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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."
If they took Microsoft's cash instead? I'm sure MS would love to have more traffic pointed at their search, regardless of the source.
Okay, I admit ignorance. I have never understood how Mozilla, a purveyor of free-as-in-beer software, makes money, even if only operating capital (as opposed to profit).
What sources other than Google fund Mozilla? And why?
Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.
is that they only gave out 300K to opensource? It is FAR less than what they are paying their CEO? Something is WAY wrong. As it is, most of Firefox WAS done as OSS, and the foundation would not exist with it. They should be spending a LOAD of money on OSS.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
That seems right to me.
Mozilla Foundation stopped supporting Thunderbird development apparently because the organization got no money for it, and Google wants you to use web mail, so that you will see the ads.
Mozilla Foundation gave no adequate explanation for killing its support of Thunderbird.
lwn.net had a story about this a while back. Worth reading at http://lwn.net/Articles/256904/. One of the comments in particular:
I think people should read this article, by Asa Dotzler, a coordinator for several Mozilla projects.
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/2007/10/firefox_finance.html
Revenues: $66,840,850
Expenses: $19,776,193
Expenses breakdown:
Program Services: $ 540,384
Software Development: $11,775,516
Sales and Marketing: $ 4,836,238
General & Admin: $ 2,624,055
"Profit" (or, change in net assets, since it's a non-profit): $27,893,735
Damn, it's good to be free. You'd think that the foundation would donate its money to fund other OSS projects, but as software people have discovered, the first priority of a foundation is to ensure the existence (and a lucrative existence at that) of its staff.
You're kidding, right?
Everyone I know using Firefox on the Mac has the same problem. Reproducible? Perhaps the foundation could just buy a Mac for testing.
In the six months since I switched, the system has been rock solid and every other application has been fine, only Firefox needs to be repeatedly restarted due to ballooning memory use.
Right now, after just two hours of light usage since Firefox last slowed my entire system to such a crawl that it had to be restart, one window and three tabs open (Gmail, Google reader, slashdot), Activity Monitor shows Firefox at 322MB real memory, 824MB virtual and growing. I don't actually know how high it goes before becoming completely unusable (haven't bothered looking) but it must be pretty high - I have 4GB of memory installed in this laptop and, usually, no other apps running.
That is with the most recent FF, 2.0.0.9 - there is, absolutely, a problem; perhaps if the foundation were not in such a rosy financial situation they would have an incentive to fix problems that affect a significantly large minority of their users.