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Looking Into Mozilla's Financial Success
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Mon May 21, 2007 11:03 AM
from the take-a-piece-of-that-action dept.
from the take-a-piece-of-that-action dept.
NewsCloud writes "'Thanks to the Google agreement, the Mozilla Foundation went from revenue of nearly $6 million in 2004 to more than $52 million the next year [similar revenue is expected in 2006]...In 2005, the foundation created a subsidiary, the for-profit Mozilla Corporation,...mainly to deal with the tax and other issues related to the Google contract...By creating a corporation to run the Firefox project, Mozilla was committing to be less transparent. In part, that is because Google insists on the secrecy of "its arrangement and agreements," said board member Mitch Kapor.' The NYT article compares this approach to Wikipedia's ongoing fundraisers and raises the issue of transparency in open source projects. i.e. should Firefox's 1,000 to 2,000 developers and 80,000 evangelists have full knowledge of how revenue is spent as well as the extent to which Google is able to influence strategy vs. other stakeholders."
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amusing (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, well, bring that up on the Slashdot if you want some suggestions on where to spend the money. Maybe even ask the Google about it, since that's where the money came from.
I don't know why use of "the" here amuses me so much, but it makes the author seem very unfamiliar with the companies and products they are writing about.
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I thought the author was insinuating that Mozilla was putting its money into the 1980's, Soviet, thought-controlled, mach 6 capable, stealth fighter piloted by Clint Eastwood. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083943/plotsummary [imdb.com]
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, well, bring that up on the Slashdot if you want some suggestions on where to spend the money.
Sure, I'll make a suggestion. $52M spread over 1000 developers means an average compensation of $52,000 per developer -- naturally, scaled based on the relative contributions of each. So some may only make $100 while others may make $1M. Even if you consider their entire 2004 revenue of $6M is taken up by expenses and that it holds true today, that still leaves an average of $48,000 per developer. Shouldn't this be the way contributors to open source get rewarded? Or will they make nothing except for
I'd like to see more transparancy (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I'd like to see more transparancy (Score:5, Insightful)
In any case, as much of a paranoid individual I am, I think that Google *has* to be secretive. Google has been targeted by Microsoft, Yahoo, and other huge companies which have a long history of play really really dirty. Google has been around a while now and has no real history of being dirty. Their NDA for interviews which slashdotters freaked about, if they had RTFA and then read the NDA, most of them would have seen the articles took clauses out of context, which you simply can't do, and in context it made sense.
If I were a rather new, but large, rich company with a lot to lose, I'd be keeping as many secrets as I could from the companies and people who would love to see me fail.
Know your enemy, and make sure it doesn't know you.
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Re:I'd like to see more transparancy (Score:5, Insightful)
I didn't pay for Firefox. It's a rockin' product, but how does the fact that I use it give me any rights to see what deals the owner's / developers of this F/OSS project have? I think the problem is on the other side. Google is a publicly traded company, so they should have their stock holders asking them the tough questions, not bothering a F/OSS project.
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Whom should be considered the forker? (Score:2)
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"a path of secret agreements, proprietary code, and G-strings attached sponsorship"?
Anyone?
(Man, I need to get laid more often)
Opera is not an open source project. (Score:4, Insightful)
I can't imagine the screaming hissy fits if Microsoft made this type of deal with Opera. I doubt there would be any. Opera has no more responsibility to its developers than any other for-profit corporation. And they're free to follow money wherever it may lead.
Mozilla deals are different because the Mozilla non-profit organization is a representation of the community that develops Gecko and the projects they base on it. When a for-profit company is founded with an ambiguous relationship with the original organization, the role of the development community comes into question. Sure, they're still be contributing to GPL code, but will the spirit of the project still inspire such developer devotion, with so much non-paid contribution? Could they?
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Re:Opera is not an open source project. (Score:4, Insightful)
What exactly is ambiguous about this relationship. Mozilla has been building search into the browser for about 8 years now. Google has been the default for almost as long. Google, along with other search companies, recently (a couple of years ago) started paying Mozilla for this feature. Mozilla discloses its full financials each year. Mozilla has said, repeatedly, that the bulk of revenue comes from search partners and that the majority of search revenue comes from (obviously) the default search service. Where's the ambiguity?
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Re:I'd like to see more transparancy (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, we've been defaulting to Google as the default search engine for about 8 years, long before there was a financial relationship.
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Re:I'd like to see more transparancy (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:I'd like to see more transparancy (Score:5, Informative)
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Here We Go.... (Score:2)
Given the way money and power corrupt, I'd say there's a fork coming in the next 10 years.
All hail the IceWeasel! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iceweasel [wikipedia.org]
Re:Here We Go.... (Score:5, Insightful)
I expect to get paid, I am not surprised when others do too...
I don't buy this quasi-religious non-corporate ethos as the best justification for open source - it's better engineering because it gets quality unrestricted peer review
I want a quality, well engineered genuinely innovative OS - what better justification?
as long as Google etc... etc... don't suddenly expect to own the code it's great
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Re:Here We Go.... (Score:5, Interesting)
The thousands of volunteers who do much of the actual work on Firefox don't expect to get paid in dollars, but they do expect to be "rewarded" with some kind of involvement and input in their own project.
This isn't so much about Google giving money to Mozilla as it is about Mozilla obfuscating its processes from its own volunteers. Google is giving giant amounts of money to Mozilla because of the hard work of the Firefox volunteers. I don't think the volunteers expect a dime of that money, or even a vote on how it's spent, but they'd probably at least like to be able to offer suggestions on how to spend it. As it stands, they aren't even allowed to know what's happening to the money, or what kind of agreements were attached to it.
The obvious response to this complaint is "Well, it's open source; If you don't like it, go fork your own browser!", and I suspect exactly that may happen if Mozilla continues to show this kind of disrespect to the people who are, to a large degree, responsible for the foundation's success.
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Re:Here We Go.... (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
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You are blurring the ways that an IBM or Sun interact with GPL'd projects versus mozilla for the sole purpose of disagreeing with my bias. Please, read on....
I want a quality, well engineered genuinely innovative OS - what better justification?
1. That's okay except history is full of organizations where success literally crushes innovation. The specter of failure looms large. So large, no risks are taken.
2. In
Interesting double standard of governance (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Interesting double standard of governance (Score:5, Interesting)
Thus far, Mozilla has done nothing but good things (in my opinion). They have created a nice browser and email client, distributed them as open-source, and have been aggressively promoting their products and FLOSS in general. In short, I trust them... because they have earned that trust with their actions.
So, with regard to this Google deal, I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt, and assume that they are making decisions that benefit the community. So far, we have no evidence of anything shady about the deal. (They have disclosed that the money is in exchange for Google being the default, but not the only, engine in the search bar... which is fine in my book.)
However, I'm not a fool (or at least I like to think so). And if Mozilla is found guilty of shady deals, or "betraying" the community of people who are currently evangelizing and supporting Mozilla, then I will change my stance quickly--as will most others in the community I think. The important point is that because the source-code is available to the community, everyone is empowered to fork the project and ignore Mozilla if that becomes necessary. It would be a shame to loose the Firefox brand, but at least the work that went into the codebase would not be lost.
It is this "power to the community" that makes me not worry so much... both because it means that if Mozilla becomes "evil" we have an immediate counter-reaction... and also because the existence of this possible counter-reaction makes it rather unlikely for Mozilla to ever turn their back on the community.
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Re:Interesting double standard of governance (Score:5, Informative)
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I disagree. There is plenty that is shady in Mozilla and it's increasing.
Basically, there is a force within the Mozilla Foundation that's dedica
Murky (Score:2)
Google's new Motto (Score:2, Funny)
Prediction (Score:2)
scale (Score:3, Informative)
when you look at the products that do scale- or implement something at a very large scale, it takes money. i've not seen an exception yet. i don't care about firefox, google and their deal - as long as the browser works the way i want.
on a side note-- as for what to do with the 'extra' money. i'd love to see it invested in making other open apps - like sunbird and thunderbird great.
Google deal a slippery slope (Score:5, Insightful)
Any time a project gets big and starts bringing in money, it gives up a certain amount of control that each person who works on it previously had. When I heard they were making a for-profit corporation to make secretive deals with massive corporations like Google, I initially thought things were worse than they are. But there's no question that there's a slippery slope in this deal where an open-source project that was previously fueled by the interest of developers could become entrenched and weighed down by the monetary and business aspects in the politics of a company.
The best way to keep things open and developers interested is to release all the information except that which Google requires be kept secret. It's already pretty clear the type of revenue that is coming from the Google. When things get this large, it's easy for those interested in developing to fall out of touch with something that resembles Microsoft a lot more than a community undertaking.
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Tricky isn't it? We all want Firefox (and open standards) to beat Flash, Sliverlight etc. to beat coporate lock in.
But is that open standards browser now a corporate lock in?
But, but... "do no evil"... we can trust google?
I say take their money, buy some good developers, then run ;-)
monk.e.boy
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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/ [mozdev.org] )
You don't have to trust Google. You can decide whether or not you trust Mozilla to pick reasona
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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 r
Financials (Score:2)
Could you provide a link that shows the depth of these financials? I don't think anything can prove your point better than the numbers themselves can.
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http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/mitchell/archives/
- A
Open it up, who cares if Google wants secrecy (Score:2)
What's the point of the secrecy in the google deal anyway?
How about Mozilla opens the kimono? If Google likes secrecy more than the deal itself, I'm sure that MSN or Yahoo or another competitor will be happy to take their place...
And this is surprising because? (Score:2)
Hmmm...a couple hundred/thousand contributors in the dark and a $52M bullseye. I'm not a lawyer, but if I was I'd probably be busy trolling for anyone wanting to class-action -iti
I'm glad (Score:5, Interesting)
I would also say that there is no danger for the community, it'd be really easy to fork it if things really got that bad... hell, we already have Ice Weasel...
They don't need influence (Score:2)
Some will claim that only a small percentage of the overall developer base will be interested in it, but this is still an invalid position. If they want to participate in those ki
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Well.... (Score:2, Funny)
Aren't we all?
More social networking features... (Score:2)
They could call it... Mozilla Navigator...
No, but seriously. How about paying some major contributing developers, and maybe hire some on full time to develop better web standards support, instead of fucking around with features like social networking and offline browsing. Features that are way out o
sometimes they just make shit up (Score:3, Insightful)
And this follow from what? There is nothing about the existence of the Mozilla Corporation that commits us to being less transparent. That's just bunk and it makes no sense given how transparent we are from our development process and planning to our financials.
As far as the details of specific financial relationships with search partners, those were never disclosed in detail (long before the creation of the Mozilla Corporation, in Mozilla Foundation days) and probably won't be since our various partners weren't then aren't now willing to divulge the specifics of their financial relationships with anyone. Mozilla is as transparent as we can be around those relationships, releasing our annual financials and explaining that the bulk of it comes from relationships with various search partners including our default search, Google.
The article overall is fine, but that line is just fiction.
One source of income they don't talk about... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:One source of income they don't talk about... (Score:5, Insightful)
In my opinion that's exactly the wrong way to look at it, at least when we're talking about Amazon affiliate links. Instead, I look at it this way: Whenever you buy a n item at Amazon.com without using an affiliate code, you're throwing money away - you could be using an affiliate link and donating that money to someone you wanted to support. The fact that Mozilla sets that affiliate ID to a reasonable default (support the browser you're using) when you explicitly use the built in Amazon search box is a feature, not a bug.
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Should they ???? - YES ! (Score:3)
Yes.
Open source was a method that is unheard of for creating and publishing things some time ago, and its proving that it is an unprecedented success, as it was pitted against hulky big proprietary method-using corporation's stuff and coming out stronger every day.
Some non-it sectors and foundations are going to employ open source methods for doing things. Manufacturing, hardware was recently discussed. If it goes like this, we can find many stuff being further developed by open source methods, imitating its success in i.t. So, it is changing our world.
Now hear this - privacy, finance and transparency are the present issues to integrate with open source, but when they are once integrated with it, and a transparency by ensuring privacy and a usable financial method is achieved, then there will be no reason not to implement these methods in areas from manufacturing to government.
in short, i am telling that the methods invented in open source foundations can be the key to revolutionizing the governmental systems in the world, getting much more closer to direct democracy and full transparency concepts.
Funny... (Score:2)