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Google's Shadow Over Firefox
eldavojohn writes "The Mozilla Foundation's chief executive now earns roughly half a million in pay and benefits. With $70 million in assets, the Foundation gave out less than $300,000 in grants to open source projects in 2006. And in 2006 85% of their $66 million in revenue came from Google. When these figures first came to light, people worried whether Firefox was becoming a pawn in Google's cold war with Microsoft. The Foundation addressed these fears and largely laid them to rest; but now the worry is that, even though it's clear that the community's code is what makes Firefox successful, Mozilla may be becoming dangerously reliant on Google's cash."
Better to be reliant on Google's cash, than not having any cash at all.
im no zealot, but, if any misconduct happens to come in the way of firefox from google, no amount of publicity stunt, good deeds can make it up. heed the words of a developer.
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Shouldn't a technology company spend more than $300,000 on Research & Development? There many bugs in Firefox, even some security bugs stay unfixed for years. And equally important memory leak bugs. I think more money could be spend on better timely responses to security bugs and also fix speed/memory problems plaguing Firefox.
Never learn by your mistakes, if you do you may never dare to try again
Seriously, people: capital is good, that's how you pay for stuff and people, and fund projects. And it's not like Google is bribing the Firefox Foundation, the money comes from search engine integration in Firefox. Also, I can't recall Firefox being involved in any shady business where they have sided with Google against Microsoft. Furthermore, The Firefox Foundation did negotiate with Yahoo before sealing the deal with Google, so they clearly have other options than just Google. Who knows, when the contract with Google expires in 2008, maybe even MS will try to make a deal with The Firefox Foundation.
From the summary: Nowhere is this fear expresses besides in the summary. Less editorializing, please.
I don't think the main issue is Google supporting Firefox, as people have already commented it's generally a plus to have a steady stream of income. The real issue here is in regards to the CEO's pay. Half a million dollars compared to $300,000 for R&D? Something's skewed there.
Actually it would make me feel better if they took Microsoft's cash as well. The more sources of income a company has, the more secure it is. With only one or two big sources, if they lose one they may well be screwed.
Not saying that the Mozilla Foundation is likely to lose Google's cash any time soon, but that's a general principle - don't put all your eggs in one basket, and all that.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
With operating revenues in the billions, Google is getting a huge benefit for a very small outlay with the money flowing into the Mozilla Foundation. These days, it is less common to have a hotlink lingering around for your search engine of choice because they are so ubiquitous that they are expected to just "be there".
And if you run Firefox, the default search engine at the top corner of the screen is none-other-than Google. It is a beautiful interface that has been embraced by users (me and you), the vendor (Google), and the merchant (Mozilla). A rare win-win-win for all. You and I get easy access to search online for anything with the click of a button. Google gets a way to funnel us into their site so they can show us their advertisements. Mozilla gets money to pay their engineers to improve a world class software application.
Given this information, it is silly to think that Google would terminate their beneficial relationship with Mozilla because it would significantly hurt them where it matters most (getting users to their site).
Support the 30 Hour Work Week!!!
There is no way that the head of an open source project should be taking half a mil in compensation. Donate the freaking money to other open source projects that have done important work for the open source community.
I'm sure the Samba and Apache crews can use a little of the love. Hell, the people who created Adblock are the reason I use Firefox... Give them some of the damn cash! Which other open source projects do you think have done the community a lot of good and deserve some of the bank?
Top notch programming can be done for free, but for large products that is the exception rather than the rule, even for open source applications. Most of the people who think large open source projects are done primarily by unpaid developers as a hobby, simply don't have any real experience in OSS development.
Which means Mozilla could consider a third evil and join the nasty capitalist system by figuring out exactly what value they are providing to their customers, and charging for it.Most open source projects that work really well are capitalist endeavors. The difference is that the users of the software are also the developers, instead of having developers sell the software to users after marking up the price. Mozilla provides a functional and useful Web browser, with better security than IE. The company I work for has done a very small amount of work on Firefox, because we use Firefox and wanted a feature for our own use. We're users and developers. Other companies that have standardized on it hire developers to program and contribute some feature to the project. We do this because it makes our business money by improving our tools. I guess my main point is that most OSS projects are driven by capitalism, just with the "programming as a service" instead of "code as a product" model of capitalism.
Are you completely uninformed or are you being intentionally untruthful here?
You're just plain wrong here.
The original goal, that I helped define in early 2002, was to make a browser that could actually compete with IE and gain market share where the feature bloated and designed by committee Mozilla Application Suite had failed. We didn't skimp on features and included many features, bringing it up and beyond parity with IE, that the suite never had.
Horseshit. We cut launch time and new window time in half in just a few months. We cut the download size by almost 300%. Simply removing the other app XUL overlays was a huge performance win all by itself. Then top developers (this was Dave Hyatt, the creator of XUL, and Joe, Ben, and Blake, the most experienced XUL programmers on the earth at that time) writing much cleaner XUL with sane CSS rules and avoiding the known slow XUL features, were able to get the new browser so far ahead of the Suite performance and usability that the Mozilla leadership agreed it would be a better path forward than the Suite.
From the 0.1 release (the first public release of the browser that would become Firefox) notes:
(emphasis mine.)
And that was the first release before we'd even grabbed all the low hanging performance fruit. Speed and size continued to improve with every single point release while we built great new features like complete settings and data migration, extension management, customizable toolbars, web form auto-complete, and more. The browser was more featureful, faster, and smaller than the Suite.
Yep, we gave users a set of features that people wouldn't or couldn't implement in the Suite. We listened to the users, which had outgrown the Suite's user base in size and involvement long before we shipped 1.0, and built the browser that we believed they would love using enough to spread to their IE using friends, families, and co-workers.
Again, this is just bullshit. Go back and read the Phoenix 0.1 release notes. "Phoenix is not your father's Mozilla browser. It's a lean and fast browser that doesn't skimp on features." Shall I repeat it. "a lean and fast browser that doesn't skimp on features." Where in that statement of purpose do you read that the goal was to make a minimalist browser?
When we shipped Firefox 1.0, the Windows version clocked in at a 4.7MB download compared to the Suite's 13MB download. Firefox 1.0's startup time on low to medium end systems was half that of the Suite and a noticeable improvement even on the fastest systems. Firefox 1.0's memory usage at startup was about 10% better than t