Linked by Rahul on Thu 20th Nov 2008 03:17 UTC
Mitchell Baker, chairperson of the Mozilla Foundation and former CEO of Mozilla corporation has posted a report the details the financial status of Mozilla for this year. "Our revenue remains strong; our expenses focused. Mozilla's revenues (including both Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation) for 2007 were $75 million, up approximately 12% from 2006 revenue of $67 million. As in 2006 the vast majority of this revenue is associated with the search functionality in Mozilla Firefox, and the majority of that is from Google. The Firefox userbase and search revenue have both increased from 2006"
Permalink for comment 338010
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Recent Original Stories
Recent Comments
Headlines
Random Comments
Random Stories
Random OS Link
Member since:
2005-07-24
When 10s of millions per year flow through any 501c organization, for profit subsidiaries or not, I think it best for there to be plenty of 3rd party scrutiny. You'd be surprised (or maybe you wouldn't) at how millions of dollars can affect the judgement and ethics of good, well intentioned people.
However, that is not really the essence of what bothers me about the current Free browser situation. The thing that bothers me is the historical lack of credible competition which you helpfully pointed out in a previous post. Firefox, having been such a FOSS success story thus far (which is good) has developed a sort of fan base of uncritical followers (which is bad). Firefox can do no wrong. I find this worrisome. The main thrust of many of my posts on Firefox is that another strong FOSS browser/rendering engine/javascript engine would be good for everyone, including (and perhaps especially) FF users. I believe that we will see substantial progress toward that end in the next year, and look forward to it.
Not to distract, because this is also not my main point, but interesting to note, is the philosophy, regarding FOSS, of the FF advocacy community. There are plenty of "FF Rulez!" folks who do not care that much about FF's FOSS status beyond it being another bullet point for why FF Rulez and IE Sucks. You may recall the full page New York Times advertisement that the Spread Firefox community ran a fund drive to pay for, and successfully produced. I was a Spread Firefox community member then. After publication, the official PDF of the ad was made available for download. The only problem was that it was not viewable in *any* Free pdf viewer. It *required* Adobe's Acrobat to be opened at all. I mentioned this in the SFF forums. The response from the community was along the lines of "What's the problem? Just use Acrobat". I further suggested that using a pdf that required the proprietary Adobe Acrobat was not really in keeping with the spirit of what we had donated money for in the first place. (Yes, I had donated.) The response that I got (and I quote) was to "get a life". As an advocate of FOSS since 1995 (though we didn't call it that back then) I got a very "we're not in Kansas anymore" feeling at that point. I did view the ad with Acrobat, because I did want to see it, and I'm not *that* anal about using proprietary software. But I came away feeling that I had learned something about that community which I found worrisome.
-Steve
Edited 2008-11-21 20:13 UTC