Mozilla Raking in Millions?

truthsearch writes "Internetnews.com wonders about the money Firefox is making in revenue thanks to Google. From the article: 'Mozilla gets paid a publicly undisclosed amount for each Google search query made from Firefox by a user.' This revenue is used to pay the recently formed Mozilla Corporation's 40 full-time equivalent employees and fund project and infrastructure development."

Comments

So what?

[Indio_do_Xingu]

I really don't understand the question here. Is he implying that Mozilla pockets the money? Or do they want to audit the profits? Just because an Open Source company is making money pundits start to ponder what will the money be used for?

They get the money from the search bar from gogle. Users benefit, google benefits, Mozilla benefits. Profits go to development of their current and future products. Want to know more? Why not contact them directly?

Re:So what?

[BeanThere]

Oh for God's sake what do you expect, that the Mozilla developers should be "pure" and "untainted" by commercial interests that might "bias" them towards pushing their solutions over others for reasons other than technical? Get over yourself, there just aren't enough programmers willing to live like paupers giving up their lives in some mother theresa style gesture doing volunteer development work while starving and living in the gutter ... you can't *make* software for free, programmers not only need money, they tend to demand a lot of it ... further it's a free market, the Mozilla Foundation have found a business model that allows them to make money off a free browser and there is nothing wrong with that ... if it was so terrible, then the free market would reject it and come up with alternate solutions. If their browser was shit nobody would use it no matter how much they astroturfed, and if they were raking in unjustifiable amounts of money and spending it on yachts then the free market would eventually find another cheaper way to make browsers. Nobody is forced to use FireFox and people are broadly capable of knowing whether the browser they are using sucks or not. Having more "motivation to market" (and money to do so) is a good thing, you speak as though marketing itself is some form of evil.

Funny how it's always "other people" we expect to live to insanely idealised standards of devotion to ideologies of untainted technical purity, while for ourselves it's always OK to maximise the income we can earn from our own endeavours.

Re:So what?

[BeanThere]

Google was the most popular search engine long before FireFox ever had that search box. Thus even if Google weren't funding Mozilla at all, it would still be the most obvious and logical "default choice", provided one does not limit people from choosing others or making it difficult to do so (which they haven't). I mean, it (a) just wouldn't have made sense anyway to deliberately choose a less popular search engine and (b) choosing some other search engine would still be unfairly favouring one over another. Asking the user every time they run FF for the first time would be silly. No, the only clear choice is to please the most users by choosing the most popular search engine.

I still don't agree that it's anything like the Skype situation. In the Skype situation, they had something they'd developed that worked on all platforms, and then they sat down and intentionally spent additional time and effort to deliberately break it on some platforms. In the case of the search box in FF, they started with nothing, i.e. no search box at all, and sat down and added a new feature that contains no limitations. It's like someone gives you a free ice-cream and you complain because it's not your favourite flavour. What Skype did takes something away from users, what FF have done has only added.

The point of the article?

[NekoXP]

Sounds like they are playing the guilt-trip card.

Of course it's publically undisclosed. Why do they need to disclose it? They have no obligation to, really, as a private entity (rather than being on the stock market or so).

If they are raking in the money, great! Software developers need to get paid! :)

what a dumb article

[sundru]

Some moron in an online editorial is curious what mozilla is doing with its money , why the heck should mozilla disclose how its using its money ? free software doesnt mean you have to account for every penny you earn , they built a heck of a browser let them reap the benefits of what they sowed. --- Must be a dull day for the editors @ /. Go home and have a beer fellas tis the weekend --

Re:what a dumb article

[matthewsmalley]

Why should Mozilla disclose how its using its money? Because it's a California non-profit corporation. Here in the UK charities/ngo's/etc have to disclose their financials in order to continue receiving all the perks (tax exemption for donatees etc). Otherwise you end up with one big money laudering machine (in the government's eyes).

Anyway I as a potential donater want to know what I'm donating to? (I don't think this is the case but...) If Mozilla's turned into a profit-hungry corporation, but is still trying to imply it needs my £10 a month to feed its hungry developers, then that's deception on a large scale, and I'm not interested.

There's a conscious difference in most people's minds between donating to a company that's explicity not out to make a profit and buying product from one that is.

Re:Phase 2?

[Savage-Rabbit]

They don't have much choice...Microsoft had essentially destryed "direct" market by driving browsers price to zero. And they need _some_ ways to fund their development.

Yup and it isn't as if there is anything morally wrong about OOS projects making money as long as it doesn't violate GPL and the profits go toward funding the project? Personally I don't mind, there are plenty of examples of non-profit organizations that have revenue streams so why get upset over the Mozilla project joining that group as long as the money doesnt' corrupt them?

Bandwidth Fairies

[Joebert]

Imagine that, Mozilla has income.
Here all this time I thought the bandwidth to distribute 100 million coppies at 5 mb each & the occasional updates was being pulled out of the ass of bandwidth faries.

It's the GPL, silly!

[TapeCutter]

"....to astroturf even. And I wonder if they are - they appear to have an unreasonable amount of support on sites like this...."

They get "an unreasonable amount of support" because they use the GPL, there is no conspiracy, take away the GPL and they all look pretty much the same. In fact that is the whole point, they can't legally take away the GPL for code that has already been released. Rightly or wronly many "intellectuals" associate open source with freedom and indepenence.

Money motivates and astroturf happens, but "on sites like this", the GPL stamp is what drives the genuine enthusiasim amongst people who do know their stuff. If you don't "do software" for a living the GPL may seem obscure, but trust me, the GPL is important not only to geeks, but also an ever growing number of corporations and governments.

When I worked for IBM in the 90's, the then CEO, Lou Gerstner said: "All software has been written, it just needs to be managed". None of us geeks had a fucking clue what he was talking about and simply laughed at his seemingly bizzare pronouncments. Ironically I now make a good living by stiching software components together, many of them open source.

Well, if it's this big supposedly

[hey!]

it should be possible to confirm this to a reasonable degree of satisfaction.

Non-profits, while they don't pay taxes, go through the same auditing process that private companies do. They also have to submit a "Form 990" to the Feds, which is roughtly equivalent except that it is public information. The first section of the form is gross revenues, under which income from contributions and program service revenue are different lines.

So, if the line for program and service revenue is nearly 100 million, they're probably not getting it from giving backrubs.

There may be additional state disclosures required, depending on where they're incorporated. For example, here in Massachusetts, it's possible to find out CEO salaries for non-profits. This is designed to prevent people from funneling estate money to their heirs through shell charities.

Re:Well, if it's this big supposedly

[ptbarnett]

On the 2004 return, "sponsorship revenues" were $4,422,674.

In statement 7, the explanation is:

Qualified sponsorshiop payments received as the result of agreements between various search providers and Mozilla. These arrangements facilitate the dissemination of the Foundation's Firefox browser, thereby increasing the accessibility of the internet. Mozilla receives payments for allowing the Internet search provider to occupy its default or primary search location, or for the opportunity to be included in the Firefox web browser.

(Original is all caps. Lameness filter wouldn't let me post it that way)