Linked by Rahul on Thu 20th Nov 2008 03:17 UTC
Mozilla & Gecko clones 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"
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RE[7]: All their eggs
by pfinch on Fri 21st Nov 2008 23:53 UTC in reply to "RE[6]: All their eggs"
pfinch
Member since:
2008-11-21

Steve,

I joined Mozilla about 4 months ago. I think it is entirely appropriate to be wary of uncritical fan-person-ism and you are right to hold organisations such as Mozilla to public scrutiny. And to that, I would like to offer my perspective on Mozilla, for what it's worth.

For one thing, Mozilla's mission relates as much to the open web as it does to FOSS (as is clear from the Mozilla manifesto). Which is not to say that people at Mozilla do not care about open source - they certainly do, many very passionately, and there are few organisations more defined by open source than Mozilla. And yes, for all that, there is also a high tolerance of and a desire to accommodate proprietary software.

Secondly, I have found Mozilla to be a (surprisingly) earnest place. The people I work with (I am one of the 100+ in the corporation) are only thinking about Mozilla's mission and community.

Lastly, I think you have a very good point about SpreadFirefox. There are advocates for Firefox who are less interested in its FOSS status and more interested for other reasons, and I think that is fair enough - we can be a broad church - although personally I was interested to join Mozilla in the first place because of FOSS.

But on the other hand, I have to agree with you that we cannot have a community site for open source software that requires proprietary software for participation. I hope that FOSS advocates (and I consider myself one) are able also to advocate for Firefox. If you have more examples like the Adobe one, I (and others) would be keen to know about them: we really want to know about things we're getting wrong.

-Patrick

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RE[8]: All their eggs
by sbergman27 on Sat 22nd Nov 2008 00:15 in reply to "RE[7]: All their eggs"
sbergman27 Member since:
2005-07-24

If you have more examples like the Adobe one, I (and others) would be keen to know about them: we really want to know about things we're getting wrong.


Hi Patrick,

Thanks for your insights.

I'm no longer paying much attention to SFF. But one other thing that bothered me about them was the issue of the site's web standards compliance. Or perhaps I should say the lack of it. The topic came up several times on the boards back when I was an active member. And the response was always that the site was created to "Spread Firefox". And that web standards compliance for the site was less important than, and would have to take a back seat to, the efforts directly relating to the spreading of Firefox. Making the site standards compliant would require more in the way of resources than anyone was willing to divert from the main thrust of the site. As long as it rendered OK in Firefox, that was sufficient. Although, IIRC, their Spread Firefox photo upload facility did *not* render correctly in Firefox.

At the same time, "standards compliance" was one of the bullet points that members were encouraged to use in their Firefox advocacy.

Edited 2008-11-22 00:18 UTC

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RE[9]: All their eggs
by pfinch on Sat 22nd Nov 2008 13:05 in reply to "RE[8]: All their eggs"
pfinch Member since:
2008-11-21

Steve,

You have a very good point there. I will look into it.

Patrick

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