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

Interesting double standard of governance

[crush]

When you compare the reason that the free SSL certificate providers like CAcert have been kept out of Mozilla's root certificate list (because CAcert can't pay up $250,000 for a bullshit audit from some US accountancy organisation which proves that CAcert won't mismanage funds), and now we have Mozilla doing secret deals with Google (and who knows, they could do them with Microsoft in the future). Mozilla is moving rapidly into the EvilNonOpenCompany territory... but at least the code is all GPLed.

Re:Interesting double standard of governance

[kebes]

but at least the code is all GPLed

(Actually Mozilla products are not released under the GPL but rather their own open-source license.) The fact that it is open-source is the crucial bit, since that's what, ultimately, gives the users the power in this whole situation. And that's why I'm not worried.

Thus far, Mozilla has done nothing but good things (in my opinion). They have created a nice browser and email client, distributed them as open-source, and have been aggressively promoting their products and FLOSS in general. In short, I trust them... because they have earned that trust with their actions.

So, with regard to this Google deal, I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt, and assume that they are making decisions that benefit the community. So far, we have no evidence of anything shady about the deal. (They have disclosed that the money is in exchange for Google being the default, but not the only, engine in the search bar... which is fine in my book.)

However, I'm not a fool (or at least I like to think so). And if Mozilla is found guilty of shady deals, or "betraying" the community of people who are currently evangelizing and supporting Mozilla, then I will change my stance quickly--as will most others in the community I think. The important point is that because the source-code is available to the community, everyone is empowered to fork the project and ignore Mozilla if that becomes necessary. It would be a shame to loose the Firefox brand, but at least the work that went into the codebase would not be lost.

It is this "power to the community" that makes me not worry so much... both because it means that if Mozilla becomes "evil" we have an immediate counter-reaction... and also because the existence of this possible counter-reaction makes it rather unlikely for Mozilla to ever turn their back on the community.

Re:Interesting double standard of governance

[quentin_quayle]

"Thus far, Mozilla has done nothing but good things (in my opinion). ... I trust them... because they have earned that trust with their actions. ... So, with regard to this Google deal, I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt, and assume that they are making decisions that benefit the community. So far, we have no evidence of anything shady about the deal."

I disagree. There is plenty that is shady in Mozilla and it's increasing.

Basically, there is a force within the Mozilla Foundation that's dedicated to selling out the users to data-mining, and a counterforce of devs and users who are still idealistic. This conflict appears occasionally in debates about particular features, and more importantly in the browser's evolving features.

I don't have the relevant links handy here at work but I'll recount some of this from memory.

* They disabled first the image confirmation feature (whether to accept images from particular sites), and then removed the ability to easily find out image urls without leaving the page.

* They added support for the "ping" attribute in links, which notifies a server other than the link destination when the user clicks the link - and defended it with the nonsensical argument "you may hate this, but sites will do it anyway by other means, therefore it's better to make it easy for them". It would have been on by default if not for protests.

* Prefetching feature (applied to top results in Google searches for example) makes network requests without user notification or initiation, and it would have been on by default if not for protests.

* "Live bookmarks" feature in FF2 makes network requests without the user requesting them.

* In FF2, RSS icons are requested without notification or consent from users.

* Firefox 2 retrieves a page from the remote server whenever the user makes a bookmark; there is no notice to the user about this, and there's no way to turn it off.

* Anti-phishing feature in FF2 has optional feature to send every URL visited to Google.

* Something in Firefox 2 makes a network request at startup, even if home page is blank, all auto-updates are turned off, anti-phishing feature is off, etc.. This is reported in a thread on Mozillazine and I've personally confirmed it. It is still unexplained by M.F oundation.

The point is that this trend is increasing fast. I have no choice but to conclude that Firefox users have been sold out in the secret deal.

I'm glad

[joe 155]

I'm happy Mozilla is making a nice amount of money, that's really the point we are trying to make with the GPL isn't it? you can still be commercially viable and open source - don't fear it...

I would also say that there is no danger for the community, it'd be really easy to fork it if things really got that bad... hell, we already have Ice Weasel...

Re:Here We Go....

[xappax]

I expect to get paid, I am not surprised when others do too...

The thousands of volunteers who do much of the actual work on Firefox don't expect to get paid in dollars, but they do expect to be "rewarded" with some kind of involvement and input in their own project.

This isn't so much about Google giving money to Mozilla as it is about Mozilla obfuscating its processes from its own volunteers. Google is giving giant amounts of money to Mozilla because of the hard work of the Firefox volunteers. I don't think the volunteers expect a dime of that money, or even a vote on how it's spent, but they'd probably at least like to be able to offer suggestions on how to spend it. As it stands, they aren't even allowed to know what's happening to the money, or what kind of agreements were attached to it.

The obvious response to this complaint is "Well, it's open source; If you don't like it, go fork your own browser!", and I suspect exactly that may happen if Mozilla continues to show this kind of disrespect to the people who are, to a large degree, responsible for the foundation's success.

Re:I'd like to see more transparancy

[Xtravar]

How has Yahoo played dirty? Just curious... I don't recall anything in particular.

One source of income they don't talk about...

[bigbigbison]

From the search box in firefox do a search on Amazon. Look at the url. See that, "mozilla-20" in the url? That's mozilla's Amazon Associate link. So if you, like me, tend to buy stuff from Amazon after searchinf for it with the firefox search box, then Mozilla is getting a percentage of whatever you buy. I don't mind that, but I've just never seen it mentioned anywhere. It would be nice if they were a bit more upfront about that kind of income as well

Re:One source of income they don't talk about...

[kchrist]

The important thing to realize here is that you're not donating anything. Amazon is donating, in the form of the referral credit they're paying for the sale of a book to you. You pay the same amount regardless. This is how affilate programs work.

Re:I'd like to see more transparancy

[Alphager]

It would be good if you had a signature stating that you are Asa Dotzler, Marketing-Guy for Mozilla Inc.