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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."
...if the dollar figure is in the hundred thousands, millions, or billions? Just a thought...people seem to be overrating how much they are actually making (costs aside).
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good on them.
I salute them!
http://www.livejournal.com/users/metricmusic
Hey, if they make a great browser like Firefox, they deserve it. I just tried the new IE7, and it's horrible imo. Too overdone. I like firefox's simplicity and power.
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?
But is this really sustainable in the long run? That seems to be a lot of money.
I guess its a stupid question - seems to be a win-win situation at the outset - though google paying firefox seems more "dont be evil" driven than bottom-line minded. I mean even if they didn't pay, what were the chances that it wasn't going to be google up there?
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!
Do they also get $ from searches on ebay, amazon, or yahoo (which are also listed on the toolbar)?
They can also spend it on fixing memory leaks. Spinning the issue is not fixing the issue. I'm about to switch to Opera if FF doesnt get their act together.
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.
One that hath name thou can not otter
So you are telling me that for every googeling I do in the quick search bar mozzila gets paid. I was under the impression that this was free software. Not some scam to make $$.
By using this link to get to the story ;-)
Interesting to note the default "google" keyword for the address bar puts the sourceid=firefox in there
As an aside, for those who want to make their own custom keywords (and don't know how to), here's an example: Bookmarks->Manage Bookmarks, click on any of the bookmarks under "quick searches", click new bookmark (top left), I made one for acronyms using acronym finder.
Name: Acronym Finder
Location: right click here, copy link location, paste (/. chews up the link)
Keyword: af
Description: You can put whatever you want here, it's optional
Then you click ok. Now when in firefox you can just search for acronyms by typing af + the acronym, for example: af HTTP
For other websites that use a link similar to the acronymfinder one, just insert %s where your query would go. In my example it's in Acronym=%s. You can also note the other default quicksearches that already exist (ex. slang for urban dictionary, dict for dictionary.com)
There is another kind of evil which we must fear most, and that is the indifference of good men. -- Boondock Saints
Lets do some basic math and see how the numbers add up.
... but still A LOT MONEY !!
- Of the 100 million downloads lets say 20% are daily/active users -> 20 2illion users.
- Of the 20 million daily users, lets says 20% do make at least 1 search query. -> 4 million queries/day.
- If google pays around 0.02c a query. They get 80k/day x 30 days = 3.2Mil x 12 months =~ 38 Mil right there. A conservative number
I salute them!
With which finger?
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 --
.... other open source software.
Firefox has been mentionned based on their search bars, a while ago the German version of Firefox was said to have "spyware"
There is another kind of evil which we must fear most, and that is the indifference of good men. -- Boondock Saints
This is a great example of an open source program making money off its success. It wouldn't be impossible for other open source programs to do similar sponsorship deals with other companies.
Maybe Linux could have a "You know, Windows has a lower TCO" message when it's booting up.
Safari has Apple. Internet Explorer has Microsoft. Firefox has Google. All 3 companies have the resources to fund development of their free browsers.
Opera is the stand out -- in the rain. Opera has Opera Software, but Opera Software is a tiny 230-person company. Unless the anti-establishment mavericks in tech communities like SlashDot aggressively support Opera by buying commercial Opera-Software products, Opera just might disappear, being squeezed to death by the big 3 browers: Safari, Internet Explorer, Firefox.
Having used Internet Explore, Firefox, and Opera, I can swear that Opera is the fastest, most compact browser for the Windows environment. I hope that the best-marketed product (i.e. either Internet Explorer or Firefox) will not extinguish the technically best product (i.e. Opera). Still, business history has not been kind to the technically best products: e.g., DEC's Alpha processor and Sony's Betamax.
The real risk is that Google might start wanting some more out of Mozilla. If they fund the whole thing one might consider that they have too much to say. Of course you'd have to be very creative to figure out an example...
Also, Google might actually be dependant on being represented in Firefox. What if Mozilla screws them and get a deal with Yahoo? Ooops... there goes say 100 mio. daily searches..
Statistically speaking firefox users are more tech savy. Which therefore transaltes to more socially dysfunctionally people, which ends is a much more searches for pr0n. Remove the pr0n searches and Firefox employees are picking up cans after hours in the Google parking lot to subsidize their salary.
"That Google pays content and search partners, as well as AdSense participants, is not new. What is interesting, however, is the amount that Mozilla earns from its users' Google queries.
One blogger has speculated that the figure is as high as $72 million in fact.
Mozilla Corporation board member Chris Blizzard said that the $72 million figure is not correct, "though not off by an order of magnitude."
Why not call it by its name? What's wrong with giving actual numbers? If someone gives these guys money why not advertise it?
Anyway, of course this kind of money helps firefox to progress. But what I don't like is the idea that this project may act too much dependend and not transparant. I like Google's money to be in open source project, but I hate the idea this project will be seduced by corporate interests instead of user interest that will maybe occur in th future. As a user and open source developer I highly value transparency.
So now I'm on Opera 9.0TP2 and enjoying it. 84 MB of memory used after 12 days of Opera running, God knows how many tabs opened and closed and how many sites (incl. Flash and videos) visited. And I currently have 18 tabs open. *AND* it's a technical preview (not even beta software).
The biggest insult added to injury was the "it's not a memory leak, it's a feature!" attitude from Mozilla.
I don't plan on switching back to Firefox, ever.
If you RTFA, a Mozilla board member says that the quoted figure of $72 million is too high, but "not off by an order of magnitude".
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?
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
I wanted to disable it, because I don't need google (or anyone else) to know I'm using firefox.
Ever heard of UA strings?
GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: www.google.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.0.1) Gecko/20060203 Fedora/1.5.0.1-1.1.fc4.nr Firefox/1.5.0.1
Not that its really an idea for Mozilla or any other project. Or is it ? In terms of funding through Google, their ad models not only fund browsers rather well, but pretty much the entire web site eco system. Who isn't getting money from the Google Ad Business Model these days ?
Amazing, although, of course there is a difference between apps getting money and sites getting money. (Have to admit, though, I didn't even know until recently that browsers had that much of an income opportunity just through that Google search field.) Will Google encroach on the big ad agencies' turf soon ?
I'm not opposed to the foundation making money I just want to know where it's going. Why is the foundation so fucking circumspect about telling us?
Time to switch to Opera I guess...at least I know who is making what there.
You want to know who isn't running Firefox 2.x? They spell it "definately" and "rediculous".
heres how much i make a month just from search alone
53,846 @ 3,557clicks = $261.67
now thats per month and im a small publisher
firefox probably gets that many searches every minute!
also they pay up to $1 for every person who downloads firefox from a referal from my site
!!
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.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
My real question is where all this money goes, I had the, maybe stupid, idea that the Mozilla foundation was non for profit, hence all the money they make is to pay their employees and invest. Now, if they make real money out of it, I would be a little bit pissed off, since I donated money to advertise their product, I mean if they have that much money, they can sure do some advertisement, can't they? I'm not saying I'm ennoyed I gave money, but when I see that : "# What is the purpose of this site? As a small, non-profit organization, the Mozilla Foundation has very limited resources at its disposal to market Firefox to the world. SpreadFirefox was created to fill this void, and was founded on the same principles of community involvement that drive the development and testing of Firefox. We believe there is nothing that a large community of enthusiastic volunteers can't accomplish, and this site exists to unite the community into one cohesive marketing force that even competitors with unlimited resources can't compete with. For more information, see our original announcement." And then I hear about all these arrangements, it sounds to me like their limited ressources are not that limited, so I understand it's not Mozilla directly, but spread firefox in this instance, but it sounds like a lot of bs suddendly.
You don't get it, huh?
This disable-output-escaping makes simply no sense if you're having a valid xml-doc and an xslt-stylesheet to produce _valid_ xhtml (cause you don't need it for that).
It does, however, if you're trying to build makefiles with xml/xslt... but then you chose the wrong tool to produce the final result.
Your browser is made for displaying websites, not producing some weird output.
Because of this, the mozilla-guys are completely right if they say "no we won't".
"....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.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Map of Mozilla HQ
Map of Google HQ
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.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I cannot have the people behind the browser I use making money from it, that may in turn lead to improvements and new features etc.
/lol
Of course, everyone knows that is a lie, as soon as they get money they will tie the product to intel and force me to upgrade to large and larger versions which do the same thing with built in backward incompatability!
Damnit! I am going back to Firefox 0.4a thankyouverymuch.
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
It's pretty interesting. It's a long shot enough a Search Engine making that much money, let alone them having enough to hand out to their favourite Web Browser.
EpiAdv - if you like Pokey the Penguin, try this comic!
-- When I talk about a lot of swap, I'm talking about 800-1000MB. If that isn't high, then tell me what is.
So. . . You don't do anything if you aren't being paid, (or unless you are paying some company for the pleasure of spending your time with their product or service)?
I hope you are mis-reporting yourself.
I use Firefox and I am very glad to have it. I am not a programmer, so I give my time in other ways to the world in the desire to make things better for the people around me. My community is a good and happy one, and it remains a good and happy one because a lot of people here enjoy donating their time and energy to others. It reciprocates nicely in all manner of ways which money cannot (and should not) measure.
Living in a community filled only with people who refuse to lift a finger unless they are being paid sounds utterly and completely miserable.
I'm not saying we don't all have bills at the end of the month. But I am saying that it's vital, if you want a healthy and happy community, that people learn to share and help each other. --Work-for-money fuels the basic structure. Work-for-free fills the structure with color and life.
-FL
How much money does slashdot make from all the advertising?
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
Look at the biggest names in Open Source, they all have some income generating stream somewhere. If this is how Mozilla drums up money for FF than more power to them as it's the least intrusive money making scheme i've seen in software yet. (Compare to banner ads for instance)
I'm a fiscal conservative, it's a pity we don't have a political party anymore
Firefox and Thunderbird are developed and distributed by Mozilla Corporation. Its a subsidiary of Mozilla Org and its a taxable for-profit entity.
1 (short ton / firkin) = 89.1432354 slugs / keg
That's wacky. I currently have over thirty tabs open--including Google.com/ig which autoreloads every five minutes and another local file that reloads every thirty seconds, and I've been viewing stuff on Google Video--and it's using 111MB mem + 114MB swap after running sine sometime yesterday or the day before. This is Firefox 1.5.0.1 on Windows XP with 512MB of RAM. I do wish it used a lot less memory, but I'm not complaining so much at this point. It used to use more, but it's been much better these past few weeks, possibly because I set config.trim_on_minimise to true.
On the other hand, it's crashing nearly daily for me. Google Gmail seems to be the primary culprit, probably coupled with one of the extensions I'm running.
Right now, the things I would most want fixed for my own use are (in order): stability, memory usage, CPU usage (esp. when Flash adverts appear, but I should probably just block those), and then improved CSS support.But I'm too stupid to do it myself, I'm sorry to say. Maybe someday I'll really dive into the codebase, but the code is huge an complex.
transparency is crucial to ethical behavior
Just a question, do you think that all private companies should be required to publicly disclose their financials, like publicly traded companies are, in the interests of "ethical behaviour"?
If you owned a private business would you think it's best to keep your finances public? (One problem with this line of thinking is that the smaller the business, the more blurry the line between the individual and the company --- at some point one would inevitably have to also then argue that the financials of an individual should be public information, and then hence, every individual's. It isn't really my business what my neighbour is spending his money on so long as his actions aren't harming me or others - and if they are, it's usually possible to tell regardless of transparency due to the consequences.)
I'm not convinced that transparency is vital to maintain ethical behaviour within an organisation. If it was, private companies would be havens of illegal behaviour, yet we already have enough checks and safeguards against actual illegal activities that transparency isn't really necessary to keep the system working ... there are millions of private companies that are run quite ethically. For example I own a private business and of course do not release my financials ... but there is little opportunity for me to behave unethically or illegally (even if I wanted to, which I don't), because my financials are still audited and because it wouldn't be possible for me to charge others without delivering the product - I'd get sued.
I don't see mention of Mozilla's "business model" anywhere on their site, and that disappoints me
I start to agree with you somewhat here: The Mozilla Foundation tends to "parade itself" almost as a kind of charity / non-profit organisation. But clearly there is a "business model" of sorts. This seems deceptive. Without transparency, the executives could be (for example) paying themselves millions. This isn't necessarily illegal but would be unethical. This is the real issue here and what "nags", not the mere fact that they make money or that they market.
Mozilla. And of course AOL which put a lot of money into the project initially. Opera has not been able to rely on donations from other companies
Sure. But why do you think all of those companies were willing to donate time and money to Mozilla, but not to Opera?
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
If you spent the time reading the submission on digg.com, you would see that the lack of a change isn't caused by laziness; they have a valid, if somewhat controversial, reason to not implement disable-output-escaping.
"it's not about aptitude, it's the way you're viewed" - Galinda
That's probably not a leak. You probably grew the scope chain by inadventently creating nested closures. I wrote a web app which was sensitive to this, and managed to trim its runtime memory footprint up to 100 megs by being more careful about how I use closures.