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."
It's hard to see that which is transparent.
In any case, as much of a paranoid individual I am, I think that Google *has* to be secretive. Google has been targeted by Microsoft, Yahoo, and other huge companies which have a long history of play really really dirty. Google has been around a while now and has no real history of being dirty. Their NDA for interviews which slashdotters freaked about, if they had RTFA and then read the NDA, most of them would have seen the articles took clauses out of context, which you simply can't do, and in context it made sense.
If I were a rather new, but large, rich company with a lot to lose, I'd be keeping as many secrets as I could from the companies and people who would love to see me fail.
Know your enemy, and make sure it doesn't know you.
Eternity is a time bomb.
I disagree,
I didn't pay for Firefox. It's a rockin' product, but how does the fact that I use it give me any rights to see what deals the owner's / developers of this F/OSS project have? I think the problem is on the other side. Google is a publicly traded company, so they should have their stock holders asking them the tough questions, not bothering a F/OSS project.
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? -
Actualy, Firefox is tri-licensed. So take your pick. If you want to redistribute the code under the GPL, feel free to do so.
I am d3matt
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
"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.
"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?