Looking Into Mozilla's Financial Success

NewsCloud writes "'Thanks to the Google agreement, the Mozilla Foundation went from revenue of nearly $6 million in 2004 to more than $52 million the next year [similar revenue is expected in 2006]...In 2005, the foundation created a subsidiary, the for-profit Mozilla Corporation,...mainly to deal with the tax and other issues related to the Google contract...By creating a corporation to run the Firefox project, Mozilla was committing to be less transparent. In part, that is because Google insists on the secrecy of "its arrangement and agreements," said board member Mitch Kapor.' The NYT article compares this approach to Wikipedia's ongoing fundraisers and raises the issue of transparency in open source projects. i.e. should Firefox's 1,000 to 2,000 developers and 80,000 evangelists have full knowledge of how revenue is spent as well as the extent to which Google is able to influence strategy vs. other stakeholders."

Comments

Re:Interesting double standard of governance

[d3matt]

Actualy, Firefox is tri-licensed. So take your pick. If you want to redistribute the code under the GPL, feel free to do so.

Re:I'd like to see more transparancy

[asa]

"Apparently its ok for Google to chuck cash at Mozilla to default to them,"

Actually, we've been defaulting to Google as the default search engine for about 8 years, long before there was a financial relationship.