goes into details unheard of to date about the inner workings at Netscape and he fills in a timeline spanning from the open sourcing of Netscape to the release just recently of Firefox 1.5. Especially interesting and poignant are comments like this: 'I was told I could not expect to use Open Source tricks against folk who were employed by the Company (all hail!). I held true to my beliefs and refused to review low quality patches. I was almost fired. Others weren't so lucky.'. Anyhow, I consider this required reading for any fan of the Firefox browser." Or even just a programmer. Worth reading.
The Form 990 for 2004 has been released by Mozilla Foundation. They consider their $4.4 million in income from "search revenues" (apparently this is all from Google) to be part of their exempt function or purpose.
The IRS considers any advertising income realized by a nonprofit to be "unrelated business income" and subject to taxes. Question: What's in the contract with Google that Mozilla signed in 2004? Is it based on AdWords percentages? Opera's 2005 contract with Google works this way, so I assume that Mozilla's contract with Google does also.
Even if unrelated to AdWords, the fact remains that doing any sort of business with Google, which is an ad agency (99 percent of Google's income is from advertising), means that income from Google is unrelated to any nonprofit, exempt function or purpose.
And it's definitely not a donation. A charitable contribution requires that no goods or services are exchanged. The money passed from Google to Mozilla does not qualify as a contribution, because Google has received substantial benefit from the association.
Naughty Mozilla Foundation. They should pay their taxes.
A copy of Mozilla's 2004 Form 990 is available at http://www.scroogle.org/mozilla.html