Mozilla Foundation

Main article: Mozilla Messaging

On February 19, 2008, Mozilla Messaging was announced, which like the Mozilla Corporation is a wholly owned for-profit subsidiary of Mozilla Foundation. Its focus will be developing software to tackle the problems in Internet communication. As of May 2008, Mozilla Messaging in developing the Thunderbird 3 email client with a probable release at the end of the year.

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Operations

Initially, the remit of the Mozilla Foundation grew to become much wider than that of mozilla.org, with the organization taking on many tasks that were traditionally left to Netscape and other vendors of Mozilla technology. As part of a wider move to target end-users, the foundation made deals with commercial companies to sell CDs containing Mozilla software and provide telephone support. In both cases, the group chose the same suppliers as Netscape for these services. The Mozilla Foundation also became more assertive over its intellectual property, with policies put in place for the use of Mozilla trademarks and logos. New projects such as marketing were also launched.

With the formation of the Mozilla Corporation, the Mozilla Foundation delegated all their development and business-related activities to the new subsidiary. The Mozilla Foundation now focuses solely on governance and policy issues, though it also continues to oversee the projects that have not been "productized", such as Camino and SeaMonkey. The Mozilla Foundation owns the Mozilla trademarks and other intellectual property, which it licenses to the Mozilla Corporation. It also controls the Mozilla source code repository and decides who is allowed to check code in.

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Financing

The Mozilla Foundation accepts donations as a source of funding. As well as AOL's initial $2 million donation, Mitch Kapor gave $300,000 to the organization at its launch. The group has tax-exempt status under IRC 501(c)3 of the U.S. tax code, though the Mozilla Corporation subsidiary is taxable.

In 2006 the Mozilla Foundation received US$66.8 million in revenues, of which 61.5 million is attributed to "search royalties".^[2]

The foundation has an ongoing deal with Google to make Google search the default in the Firefox browser search bar and hence send it search referrals; a Firefox themed Google search site has also been made the default home page of Firefox. A footnote in Mozilla's 2006 financial report states "Mozilla has a contract with a search engine provider for royalties. The contract originally expired in November 2006 but was renewed for two years and expires in November 2008. Approximately 85% of Mozilla’s revenue for 2006 was derived from this contract."; this equates to approximately US$56.8 million.^[2]

In 2006 after a request from Theo de Raadt of OpenBSD for funding from corporate entities which make a profit through the use of OpenSSH in their packaged distributions, the Mozilla Foundation donated ten thousand dollars USD to de Raadt and OpenBSD for OpenSSH development. The funds donated came from money earned through the income provided by Google. While the target of this request were corporations such as Cisco, IBM, HP, and Red Hat (which all sell operating systems containing OpenSSH but have not donated to its continued development before), the Mozilla Foundation found that without OpenSSH, much of the work developers do would be through unsecure and unsafe methods and thus gave the funds as a thank you. [1]

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People

The Mozilla Foundation Board of Directors has six members: [2]

Originally Christopher Blizzard had a seat on the board but he moved to the Mozilla Corporation Board of Directors when it was established; Joichi Ito joined the Mozilla Foundation board at that time. Bob Lisbonne and Carl Malamud were elected to the board in October 2006.

The foundation also has a number of paid staff members, who focus on project and policy issues:

David Boswell (programmer)^[3]
Frank Hecker — Executive Director
Gervase Markham
Zak Greant

The Mozilla Corporation also has a number of employees, many of whom worked for the foundation before the establishment of the corporation.

The Mozilla project has traditionally been overseen by a committee known as mozilla.org staff; the individuals on that committee later became foundation or corporation board members or staff members.

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References

Mozilla Foundation Forms New Organization to Further the Creation of Free, Open Source Internet Software, Including the Award-Winning Mozilla Firefox Browser. Mozilla Press Center. Retrieved on August 3, 2005.

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Notes

^ Mozilla's 2006 revenue: $66.8 million | Underexposed - CNET News.com
^ ^a ^b Independent Auditor's Report and Consolidated Financial Statements.
^ Blog post about David Boswell joining the Mozilla Foundation by Mozilla Foundation Executive Director Frank Hecker

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See also

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External links

Mozilla Foundation is at coordinates 37°25′11″N 122°05′20″W / 37.419804, -122.088838 (Mozilla Foundation)Coordinates: 37°25′11″N 122°05′20″W / 37.419804, -122.088838 (Mozilla Foundation)

v • d • e Mozilla organisations

Mozilla Foundation • Mozilla Corporation • Mozilla Messaging • Mozilla Europe • Mozilla Japan • Mozilla China • Mozilla Online (China)