Mozilla Pockets Almost AU$49M Profit for 2006

By Greg McNevin

October 26, 2007: The Mozilla Foundation and its for-profit subsidiary Mozilla Corp., best known for Firefox and other popular open source applications, released its 2006 revenue statement on Monday, showing that even freely distributed open source software can be quite lucrative.

The group posted US$66.8 million (AU$73.4M) in revenue for 2006, a healthy 26 percent jump on the previous year’s US$52.9 million (AU$58.8M).

Considering 2006 only saw US$19.8 million (AU$22M) go to expenses, that’s just under US$49 million (AU$54.5M) in its pocket.

“The highlight is that Mozilla remains financially healthy: we're able to hire more people, build more products, help other projects, and bring more possibilities for participation in the Internet to millions of people,” wrote foundation Chairman Mitchell Baker in the company blog.

The group had around 90 full and part-time workers on its books in 2006.

While the group is raking in healthy profits, however, in both 2005 and 2006 85 percent of its revenue was generated via its partnership deal with Google. The search colossus forks over cash every time a search is made from within Firefox for example, but with this deal set to expire in November 2008 the group may have to look for other partners if it cannot extend its contract.

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