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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."
Apparently its ok for Google to chuck cash at Mozilla to default to them, but they dont want the terms of the deal disclosed? Dodgy. Imagine the screaming hissy fits about conspiracy if Microsoft brokered a similar deal with Opera to default to whatever MS call their seach engine these days (yes I know Google got there first as well).
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Any time a project gets big and starts bringing in money, it gives up a certain amount of control that each person who works on it previously had. When I heard they were making a for-profit corporation to make secretive deals with massive corporations like Google, I initially thought things were worse than they are. But there's no question that there's a slippery slope in this deal where an open-source project that was previously fueled by the interest of developers could become entrenched and weighed down by the monetary and business aspects in the politics of a company.
The best way to keep things open and developers interested is to release all the information except that which Google requires be kept secret. It's already pretty clear the type of revenue that is coming from the Google. When things get this large, it's easy for those interested in developing to fall out of touch with something that resembles Microsoft a lot more than a community undertaking.
I expect to get paid, I am not surprised when others do too...
I don't buy this quasi-religious non-corporate ethos as the best justification for open source - it's better engineering because it gets quality unrestricted peer review
I want a quality, well engineered genuinely innovative OS - what better justification?
as long as Google etc... etc... don't suddenly expect to own the code it's great
if "Faith" could be proved with facts - would it still be faith? So why does "Faith" try to present beliefs as fact? -
I can't imagine the screaming hissy fits if Microsoft made this type of deal with Opera. I doubt there would be any. Opera has no more responsibility to its developers than any other for-profit corporation. And they're free to follow money wherever it may lead.
Mozilla deals are different because the Mozilla non-profit organization is a representation of the community that develops Gecko and the projects they base on it. When a for-profit company is founded with an ambiguous relationship with the original organization, the role of the development community comes into question. Sure, they're still be contributing to GPL code, but will the spirit of the project still inspire such developer devotion, with so much non-paid contribution? Could they?
"By creating a corporation to run the Firefox project, Mozilla was committing to be less transparent."
And this follow from what? There is nothing about the existence of the Mozilla Corporation that commits us to being less transparent. That's just bunk and it makes no sense given how transparent we are from our development process and planning to our financials.
As far as the details of specific financial relationships with search partners, those were never disclosed in detail (long before the creation of the Mozilla Corporation, in Mozilla Foundation days) and probably won't be since our various partners weren't then aren't now willing to divulge the specifics of their financial relationships with anyone. Mozilla is as transparent as we can be around those relationships, releasing our annual financials and explaining that the bulk of it comes from relationships with various search partners including our default search, Google.
The article overall is fine, but that line is just fiction.
"This isn't so much about Google giving money to Mozilla as it is about Mozilla obfuscating its processes from its own volunteers."
What exactly is Mozilla doing to obfuscate its processes? Is providing a dial-in number to the weekly Mozilla planning meetings some kind of obfuscation? How about dial-in numbers for the Firefox meetings and the Gecko meetings and the Support meetings and the Marketing meetings? Is that also obfuscation? How about the public Mozilla wiki that documents all of the product and project proposals, roadmaps, PRDs, buglists, etc.? More obfuscation? And the newsgroups where all of the planning discussions happen, where all of the tricky technical issues are openly evaluated? And an open bug tracking tool where all of our implementation bugs and patches are publicly discussed, reviewed, and explained? Is that just more obfuscation? How about the annual financial disclosures where the community can see exactly how much revenue Mozilla generated? And the announcements of all of our new hires (many, including project and product leads hired from volunteers in the community) All obfuscated?
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
In my opinion that's exactly the wrong way to look at it, at least when we're talking about Amazon affiliate links. Instead, I look at it this way: Whenever you buy a n item at Amazon.com without using an affiliate code, you're throwing money away - you could be using an affiliate link and donating that money to someone you wanted to support. The fact that Mozilla sets that affiliate ID to a reasonable default (support the browser you're using) when you explicitly use the built in Amazon search box is a feature, not a bug.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
"Yes, it's part of the business world, and just "how things work."
We're actually trying to use our leverage to change "how things work" in the business world. A good example would be our "companion" program. We've partnered with several large companies to build customized versions of Firefox that include new and powerful features to compliment their services. Because these partners find value in Firefox and working with Mozilla, we've been able to convince them that the code for their "companion" should be open source and, in cases like the Kodak Companion, that the product have other, competing services (say, Flickr, for example,) built right in.
We're not going to accept, across the board, that there's "a way" that business works. We're doing what we can, with the leverage we have, to change "how things work". I'd wager, though, that there isn't a single prominent search service that would be willing to disclose the exact terms of a search arrangement and since Mozilla isn't basing the product decisions on the search contracts, but rather the other way around, this is one of those areas where I think we can all accept a bit of opacity.
(and in case that last part wasn't clear, we don't make Google the default search because they pay us. We made Google the default because defaults are necessary and we felt that Google was the best possible default for our users. If that changes, then the default search engine will change. Google has been the default search for Mozilla going back to like 1999.)