Post a Comment
Its a very noble gesture from the Mozilla Foundation. I hope other opensource projects continue supporting each other in this manner. Incidentally on the Mozilla Foundation article there is something about Firefox 2.0 and 3.0 being licenced as GPL/LGPL and MPL as well. Very interesting.
>It already is and always has been tri-licenced MPL/GPL/LGPL
But until last month it wasn't complete tri-licenced.
This goal achieved only a few days ago:
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/gerv/archives/2006/03/relicensing_co...
So if Mozilla earns money through the success of their browser they get criticized, and if they give away this money to other (remotely related) projects they get criticized as well because they don't give enough?
Helping the openSD project is a nice gesture from Mozilla, but the most important thing, and this is probably what the Mozilla Fundation expected, is that it gave a lot of publicity to the current OpenBSD financial problems and people/companies will probably donate more.
Yes but this non profit organization is also hiring new people almost every week, they are no longer a 10 people organization and more like a 100 people one, which means salaries, offices, furniture, travel expenses...
And I do expect them to not spend this money in a year time like somebody you just won the lottery but plan to have money in the bank to remain independent from external pressure for the years to come.
I agree that they should spend much more money in the community tahn they do now (which is close to zero), but I expect them to spend the bulk of it in its direct activities, opening mozilla branches in the world, participating in opensource events, organizing mozilla events, hiring new mozilla developpers, giving money/machines to mozilla localizers, paying the hosting bills of Mozilla portals...
80+ people from the start, in your dreams!!! Even now there are barely 80 full time developers working on Mozilla code and many of them are doing it for partner comapnies like IBM, Google or RedHat.
When Netscape was axed by AOL and the Mozilla foundation was created, barely 10 people were hired by the new unit. There is a huge difference between "we have 80 developpers" and "we have 80 PAID developpers". Until very recently key developpers like super-reviewers and module owners were still unemployed and working for free on the project.
You get stickers! And artwork. And you support an open source project. If you just download it you don't get stickers, you can download some artwork but it's never going to be the same as the official cd inserts, and you don't support the project.
Of course you could buy a couple shirts and download and support the project... or just donate 20 euro and download it and still support the project...
or you can just not support the project but who would want to do that? 
I keep telling everyone that it's all about the stickers and no one believes me!
edit- Imagine how many stickers the mozilla guys are gonna get? lifetime supply I imagine! *sigh* maybe if you donate to mozilla you'll get openbsd stickers. I dare you to donate and find out!
Edited 2006-04-04 20:14
They might make a profit on the cost of producing the discs themselves but not on all the dev time spent on the software itself.
http://www.undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20060321034114
Wow, this news shocked me. For some reason I always thought Mozilla leaned more towards the Windows and Linux crowd. This is indeed a great gesture by the Mozilla crew. I'd like to see other big named companies do the same and get credit for it. Mozilla gets my respect, even tho they already had it.




