Slashdot Mirror
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."
Yes, well, bring that up on the Slashdot if you want some suggestions on where to spend the money. Maybe even ask the Google about it, since that's where the money came from.
I don't know why use of "the" here amuses me so much, but it makes the author seem very unfamiliar with the companies and products they are writing about.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
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
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.
Do slightly less evil than Microsoft
we are used to looking at systems and asking, 'will it scale?'
when you look at the products that do scale- or implement something at a very large scale, it takes money. i've not seen an exception yet. i don't care about firefox, google and their deal - as long as the browser works the way i want.
on a side note-- as for what to do with the 'extra' money. i'd love to see it invested in making other open apps - like sunbird and thunderbird great.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
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'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...
*''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
Aren't we all?
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?
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.
"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.
Did anyone else read that as
"a path of secret agreements, proprietary code, and G-strings attached sponsorship"?
Anyone?
(Man, I need to get laid more often)
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
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
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
Yes.
Open source was a method that is unheard of for creating and publishing things some time ago, and its proving that it is an unprecedented success, as it was pitted against hulky big proprietary method-using corporation's stuff and coming out stronger every day.
Some non-it sectors and foundations are going to employ open source methods for doing things. Manufacturing, hardware was recently discussed. If it goes like this, we can find many stuff being further developed by open source methods, imitating its success in i.t. So, it is changing our world.
Now hear this - privacy, finance and transparency are the present issues to integrate with open source, but when they are once integrated with it, and a transparency by ensuring privacy and a usable financial method is achieved, then there will be no reason not to implement these methods in areas from manufacturing to government.
in short, i am telling that the methods invented in open source foundations can be the key to revolutionizing the governmental systems in the world, getting much more closer to direct democracy and full transparency concepts.
Read radical news here
It's funny to see all these "Mozilla is Evil!" posts. So what if Mozilla made corporate subsidy? It's been a year know that Moz Co has been in operation, so where is the fallout? Did Mozilla the organization do anything shaddy? The whole Iceweasel thing is a lot of bullshit, if Mozilla wants to engage in marketing they have to protect their trademark, there are no exceptions. Mozilla's policy on trademarks is very sane, they don't act in an aggressive manner, they get in contact with the right people and sort things out.
Mozilla succeeded exactly because they are able to make a product that can be used by average users (while at the same time allowing geeks to customize Firefox to any degree we want). Mozilla should continue with their policy of ignoring OSS populism and innovating . The idiots who are too stupid to understand why Mozilla makes certain decision should use Iceweasel.
"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?
Sure.
2 007/01/the_mozilla_foundation_achievi.html
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/mitchell/archives/
- A