Mozilla Corporation
Description
Summary from the Wikipedia:
URL = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation
"The Mozilla Corporation is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation that develops, distributes and promotes the Internet-related applications, including the Mozilla Firefox web browser and the Mozilla Thunderbird email client. Unlike the non-profit Mozilla Foundation, the Mozilla Corporation is a taxable entity. In contrast to most commercial organizations, the Mozilla Corporation is not motivated purely by a desire for profit. Instead, the Mozilla Corporation aims to work towards the Mozilla Foundation's public benefit goals of "preserving choice and innovation on the Internet." The Mozilla Corporation was established on August 3, 2005 to handle the revenue-related operations of the Mozilla Foundation. As a non-profit, the Mozilla Foundation is limited in terms of the types and amounts of revenue. The Mozilla Corporation, as a taxable organization (essentially, a commercial operation), does not have to comply with such strict rules. Upon its creation, the Mozilla Corporation took over several areas from the Mozilla Foundation, including the development of Firefox and Thunderbird and the management of relationships with businesses. With the creation of the Mozilla Corporation, the rest of the Mozilla Foundation narrowed its focus to concentrate on the Mozilla project's governance and policy issues. It retains control of the Mozilla source code repository and also owns the Mozilla trademarks and other intellectual property, which it licenses to the Mozilla Corporation." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation)
Discussion
Maria Sipka:
"“Mozilla Corporation does pretty much everything in the open for the public to participate: its product development roadmaps, the weekly company meetings (which anyone can call in to), they blog/do forum posts about every major decision (and even minor ones) that the company makes, etc, etc."
Also, the company’s leaders have long been pushing to make more of the "business" practices more open so that anyone can ask questions regarding marketing plans and results, business development decisions and the decision making process for the little actual business development they do.
Mozilla Foundation grants and related expenditures for 2007 include grants to Mozilla community projects, other open source software projects such as the Perl Foundation, the DOJO Ajax toolkit, the Windows screen reader software NVDA, and many, many other projects and efforts.
What impresses me the most is Mozilla's attitude toward revenue, of which a substantial amount comes from their search partnership with Google. Finette proudly states, “We do not want to be dependent on one partner. Having money in the bank ensures that Mozilla is going to be around even if a partner's strategy changes. Similarly, if a situation occurred where we also decided not to continue a relationship, we would have the possibility to walk away and not worry about compromising Mozilla users’ level of service." In 2006, Mozilla reported whopping revenues of $66.8 million, which enables Mozilla to financially support and cultivate competitive, viable community innovation. "
More Information
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