Guest post by 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”
I persnally use firefox on everything except osx where I use safari. Its a good browser.
I’m concerned that they are to dependant on one source of income (all their eggs in one basket)
Although, as far as im aware, google hasnt to date ‘done a microsoft’ but they do now have their own browser…
Google are a business, not a charity, im concerned how long it will be before the shareholders start demanding a bigger cut of the browser market share which would put Mozilla in a very weak position
Mozilla are a charity, not a business.
http://www.mozilla.org/mission.html
http://www.mozilla.org/about/manifesto
Given their purpose and their mission, unlike Google or Microsoft, Mozilla does not have the market-share imperatives that you imply that it has.
Having said all that, gaining a sizeable market share is perhaps the best way to achieve Mozilla’s actual aims.
Mozilla’s aims are, however, still achieved even if Google Chrome or some other webkit-based browser eventually becomes the dominant browser.
Edited 2008-11-20 23:39 UTC
Mozilla Corporation is a 100+ employee, $67 million per year *business* which reinvests an unspecified portion of its profits back into Mozilla Foundation. Nominally a subsidiary of Mozilla Foundation, it is essentially a bubble within the Foundation which can be as corporate and profit-seeking as it likes, loop-holing through the restrictions of the Foundation’s nonprofit status. Many people do not realize this since Mozilla puts on its “Foundation” face when that suits its purposes, and its “Corporation” face when it doesn’t.
I agree that when a Webkit-based browser overtakes them their stated goals will be furthered. And I guarantee that the Mozilla Corp management team will be in an absolute tizzy when it happens.
I, on the other hand, will be delighted to see true competition come to the Free web browser market for the first time.
Edited 2008-11-21 00:10 UTC
Where does Mozilla’s money go, other than back to pay its employess and re-invest in development and research?
Do you imagine they are hiding it under a matress somewhere? Or perhaps you think some individuals at the top are siphoning it off somehow … which is a pretty serious insinuation to make really.
As for trends, well according to one source, these are the trends:
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp
Firefox has closed to within a whisker of IE6 + IE7.
IE6 is in a long, slow decline.
IE7 increases do not make up for IE6 falls.
Chrome and Safari have about 3% each, just ahead of Opera.
Non-IE browsers between them have overtaken IE.
…
I can’t really see a case to be made where Firefox & Gecko aren’t by far the most serious competition for IE.
Pay who, and how much?
You said that, not me. I merely point out that your “Mozilla is a charity” viewpoint misses the big picture. There’s $70 million flowing annually, getting divvied up, paid, allocated, spent, all sans 501c restrictions.
I do think it deserves more community scrutiny than it gets. And I do think that it could benefit from another strong FOSS competitor, as KDE and Gnome benefit from each other, and as Debian has benefited from having another strong distro appear in their camp.
Agreed on current market shares, but recommend that we revisit the issue in a year. I fully expect a less worrisome, less lopsided, and more vibrant FOSS browser market to emerge by then.
Edited 2008-11-21 01:40 UTC
I have no problem with there being an audit to establish that the money that flows through Mozilla is indeed used for its stated aims, and to ensure that no-one is raking off some cash somewhere.
However, if an audit does establish that Mozilla’s money is being used as per its charter and stated purpose, then I have no problem with Mozilla retaining its tax-free status.
What would be the point of taking some of the funds going through the self-funded Mozilla orgaisation, which is being used for a stated purpose to help the people, and instead tax those funds for adding to the public purse … ostensibly also to help the people.
Personally … we can see what Mozilla are doing with the money. It would appear that they are sticking exactly on task to their stated purpose, and doing everything they can to make a better, more popular open browser, and hence keep the web open for everyone. If Mozilla were to be taxed … then the government would instead be in control of some of those development funds.
Where would YOU trust the money to be better spent for your interests?
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
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
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
Steve,
You have a very good point there. I will look into it.
Patrick