> What exactly is that money for? Where does it > go? Developers? Advertising?
If you read the financial statements that all this is based on, you'd see exactly and precisely where it goes. the bulk of it goes to paying about 100 full-time people and maintaining one of the largest and most capable infrastructures on the planet. Lots also goes into savings/investments for the future.
> Does it REALLY take 56 Million to develop a web > browser? Starting from scratch, I'm sure I could > do it for about 250-500k. And that's with salaries, > rent and benefits.
You go ahead and do that. I'm sure it'll be a huge success. Send me an email with a link when it's shipping to 130 million users.
> With all this intimate data which can be collected > by tracing cookies sent to your browser, why in the > hell doesn't a browser default to delete cookies if > you tell it to "clear PRIVATE data"???
Because users freak out when they say "clear cookies" and all their username logins disappear. For those of you who want to also clear that, it's right there with the tick of a box. I, for one, would rather manually manage my cookies so I can keep all my logins saved.
> Grey out the search box until the user chooses the search > engine they want to use. Randomly choose the order of the > search engines in the drop down box (once). Replace the > home page with a selection page, and include a type-in box.
Yeah. Everything should be an option. Sounds like you want SeaMonkey and not Firefox. Firefox ships with a set of defaults that we believe are best for the most users. Right now, and for the last five or six years, Google has been the best possible search for most of our users. Where it isn't, we'll change it (like we did for a year in Japan, China, and Korea with Yahoo as the default.)
You're suggesting we optimize for the minority case and that's a cop-out that all too many software programs opt for. Most users don't want to have to configure their browser before they start using it. They want it to "just work" and that's what we aim to deliver.
> That way Mozilla won't be giving Google any special treatment > and when the users choose Google to be the preferred search > and home page anyway you can claim that you weren't doing > anything wrong in the first place.
That way, we can make all of our users suffer an extra flaming hoop to jump through to satisfy a few people who are already quite capable of switching to whatever services they want. Sounds like a great plan.
We most certainly have said where the money goes. Read the financial disclosure statement. In summary, the bulk of what we spend goes to personnel and infrastructure and what we don't spend goes into savings/investment.
> As for Microsoft "chucking" Mozilla money, I can't see where > Mozilla users would find Microsoft terribly useful like they > do Google, Yahoo, and our other search defaults.
>> You can't understand why Mozilla users would want the mozilla >> foundation to get more money? Mozilla users want a better browser, >> and they believe that money helps developers make it better. I >> doubt there's a single user on the planet who wouldn't believe >> money from Microsoft would be helpful.
Sorry. One of us misunderstood. Google doesn't just give money to Firefox. They pay for search traffic. Microsoft wouldn't just give Mozilla money, they'd want traffic in return and this is where my point comes in that I don't think that Firefox users would find Microsoft services useful like they do Google and Yahoo and others. Given that users aren't clamoring for Microsoft services, putting them in the browser seems like a bad idea.
>> The other question is: What's in it for Microsoft? And the >> answer is: nothing. Microsoft has their own browser. They >> prefer people to use their own browser. Internet Explorer >> already has 90% marketshare, or more, so giving money to a >> competitor doesn't make any financial sense. If microsoft >> didn't have Internet Explorer, it might make sense for them >> to donate to the mozilla foundation, as long as they could >> get in certain features they wanted. But that's not how the >> world is.
I disagree. I'd wager that Microsoft would pay more than any other search service if Mozilla would make them the default in Firefox. They do have a browser, IE, which has about 75-80% (not 90%) of the global browser market, and they'll definitely use that browser to drive traffic to Microsoft Live services, especially Live Search. That's no reason they wouldn't pay for additional traffic to their search services from other sources.
This is no longer a browser war, it's a web services war and it's all about traffic. There are only two or three big players in web search and Microsoft is not at all happy playing third or fourth place in that game. They'll use any tool at their disposal, including cash, to buy their way up a place or two. Firefox, if it sent the bulk of its search traffic to Microsoft's Live Search, could probably give them a gain of one full place -- surpassing Yahoo and moving in on Google's market.
Again, this isn't about donations. Google isn't "donating" to Firefox. This is about search traffic and what that's worth to the search providers.
> Quite impressive growth indeed, 3 weeks and tens of millions of > users. Or how about finally agreeing to stop using bullshit download > numbers as your installed user base? Might make your calculations a > little easier too. I could see how forgetting wget on a loop might > add a good number of new "users" overnight.
This isn't based on downloads, it's based on active user counts.
I was slightly under-reporting a month ago since it had been a few months since I lst looked at the stats and I'm pretty contemporary with this post since I've been following the stats pretty closely the last month or so.
OK. Now you've got to be kidding. That's rich. Questioning whether or not I was "there" for the 100+ Mozilla releases I managed. OK. You're clearly just joking around here. Had I recognized you were just trying to be funny, I'd have not responded to your initial comment.
> Actually, maybe the problem is the theory that top-notch computing
> work can be done for free, without paying the people who do it,
> because they just love the fame.
It's not a theory. It's happening. It's happening with Mozilla and Firefox. Mozilla pays about 50 full-time software engineers to work on Firefox and the Mozilla platform that Firefox is built on top of. about 1,600 additional developers have contributed code to that project recently without pay from Mozilla, accounting for about 40% of the total work on the latest version of Firefox.
Now, I'm not saying all of them did it "because they love the fame." I've talked with a lot of these contributors about their motivations and very few (though not zero) are in it for "fame". Some are in it because they enjoy participating on a large-scale global software project that enjoys a user base upwards of 130 million. Some are doing it because they like the challenge of solving difficult software problems. Others are in it to get experience they can use to advance in their careers.Some are in it because they care deeply about the Internet or Internet users. A few I know are in it because it's required by their curriculum. I was a volunteer with Mozilla for more than a year because I enjoyed working with a community of passionate people.
Yes, there are definitely people doing top-notch software development at Mozilla for reasons other than a paycheck. The reasons are probably as varied as the people participating.
> Clearly, if Google is giving all this money to Mozilla and
> there is danger of Google getting all the say, Microsoft
> ought to chuck Mozilla a billion or two to stay in the race...
Google isn't "giving" all this money to Mozilla. Firefox users are using Google search a lot and Google is paying Mozilla for that traffic. There is no "say" for Google here outside of that very narrow search relationship. As for Microsoft "chucking" Mozilla money, I can't see where Mozilla users would find Microsoft terribly useful like they do Google, Yahoo, and our other search defaults.
We built the search feature into Mozilla in 1999. Google has been an option in that feature since its inception. That was 5 years before there was any revenue associated with it. We made Google the default in 2002 or 2003 to replace the silly "Netscape" default which was simply a Netscape branded Google. This was years before there was any revenue associated with it.
We made these decisions because it was the right thing for users, not because it was a revenue opportunity. If we ever have to decide between doing what's right for users and a revenue opportunity, we'll put the users first every time. The nice thing about the current situation is that it's both the right thing for users and a revenue opportunity.
And this is just about the "defaults" in Firefox. If you don't like Google, switch it to Yahoo. If you don't like Yahoo, you can add any one of more than 13,000 additional search services to the Firefox search toolbar with just a click or two at http://mycroft.mozdev.org/
The browser speed test you cite is bogus. Firefox, during all of my time being involved with its development and release, has always been faster at start-up, new window, and pageload, than the Suite, (with the possible exception of startup with the suite with the preloader on (turbo mode) Even then, on the hardware I had during the development of every pre-1.0 release of Firefox, Firefox bead Suite in turbo mode on a first start after reboot).
The original phoenix work came from Blake, me, Joe, Dave, Bryner, Pch, and a couple of others later on and the motivation was not to create a minimalist browser. I was there. I was a part of it from the first checkin to mozilla/browser and the goal was not to create a minimalist browser, it was to create a good browser. Viewer.exe was a minimalist browser but it was not a good browser. Chimera, the cocoa Mac browser, something we modeled some of the early m/b work on (but, in our case, using XUL) was not a minimalist browser. Ben's short-lived c# Manticore browser that pre-dated Firefox, was not intended to be a minimalist browser either, though it didn't get much past that.
Yes, it was called m/b for about three months of early active development. The people were the same as when we named it Phoenix and the goals were the same.
And that bullshit about telling users not to download Mozilla is just that, bullshit. You're remembering pre Mozilla 1.0 days. I was responsible for those pages and when I shipped 1.0, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, 1.5, 1.6, and 1.7,and all of the dot releases in between, all of them messaged the Suite as a strong and community supported end-user offering. Claiming otherwise is simply lying.
I was there. I was responsible for every single Suite release going back to M17 and all the way up to the 1.7 release. I was responsible for every Firefox release from the first binary of m/b posted at my blog all the way up until Firefox 1.5. I shipped those products and wrote much of the user-facing content on release pages. Don't come in here and tell me I'm re-writing history unless you're going to cite some one or some documentation from someone more authority than me.
I'm probably naively misjudging, but I'm going to assume you're not trolling and reply.
> Actually, every time I do a search in the Firefox search box
> I (along with a few million others)
Actually, that would be "along with about 130 to 140 million others".
> am giving Mozilla way, way more money than they actually need.
If you define need as very short term, then you could possibly have a point. I don't, and the rest of the people making Mozilla and Firefox don't think about things only in the short term. Mozilla's mission to promote choice and innovation on the Internet and to advocate for people using the web, is a long-term mission that still has not demonstrated sustainability beyond a few short years.
> Since this money is coming mostly from users who believe in
> the open source community,
I'd wager that the percentage of Firefox's 130+ million users who even know what open source is falls somewhere south of 10%. Those who "believe in the open source community" are far from making up double digit percentages, much less a majority. That doesn't change the fact that our mission is dependent on the support and participation of a large community of contributors, but our mission is much larger than open source and cannot be considered anything of a success if it's limited to those "who believe in the open source community."
> I'm pissed that the money does not go back out to support the
> open source community.
From the way you phrase this, it sounds like you're suggesting that the Mozilla project is not "open source community". I take issue with this. Mozilla is one of the most important communities in the entire open source ecosystem and I think it's completely reasonable that the money that Mozilla generates go first and foremost into forwarding Mozilla's mission. Beyond that, we're building a grants program for other projects with strong alignment that's already giving out hundreds of thousands of dollars. But a grants program requires a lot of work, work that we think is important to do but that we don't have all of the right people for today. We're working on it. You can throw stones at slashdot or you can help us make things better.
> I suppose that since I do not like the way they are keeping huge
> piles of bank for themselves, I can just stop using their search
> box
You could do better than that. You could work with your favorite OSS programs developing and writing grant proposals. You could work with OSS projects to help them develop revenue streams. You could contribute in so many positive ways that going out of your way to remove resources from an open source project seems misguided. That is, unless I was being far too generous in assuming you weren't just a troll.
>You need a six figure CEO to manage 90 freaking people? BULLSHIT!!!
Actually, we're not 90 people. We're thousands of people working to further the Mozilla Mission. The overwhelming majority of Mozilla's full-time staff are organizing and managing a much larger area than simply their direct reports or their code modules. If you want to make comparisons with more traditional organizations, I'd wager that Mozilla is operating much more like a company of about 1000 employees than a company of 100.
If you think there exists a competent CEO who could lead Mozilla effectively for less than a six figure salary, you're living on a different planet. If you think there's a CEO that would lead any non-profit company with 10s of millions in annual revenue, for less than six figures, you're living in a fantasy land.
If you really care about open source software, you'll seek out positive ways to contribute and bashing a project that's delivered open source software to the desktops of more people than any other project in the history of OSS will fall way down on your list of priorities.
Are you completely uninformed or are you being intentionally untruthful here?
> Firefox's roots go back a while (2 years?) before that roadmap was
> written. The original goal was to make a minimal browser, however,
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.
> people soon realized that Mozilla never really was bloated. Stripping
> out the "bloat" from Mozilla ended up with a negligible amount of
> speed & memory improvements.
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:
Phoenix is not your father's Mozilla browser. It's a lean and fast
browser that doesn't skimp on features. A few of the features new to this release include:
Speed, Speed, and Speed
Phoenix was designed with performance as a primary goal. The XUL experts
built a browser that starts in nearly half the time of Mozilla and its
commercial derivatives. New windows also snap into existence almost twice as
fast as Mozilla and commercial derivatives.
(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.
> Then parts of the UI code were rewritten to provide features that
> people always wanted in Mozilla (such as customizable toolbars).
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.
> In the end, Firefox ended up being a little slower and a little more
> memory hungry than Mozilla. Hence they made up the "right set of
> features" line.
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
This is incorrect. Mitchell received $300K/year salary, not half a million. If you doubt it, read the actual financial statement rather than second (or third) hand commentary.
As for the question you raise, this amount is well below the average and even slightly below the median salary for CEOs of other non-profits I've looked at, though I haven't found a breakdown between private foundations and public-benefit foundations so there could be some disparity there. Also, CEO pay in the non-profit sector is about 1/10 of what they could be making in traditional for-profit businesses so it's a safe bet that non-profit CEOs aren't in it for the compensation alone.
Add into that the costs of living in the Bay Area, where Mozilla is headquartered, and the ridiculously competitive employment landscape there, and reasonable people will surely mostly agree that this is reasonable compensation.
I'm curious. If that's the financial state of Mozilla Foundation, what's Mozilla Corporation's figures like? I assume a lot (potentially even more than that).
This covers both the Foundation and the Corporation.
"Yes, it's part of the business world, and just "how things work."
We're actually trying to use our leverage to change "how things work" in the business world. A good example would be our "companion" program. We've partnered with several large companies to build customized versions of Firefox that include new and powerful features to compliment their services. Because these partners find value in Firefox and working with Mozilla, we've been able to convince them that the code for their "companion" should be open source and, in cases like the Kodak Companion, that the product have other, competing services (say, Flickr, for example,) built right in.
We're not going to accept, across the board, that there's "a way" that business works. We're doing what we can, with the leverage we have, to change "how things work". I'd wager, though, that there isn't a single prominent search service that would be willing to disclose the exact terms of a search arrangement and since Mozilla isn't basing the product decisions on the search contracts, but rather the other way around, this is one of those areas where I think we can all accept a bit of opacity.
(and in case that last part wasn't clear, we don't make Google the default search because they pay us. We made Google the default because defaults are necessary and we felt that Google was the best possible default for our users. If that changes, then the default search engine will change. Google has been the default search for Mozilla going back to like 1999.)
Achromatic1978, Mozilla hasn't released 2006 financials yet. When it does, you can evaluate them. Making guesses based on 2005 numbers will most likely be pretty far off (especially given the differning breakdown between taxible and non-taxable revenues.) Also, you're pretty far off on even your 2005 math so you might want to re-read the documents.
All that being said, nowhere did I claim that Mozilla was "breaking even". If we were, how could we have had $29M on hand at the end of 2005.
Finally, my post was a response to bogie's comment "Is someone there making 5 million a year? Which devs get paid and how much? $50 million is a lot of money to spread around when you have only ~40 employees( per mozilla.org site announcing reorg from 2005)." and I stand by it. We are a much larger organization, doing a lot more than we were in 2005.
We're actually about 100 employees today. Also, we pay taxes on that revenue and we have non-trivial operating costs -- employees, community support and empowerment, facilities, and definitely in the infrastructure that we've built out to support the 500,000 Firefox downloads that we serve every day, the millions of daily sessions at our various web properties, the 100 million or so application security updates we ship every 6-8 weeks, etc.
No one at Mozilla is getting rich. I'd wager that most people at Mozilla could go elsewhere and probably do better. We're here because we love doing what we're doing. That Mozilla has the resources to support so many community members with full-time salaries is a good thing - an amazing thing. We were 10 people when the Foundation started and we're about 100 today. Many former part-time volunteers are now able to spend a lot more time working on Mozilla projects and that's a great thing.
I was spending 20-30 hours a week volunteering for Mozilla long before I was getting paid to do it and a lot of other Mozilla employees were also volunteers before coming on full-time. If you're interested in full-time work with Mozilla, see our careers page: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/about/careers.html
I'm Asa Dotzler, but I'm not really "Marketing Guy", I'm more like "community development guy" who happens to have worked on marketing community (along with qa and testing community, project management community, l10n community, etc. etc.)
"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?
"But is that open standards browser now a corporate lock in? But, but... "do no evil"... we can trust google?"
What corporate lock-in? We've been providing built in search in Mozilla applications for the better part of a decade. We have always provided multiple search services and an easy mechanism for adding additional services (there are about 12,000 alternative search services here: http://mycroft.mozdev.org/ )
You don't have to trust Google. You can decide whether or not you trust Mozilla to pick reasonable defaults based on what users want, or you can not trust Mozilla to pick reasonable defaults based on what users what.
"The best way to keep things open and developers interested is to release all the information except that which Google requires be kept secret."
We did this for both 2004 and 2005 and will be doing it for the 2006 year financials (and then 2007 after that.) There is nothing secret here except the specific financial details that Google will not allow to be disclosed. It's not that hard to look at the Mozilla financials, read the statements from Mozilla explaining that the overwhelming majority of Mozilla's revenue comes from search relationships and that the bulk of the search revenue comes from the default search service.
Slashdot Mirror
> What exactly is that money for? Where does it
> go? Developers? Advertising?
If you read the financial statements that all this is based on, you'd see exactly and precisely where it goes. the bulk of it goes to paying about 100 full-time people and maintaining one of the largest and most capable infrastructures on the planet. Lots also goes into savings/investments for the future.
> Does it REALLY take 56 Million to develop a web
> browser? Starting from scratch, I'm sure I could
> do it for about 250-500k. And that's with salaries,
> rent and benefits.
You go ahead and do that. I'm sure it'll be a huge success. Send me an email with a link when it's shipping to 130 million users.
- A
> With all this intimate data which can be collected
> by tracing cookies sent to your browser, why in the
> hell doesn't a browser default to delete cookies if
> you tell it to "clear PRIVATE data"???
Because users freak out when they say "clear cookies" and all their username logins disappear. For those of you who want to also clear that, it's right there with the tick of a box. I, for one, would rather manually manage my cookies so I can keep all my logins saved.
- A
>Make Yahoo! the default search. I dare you.
We did. And users didn't like it at all. We put Yahoo in for CJKT builds because they had a larger presence in those markets. Users were unhappy.
- A
> Grey out the search box until the user chooses the search
> engine they want to use. Randomly choose the order of the
> search engines in the drop down box (once). Replace the
> home page with a selection page, and include a type-in box.
Yeah. Everything should be an option. Sounds like you want SeaMonkey and not Firefox. Firefox ships with a set of defaults that we believe are best for the most users. Right now, and for the last five or six years, Google has been the best possible search for most of our users. Where it isn't, we'll change it (like we did for a year in Japan, China, and Korea with Yahoo as the default.)
You're suggesting we optimize for the minority case and that's a cop-out that all too many software programs opt for. Most users don't want to have to configure their browser before they start using it. They want it to "just work" and that's what we aim to deliver.
> That way Mozilla won't be giving Google any special treatment
> and when the users choose Google to be the preferred search
> and home page anyway you can claim that you weren't doing
> anything wrong in the first place.
That way, we can make all of our users suffer an extra flaming hoop to jump through to satisfy a few people who are already quite capable of switching to whatever services they want. Sounds like a great plan.
- A
We most certainly have said where the money goes. Read the financial disclosure statement. In summary, the bulk of what we spend goes to personnel and infrastructure and what we don't spend goes into savings/investment.
- A
> As for Microsoft "chucking" Mozilla money, I can't see where
> Mozilla users would find Microsoft terribly useful like they
> do Google, Yahoo, and our other search defaults.
>> You can't understand why Mozilla users would want the mozilla
>> foundation to get more money? Mozilla users want a better browser,
>> and they believe that money helps developers make it better. I
>> doubt there's a single user on the planet who wouldn't believe
>> money from Microsoft would be helpful.
Sorry. One of us misunderstood. Google doesn't just give money to Firefox. They pay for search traffic. Microsoft wouldn't just give Mozilla money, they'd want traffic in return and this is where my point comes in that I don't think that Firefox users would find Microsoft services useful like they do Google and Yahoo and others. Given that users aren't clamoring for Microsoft services, putting them in the browser seems like a bad idea.
>> The other question is: What's in it for Microsoft? And the
>> answer is: nothing. Microsoft has their own browser. They
>> prefer people to use their own browser. Internet Explorer
>> already has 90% marketshare, or more, so giving money to a
>> competitor doesn't make any financial sense. If microsoft
>> didn't have Internet Explorer, it might make sense for them
>> to donate to the mozilla foundation, as long as they could
>> get in certain features they wanted. But that's not how the
>> world is.
I disagree. I'd wager that Microsoft would pay more than any other search service if Mozilla would make them the default in Firefox. They do have a browser, IE, which has about 75-80% (not 90%) of the global browser market, and they'll definitely use that browser to drive traffic to Microsoft Live services, especially Live Search. That's no reason they wouldn't pay for additional traffic to their search services from other sources.
This is no longer a browser war, it's a web services war and it's all about traffic. There are only two or three big players in web search and Microsoft is not at all happy playing third or fourth place in that game. They'll use any tool at their disposal, including cash, to buy their way up a place or two. Firefox, if it sent the bulk of its search traffic to Microsoft's Live Search, could probably give them a gain of one full place -- surpassing Yahoo and moving in on Google's market.
Again, this isn't about donations. Google isn't "donating" to Firefox. This is about search traffic and what that's worth to the search providers.
- A
> Quite impressive growth indeed, 3 weeks and tens of millions of
> users. Or how about finally agreeing to stop using bullshit download
> numbers as your installed user base? Might make your calculations a
> little easier too. I could see how forgetting wget on a loop might
> add a good number of new "users" overnight.
This isn't based on downloads, it's based on active user counts.
I was slightly under-reporting a month ago since it had been a few months since I lst looked at the stats and I'm pretty contemporary with this post since I've been following the stats pretty closely the last month or so.
Thank you. Drive through.
- A
> If you were really there,
OK. Now you've got to be kidding. That's rich. Questioning whether or not I was "there" for the 100+ Mozilla releases I managed. OK. You're clearly just joking around here. Had I recognized you were just trying to be funny, I'd have not responded to your initial comment.
- A
It's not a theory. It's happening. It's happening with Mozilla and Firefox. Mozilla pays about 50 full-time software engineers to work on Firefox and the Mozilla platform that Firefox is built on top of. about 1,600 additional developers have contributed code to that project recently without pay from Mozilla, accounting for about 40% of the total work on the latest version of Firefox.
Now, I'm not saying all of them did it "because they love the fame." I've talked with a lot of these contributors about their motivations and very few (though not zero) are in it for "fame". Some are in it because they enjoy participating on a large-scale global software project that enjoys a user base upwards of 130 million. Some are doing it because they like the challenge of solving difficult software problems. Others are in it to get experience they can use to advance in their careers.Some are in it because they care deeply about the Internet or Internet users. A few I know are in it because it's required by their curriculum. I was a volunteer with Mozilla for more than a year because I enjoyed working with a community of passionate people.
Yes, there are definitely people doing top-notch software development at Mozilla for reasons other than a paycheck. The reasons are probably as varied as the people participating.
- A
Google isn't "giving" all this money to Mozilla. Firefox users are using Google search a lot and Google is paying Mozilla for that traffic. There is no "say" for Google here outside of that very narrow search relationship. As for Microsoft "chucking" Mozilla money, I can't see where Mozilla users would find Microsoft terribly useful like they do Google, Yahoo, and our other search defaults.
- A
We built the search feature into Mozilla in 1999. Google has been an option in that feature since its inception. That was 5 years before there was any revenue associated with it. We made Google the default in 2002 or 2003 to replace the silly "Netscape" default which was simply a Netscape branded Google. This was years before there was any revenue associated with it.
We made these decisions because it was the right thing for users, not because it was a revenue opportunity. If we ever have to decide between doing what's right for users and a revenue opportunity, we'll put the users first every time. The nice thing about the current situation is that it's both the right thing for users and a revenue opportunity.
And this is just about the "defaults" in Firefox. If you don't like Google, switch it to Yahoo. If you don't like Yahoo, you can add any one of more than 13,000 additional search services to the Firefox search toolbar with just a click or two at http://mycroft.mozdev.org/
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The browser speed test you cite is bogus. Firefox, during all of my time being involved with its development and release, has always been faster at start-up, new window, and pageload, than the Suite, (with the possible exception of startup with the suite with the preloader on (turbo mode) Even then, on the hardware I had during the development of every pre-1.0 release of Firefox, Firefox bead Suite in turbo mode on a first start after reboot).
The original phoenix work came from Blake, me, Joe, Dave, Bryner, Pch, and a couple of others later on and the motivation was not to create a minimalist browser. I was there. I was a part of it from the first checkin to mozilla/browser and the goal was not to create a minimalist browser, it was to create a good browser. Viewer.exe was a minimalist browser but it was not a good browser. Chimera, the cocoa Mac browser, something we modeled some of the early m/b work on (but, in our case, using XUL) was not a minimalist browser. Ben's short-lived c# Manticore browser that pre-dated Firefox, was not intended to be a minimalist browser either, though it didn't get much past that.
Yes, it was called m/b for about three months of early active development. The people were the same as when we named it Phoenix and the goals were the same.
And that bullshit about telling users not to download Mozilla is just that, bullshit. You're remembering pre Mozilla 1.0 days. I was responsible for those pages and when I shipped 1.0, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, 1.5, 1.6, and 1.7,and all of the dot releases in between, all of them messaged the Suite as a strong and community supported end-user offering. Claiming otherwise is simply lying.
I was there. I was responsible for every single Suite release going back to M17 and all the way up to the 1.7 release. I was responsible for every Firefox release from the first binary of m/b posted at my blog all the way up until Firefox 1.5. I shipped those products and wrote much of the user-facing content on release pages. Don't come in here and tell me I'm re-writing history unless you're going to cite some one or some documentation from someone more authority than me.
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I'm probably naively misjudging, but I'm going to assume you're not trolling and reply.
Actually, that would be "along with about 130 to 140 million others".
If you define need as very short term, then you could possibly have a point. I don't, and the rest of the people making Mozilla and Firefox don't think about things only in the short term. Mozilla's mission to promote choice and innovation on the Internet and to advocate for people using the web, is a long-term mission that still has not demonstrated sustainability beyond a few short years.
I'd wager that the percentage of Firefox's 130+ million users who even know what open source is falls somewhere south of 10%. Those who "believe in the open source community" are far from making up double digit percentages, much less a majority. That doesn't change the fact that our mission is dependent on the support and participation of a large community of contributors, but our mission is much larger than open source and cannot be considered anything of a success if it's limited to those "who believe in the open source community."
From the way you phrase this, it sounds like you're suggesting that the Mozilla project is not "open source community". I take issue with this. Mozilla is one of the most important communities in the entire open source ecosystem and I think it's completely reasonable that the money that Mozilla generates go first and foremost into forwarding Mozilla's mission. Beyond that, we're building a grants program for other projects with strong alignment that's already giving out hundreds of thousands of dollars. But a grants program requires a lot of work, work that we think is important to do but that we don't have all of the right people for today. We're working on it. You can throw stones at slashdot or you can help us make things better.You could do better than that. You could work with your favorite OSS programs developing and writing grant proposals. You could work with OSS projects to help them develop revenue streams. You could contribute in so many positive ways that going out of your way to remove resources from an open source project seems misguided. That is, unless I was being far too generous in assuming you weren't just a troll.
Actually, we're not 90 people. We're thousands of people working to further the Mozilla Mission. The overwhelming majority of Mozilla's full-time staff are organizing and managing a much larger area than simply their direct reports or their code modules. If you want to make comparisons with more traditional organizations, I'd wager that Mozilla is operating much more like a company of about 1000 employees than a company of 100.
If you think there exists a competent CEO who could lead Mozilla effectively for less than a six figure salary, you're living on a different planet. If you think there's a CEO that would lead any non-profit company with 10s of millions in annual revenue, for less than six figures, you're living in a fantasy land.
If you really care about open source software, you'll seek out positive ways to contribute and bashing a project that's delivered open source software to the desktops of more people than any other project in the history of OSS will fall way down on your list of priorities.
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there are not a large number of software engineers out of work in the valley. you're just wrong.
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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
Why does the CEO make half a million a year?
This is incorrect. Mitchell received $300K/year salary, not half a million. If you doubt it, read the actual financial statement rather than second (or third) hand commentary.
As for the question you raise, this amount is well below the average and even slightly below the median salary for CEOs of other non-profits I've looked at, though I haven't found a breakdown between private foundations and public-benefit foundations so there could be some disparity there. Also, CEO pay in the non-profit sector is about 1/10 of what they could be making in traditional for-profit businesses so it's a safe bet that non-profit CEOs aren't in it for the compensation alone.
Add into that the costs of living in the Bay Area, where Mozilla is headquartered, and the ridiculously competitive employment landscape there, and reasonable people will surely mostly agree that this is reasonable compensation.
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This covers both the Foundation and the Corporation.
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"Yes, it's part of the business world, and just "how things work."
We're actually trying to use our leverage to change "how things work" in the business world. A good example would be our "companion" program. We've partnered with several large companies to build customized versions of Firefox that include new and powerful features to compliment their services. Because these partners find value in Firefox and working with Mozilla, we've been able to convince them that the code for their "companion" should be open source and, in cases like the Kodak Companion, that the product have other, competing services (say, Flickr, for example,) built right in.
We're not going to accept, across the board, that there's "a way" that business works. We're doing what we can, with the leverage we have, to change "how things work". I'd wager, though, that there isn't a single prominent search service that would be willing to disclose the exact terms of a search arrangement and since Mozilla isn't basing the product decisions on the search contracts, but rather the other way around, this is one of those areas where I think we can all accept a bit of opacity.
(and in case that last part wasn't clear, we don't make Google the default search because they pay us. We made Google the default because defaults are necessary and we felt that Google was the best possible default for our users. If that changes, then the default search engine will change. Google has been the default search for Mozilla going back to like 1999.)
Achromatic1978, Mozilla hasn't released 2006 financials yet. When it does, you can evaluate them. Making guesses based on 2005 numbers will most likely be pretty far off (especially given the differning breakdown between taxible and non-taxable revenues.) Also, you're pretty far off on even your 2005 math so you might want to re-read the documents.
All that being said, nowhere did I claim that Mozilla was "breaking even". If we were, how could we have had $29M on hand at the end of 2005.
Finally, my post was a response to bogie's comment "Is someone there making 5 million a year? Which devs get paid and how much? $50 million is a lot of money to spread around when you have only ~40 employees( per mozilla.org site announcing reorg from 2005)." and I stand by it. We are a much larger organization, doing a lot more than we were in 2005.
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We're actually about 100 employees today. Also, we pay taxes on that revenue and we have non-trivial operating costs -- employees, community support and empowerment, facilities, and definitely in the infrastructure that we've built out to support the 500,000 Firefox downloads that we serve every day, the millions of daily sessions at our various web properties, the 100 million or so application security updates we ship every 6-8 weeks, etc.
No one at Mozilla is getting rich. I'd wager that most people at Mozilla could go elsewhere and probably do better. We're here because we love doing what we're doing. That Mozilla has the resources to support so many community members with full-time salaries is a good thing - an amazing thing. We were 10 people when the Foundation started and we're about 100 today. Many former part-time volunteers are now able to spend a lot more time working on Mozilla projects and that's a great thing.
I was spending 20-30 hours a week volunteering for Mozilla long before I was getting paid to do it and a lot of other Mozilla employees were also volunteers before coming on full-time. If you're interested in full-time work with Mozilla, see our careers page: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/about/careers.html
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I'm Asa Dotzler, but I'm not really "Marketing Guy", I'm more like "community development guy" who happens to have worked on marketing community (along with qa and testing community, project management community, l10n community, etc. etc.)
Sure.
2 007/01/the_mozilla_foundation_achievi.html
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/mitchell/archives/
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"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?
"But is that open standards browser now a corporate lock in? But, but... "do no evil"... we can trust google?"
What corporate lock-in? We've been providing built in search in Mozilla applications for the better part of a decade. We have always provided multiple search services and an easy mechanism for adding additional services (there are about 12,000 alternative search services here: http://mycroft.mozdev.org/ )
You don't have to trust Google. You can decide whether or not you trust Mozilla to pick reasonable defaults based on what users want, or you can not trust Mozilla to pick reasonable defaults based on what users what.
"The best way to keep things open and developers interested is to release all the information except that which Google requires be kept secret."
We did this for both 2004 and 2005 and will be doing it for the 2006 year financials (and then 2007 after that.) There is nothing secret here except the specific financial details that Google will not allow to be disclosed. It's not that hard to look at the Mozilla financials, read the statements from Mozilla explaining that the overwhelming majority of Mozilla's revenue comes from search relationships and that the bulk of the search revenue comes from the default search service.