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Mozilla and Google Sign New Agreement For Default Search

Posted by Soulskill on from the much-ado-about-nothing dept.

An anonymous reader writes "It appears Google will not cut their default search arrangement with Mozilla. From the official blog post: 'We're pleased to announce that we have negotiated a significant and mutually beneficial revenue agreement with Google. This new agreement extends our long term search relationship with Google for at least three additional years.'"

2 of 103 comments (clear)

  1. Re:how are the terms able to stay secret? by Trepidity · · Score: 5, Informative

    Answering my own question, it looks like it does more or less come out in the reports. Here [pdf] is their financial report for 2009-2010. It reports that they earned "royalties" of $101 million in 2009 and $121 million in 2010, and they explain their royalties as follows:

    The Corporation has a contract with a search engine provider for royalties which expires November 2011. Approximately 84% and 86% of royalty revenue for 2010 and 2009, respectively, was derived from this contract.

    So that seems to imply that "a search engine provider" paid them around $87 million in 2009, and $102 million in 2010. Of course, the current deal may be substantially higher or lower, but that's probably a ballpark figure. Somehow considerably higher than I expected, but now that I look it seems Mozilla has >600 employees, which is also many more than I expected.

    --
    10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
  2. Re:how are the terms able to stay secret? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    They do all sorts of things, most of them in concert with one or more communities (either Mozilla-centric or not).

    • B2G (Boot to Gecko), an early-stage OS primarly targetted at phones
    • Popcorn.js, a HTML5 Media framework
    • Do Not Track Header Initiative
    • BrowserID Project, an initiative/implementation of a way to reduce the burden of authentication on the web
    • Bugzilla, a bug tracking software used by a lot of folks
    • MDN (the Mozilla Developer Network), documenting their browser, but rapidly expanding to document the whole web platform
    • Develop/maintain the Mozilla websites all in the open (excepting the keys to their boxen, etc.)
    • They support Firebug, the browser debugger

    Plus all of the other things from localization to interacting with the standards bodies for HTML, CSS, JS, etc. to give feedback/help push the web platform in a good direction.

    I'm sure I left a million things out. They really do a whole lot, and anyone with the time and a bit of knowledge can dive in and help them with 99.9% of it.