The nonprofit Mozilla Foundation has set up a commercial subsidiary to
cash in on the popularity of its flagship Firefox browser. With its
flagship Firefox emerging as a legitimate alternative to Microsoft
Corp.'s dominant Internet Explorer Web browser, the nonprofit Mozilla
Foundation wants to cash in on the revenue-generation possibilities.
The open-source group on Wednesday announced a major reorganization that
includes the creation of the Mozilla Corporation, a for-profit
subsidiary to ride the Firefox gravy train.
Mozilla Corp., which will operate out of the Foundation's Mountain View,
Calif., headquarters, has been set up as a wholly owned commercial
subsidiary to generate revenues to support development, testing, and
productization of the various Mozilla open-source technologies.
"The broad adoption of Mozilla Firefox has created significant economic
value both in Firefox itself and in a commercial ecosystem that is
developing around Firefox," Mozilla said in a statement.
Mozilla described the economic value as "an unintended but real
by-product" of its goal to provide a browser with enough market share to
drive open standards on the Web. "Carefully managed, this value and the
resulting ability to generate revenue can be used to make the Mozilla
project self-sustaining and help keep the Internet open and diverse,"
the group added.
Mitchell Baker, who has served for the past two years as "chief lizard
wrangler" at the Mozilla Foundation, will assume the title of president
of Mozilla Corp. All 36 employees at the Foundation will immediately
move over to the Corporation.
Brendan Eich, a co-founder and longtime technical leader of the Mozilla
project, is now the chief technical officer of the new corporation,
while the board of directors will remain the same except for the
addition of Reid Hoffman, chief executive of social networking service
LinkedIn Corp.
While making no bones about its intention to make money from Firefox and
other high-profile projects, Mozilla officials are wary of possible
backlash from hard-core volunteers who helped push Firefox's market
share with the aggressive Spread Firefox grassroots campaign.
"[The] purpose is not to generate a return on investment in the
financial sense. It is not an investment vehicle or an IPO candidate. It
is completely owned by the Mozilla Foundation," Baker said in a blog
entry detailing the reasons for the reorganization.
Frank Hecker, director of policy for the Mozilla Foundation, said the
decision to create a subsidiary had been in the works for several months
and is unrelated to Microsoft's decision to push out an IE refresh.
Hecker, who chaired the advisory committee that led to the creation of
Mozilla Corp., said it was a no-brainer to create the separation to
pursue business relationships within a for-profit taxation framework.
"There are existing relationships with search engine providers that will
be transferred to the new Corporation. These relationships will continue
in the context of the new organization that's better positioned to
generate revenues to continue the Foundation's work," Hecker said in an
interview with Ziff Davis Internet News.
"In my mind, commercial activities around open source and free software
are not antithetically opposed. People have had businesses and
commercial entities built on open source and free software. This is no
different," he said.
Once the code remains free and open and the licensing terms remain
unchanged, Hecker thinks the volunteer community will continue to
provide support.
"The Mozilla Foundation is just as free and open source as it was
yesterday," he said, noting that the Foundation's project has always had
commercial involvement. Mozilla has in the past received financial and
staffing contributions from such companies as America Online Inc.,
Google Inc., IBM and Novell Inc.
"The people involved from the very beginning knew that there were
commercial interests involved. I don't think it will be an issue where
people will be concerned about contributing code," Hecker said.
Contrary to published reports, Hecker insisted there are no plans for
the new unit to start charging for product support for the various
Mozilla projects. "There is no plan to offer support services and we
won't be charging for Firefox either. Those products will remain free,"
he said.
"As a personal opinion, I think the goal of the Foundation and the
Corporation should be to encourage commercial companies to get involved
and build value on top of these products. It doesn't make sense for
Mozilla to attempt to be all things to all people," he added.
The Mozilla Foundation, which is working on Firefox 1.5, does not plan
to distribute its own versions of Firefox and Thunderbird and it will
continue to allow others to distribute versions of Firefox and
Thunderbird in accordance with the Mozilla trademark policy.
Source: eWEEK.com
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