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Why Firefox's Future Lies In Google's Hands
Barence writes "Firefox has just turned five, and it now accounts for 25% of the global market, according to figures from Net Applications. Its success has forced rivals to raise their game, and the past two years have seen Microsoft, Apple, and Opera close the features gap significantly. Google is the default homepage when Firefox first opens, and the default search engine when users type something into the 'awesome bar.' The deal, which runs until 2011, was worth $66 million to Mozilla in 2007, accounting for 88% of the foundation's revenues that year (the last year for which it had published accounts). But now that Google is a competitor as well as a partner, is it really wise for Mozilla to be so dependent on Google?"
FUD.
No, that is only one of many possible F/OSS business models. Other common F/OSS business models include dual licensing and paid support. Examples include Redhat, formerly Trolltech (aquired by Nokia), and many others.
Of the big linux distrobutions, only one (ubuntu) comes to mind as relying on a so called "sugar daddy". Debian is entirely community run, and Fedora is community run, with support from Redhat (an extremely sucessful and profitable F/OSS company).
Time has already shown the concept to be quite workable.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
I know you're trying to be sarcastic and/or funny; but, there's a history lesson, sitting right there waiting for you... It goes by the name of Netscape.
You need to realize that most of the Firefox community is under 20 years old.
[citation needed]
"Under 30" I *might* give you as an out-of-the-blue ballpark figure, although still totally unsubstantiated; "under 20" is just setting up a straw man to justify the rest of your rant. No wonder you posted AC.
But I understand why you wanted to gloss over that age group of Firefox users -- we remember when Opera cost money. In 2000 they released a free Opera, but it was ad-supported, which I for one would never tolerate in a web browser. It wasn't until 2005 that the free Opera was ad-free, at which point Firefox was already very well established.
Citation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_(web_browser)
> Where does the money go?
See http://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2009/11/19/state-of-mozilla-and-2008/ and the documents linked from it for the 2008 data.
> Put that in the bank and you could easily pay the salary of 10 full time programmers
As of end of 2008, there were about 200 people being paid out of the $66 million, according to the link above. That would include programmers, QA, UI designers, marketing, administration, IT staff.
That's somewhat smaller than the number of people Opera, say, employs, at least last time I checked.
For comparison, by the way, FY 2008 revenues for Opera were about $87 million according to http://www.opera.com/media/finance/2009/2Q09.pdf
In summary, for 2008 and based on http://www.mozilla.org/foundation/documents/mf-2008-audited-financial-statement.pdf , something like $17 million taxes, $12 million set aside for future (e.g. if the Google contract doesn't get renewed, say). About $50 million spent, from a total revenue of $80 million or so. That would presumably include salaries+benefits for those 200-ish people, whatever hardware is needed for the developers, the testing infrastructure (see http://atlee.ca/blog/2009/11/02/what-happens-when-you-push/ for example), infrastructure for the various Mozilla web sites (addons.mozilla.org, www.mozilla.org, update servers, etc). Oh, and office space lease, presumably.
How much do you figure it should take to run an organization with about 200 competent (so not necessarily cheap) staff and a fair amount of necessary infrastructure for a year?
Give me a break. I only ever use it for Firebug anymore and even that's becoming more rare as the tools for Safari and Chrome improve. Firefox will be irrelevant within 3 years, and still wondering where they went wrong.
Opera's Dragonfly is definitely on par with FF Firebug, if you're still looking for an alternative.
"I'm never quite so stupid as when I'm being smart" (Linus van Pelt)
Well, Debian can do it: Iceweasel (the Debian version of Firefox) is updated via the repositories (and you can setup your own for internal use) and so are some of it's extensions and plugins.
Dilbert RSS feed
I'm sorry, but other than the huge advantage that is all the plugins available for Firefox, Opera has always been lightyears ahead of any other browser's features.
http://operawiki.info/OperaInnovations
Tabbed browsing and Zooming into a webpage are only the two that seem most important and were introduced by Opera, but they have always been incredibly innovative, much more so than Firefox. Yet there's not a big developer following, probably because it is not open source like FF, that's Opera's weakest part I guess, but as a browser, I love it.
It's true that Firefox has typically been playing catch up throughout its lifespan. However, in the last 18 months, it has been seriously lagging behind other browsers (IE aside). Process separation, general speed, stability, memory fragmentation, etc.
This meme about Firefox memory fragmentation just won't die! Firefox 3.0.x you could still claim that Firefox was sucking down more and more memory as pages got visited. With 3.5.x, you can kiss that problem pretty much goodbye - Firefox returns more memory back to the system than any competing browser.
And Firefox isn't the largest memory consumer here either - that prize probably goes to Chrome, simply because one-tab-per-process is inevitably a heavier memory requirement.
Firefox stability is still a minor issue. However, it's stable enough that I get about 1 crash every three days, which is well within my tolerance level (14 extensions, 11 plugins). Tools like abrt provide a decent mechanism for informing the necessary bug trackers.
Speed-wise, Firefox devs know they are in a race with Chrome. 3.6.x looks like it will be faster than 3.5.x by a fair margin. Project Electrolysis stands to improve matters further. I'm all for competition - keeps everyone working on the issue.
Give me a plugin sandbox so that Flash trapping doesn't take out the page and I'll be content.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
How productive must the executives be to justify the salaries? Seeing as it was them who negotiated the 66 million to begin with I would say there were quite productive indeed.
I'll never understand people like you that constantly whine about other peoples salaries. 1) it isn't any of your business how much they make, 2) if they didn't deserve it the board wouldn't be giving it, 3) if they grab more than they earn the company dies and the code base is free so no real loss.
Honestly, are people like you so petty that you must constantly whine that you don't make as much as someone else? Be happy they are making money, they will continue to do so and we'll all benefit as a result. If you really must insist on this socialist idea of spreading the wealth then by all means, move to Cuba and see how productive they are there.
Why are you attempting to make this into a capitalism vs. socialism strawman? The issue at hand is the CEO of a for-profit organization backed by a non-profit organization, and hence pays no taxes whatsoever on the $66 million some of which goes into obscene CEO profits. Meanwhile, countless F/OSS supporters are poring in their precious free time to develop, report bugs and develop extensions.
And it is my business how much they make or what Mozilla does with it's money, because that money comes from Google searches that people like me perform on Firefox. If me and other users of FF suddenly decide to switch to Bing on FF or to Chrome, it's Firefox that stops earning millions and fold up since Google pays per search. There are plenty of other competing browsers nowadays that are faster and leaner anyway. If some of that money that goes into executive pay was used in the previous years to make Firefox faster and leaner(notice the number of 'Firefox is bloated' complaints that pop up everytime in a FF story?) Firefox would stop losing users and revenue.
So if the executives start paying themselves $65 million a year because they signed on the agreement with Google, I should be happy for them for making money? And while I am not a fan of socialism, Cuba is a bad example. From the Wiki:
Cuba also has succeeded in reducing poverty and equalizing the distribution of wealth. According to the United Nation's Economic Commission for Latin America, the decile ratio (share of total income for the top 10 percent of wage earners divided by the bottom 10 percent) in Latin America was 45 to 1, while that of Cuba was only 4 to 1. Cuba's income distribution was more than 10 times more equal than the rest of Latin America in the 1980s. Before the Revolution, Cuba's decile ratio was 65 to 1.[4]
This space for rent.
I found the claim that Opera was "catching up" in the summary spurious at best. Many of the features that Firefox has were developed first by the Opera team, including tabs.
FanFictionRecs.net
The issue at hand is the CEO of a for-profit organization backed by a non-profit organization, and hence pays no taxes whatsoever on the $66 million some of which goes into obscene CEO profits.
The Mozilla Corporation pays taxes on everything it earns just like every other taxable corporation. It is not allowed to share money back with the Foundation or risk costing the Foundation its non-profit status.