Mozilla creates for-profit arm
Mozilla creates for-profit arm
Aug 5, 2005: The Mozilla Foundation, the non-profit public benefit software development organisation behind the Firefox Internet browser, has formed a wholly-owned for-profit subsidiary to be known as the Mozilla Corporation.
Leading figures in the Mozilla Foundation were at pains to stress though that the organisation was not about to turn into a money-grabbing entity, but that the Mozilla Corporation was merely established to support the non-profit, public benefit goals of its parent, the Mozilla Foundation, and the Mozilla community.
The organisation will continue to leverage resources from diverse sources to create and distribute open and free-of-charge end-user products such as the popular Mozilla Firefox web browser and Mozilla Thunderbird email client.
Mozilla's flagship product Mozilla Firefox is approaching a 10 percent share of worldwide Internet usage and has surpassed 75 million downloads. It is now the main challenger to the dominance of Microsoft's Internet Explorer.
"The formation of the Mozilla Corporation gives the Mozilla Foundation new capabilities for becoming even more successful in delivering innovative open source end-user products," said Mitchell Baker, president of Mozilla Corporation. "The Mozilla Corporation is not a typical commercial entity. Rather, it is dedicated to the public benefit goal at the heart of the Mozilla project, which is to keep the Internet open and available to everyone."
According to Mozilla, the broad adoption of Firefox has created significant economic value both in Firefox itself and in a commercial ecosystem that is developing around Firefox.
This economic value is an unintended but real by-product of the Mozilla project's overriding goal of providing a web browser with enough marketshare to drive open standards on the web. The Foundation believes that if 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 Mozilla Foundation's spirit and philosophy will be very much alive in the new organisational model. We needed to find the right vehicle for advancing a sustainable worldwide effort to promote innovation and choice on the Internet, but with the same goals, values and collaborative dynamics that made the Mozilla Foundation a successful member of the open source software community," said Mitch Kapor, chairman of the board of the Mozilla Foundation.
The Mozilla Foundation remains the nucleus for the Mozilla project. It maintains the primary responsibility for managing the open source project, stewarding and distributing the source code, setting policies, and organising the relationships between all participants in the project. As the Mozilla Foundation focuses on the project's governance, infrastructure and source code, the Mozilla Corporation will focus on developing and delivering end-user products, including marketing, sponsorships and a range of distribution-related activities. These activities are also expected to generate revenue, but the Mozilla Corporation only intends to pursue those that fit with the Mozilla project's focus on end-user experience and are consistent with the public benefit goals of the parent Mozilla Foundation.
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