Looking Into Mozilla's Financial Success

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."

scale

[stoolpigeon]

we are used to looking at systems and asking, 'will it scale?'
 
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.

Know what they should do with that revenue?

[Elsan]

They should give it to me. That'd be fair for everyone involved.

Re:Interesting double standard of governance

[d3matt]

Actualy, Firefox is tri-licensed [wikipedia.org]. So take your pick. If you want to redistribute the code under the GPL, feel free to do so.

Re:I'd like to see more transparancy

[asa]

"Apparently its ok for Google to chuck cash at Mozilla to default to them,"

Actually, we've been defaulting to Google as the default search engine for about 8 years, long before there was a financial relationship.

Re:Google deal a slippery slope

[asa]

"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.

Re:Google deal a slippery slope

[asa]

"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/ [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.

Re:Financials

[asa]

Sure.

http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/mitchell/archives/2 007/01/the_mozilla_foundation_achievi.html [mozillazine.org]

- A

Re:I'd like to see more transparancy

[asa]

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.)