Mozilla Foundation

The Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit organization that was established to support the open source Mozilla project to life. The organization shall determine, is continued in the direction the development of the projects, provides a basic legal infrastructure and cares about trademarks and other intellectual property. The Foundation owns a subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation, which has hired some developers and coordinates releases of the projects Firefox and Thunderbird. It has its headquarters in Mountain View in Silicon Valley in California.

The Mozilla Foundation describes itself as a nonprofit organization dedicated to the preservation of choice and innovation on the Internet.

History

On 23 February 1998 Netscape called Mozilla organization launched to coordinate the Mozilla Application Suite in their development. The organization consisted almost entirely of Netscape employees, although it was theoretically independent from the company. The Mozilla organization claiming to operate the Mozilla browser for testing purposes only, and not for end users. The first led to the emergence of Beonex communicators, of which there were also end-user versions, but most users still invited the "official" Mozilla packages down.

When AOL Time Warner and Microsoft out of court agreed in an antitrust action in May 2003 - Microsoft pointed AOL 750 million U.S. dollars in compensation and AOL granted, moreover, for seven years a royalty-free use of the Internet Explorer technology - the end of Netscape's seemed quite likely.

On 15 July 2003 AOL closed the Netscape browser development department and led them into the non-profit Mozilla Foundation, which should henceforth take care of the development of the code. The last 50 Netscape developers were laid off. AOL helped generously in the spin-off of the project: The hardware used was left to the Foundation, as well as the rights to the Mozilla code and the brands Mozilla and Bugzilla, three employees paid for the first three months and two million dollars in donations over the next two years promised. The rights to the name Netscape kept AOL.

Mozilla Corporation

On 3 August 2005, so two years later, founded the Foundation, the Mozilla Corporation to ensure the development and dissemination of the projects. The Corporation is responsible for the planning of releases and marketing. It also has links with companies, many of which make Mozilla's income. Unlike the non-profit Foundation, the Mozilla Corporation is a taxable business, which is therefore much greater freedom has in business affairs. Parallel to the Mozilla Corporation Mozilla Messaging was founded in 2007, which has taken over the development of Thunderbird. In April 2011 was re-integration into the Mozilla Foundation or Mozilla Corporation, as the messaging offshoots have proved to be conducive to the development.

Tasks

The remit of the Mozilla Foundation quickly grew beyond the old organization, when it took over many of the things that originally belonged to Netscape. Then a trend towards end-user was noticeable, and the Foundation began to do business with commercial companies should sell Mozilla on CDs and offered for example telephone support. It was set to the same owner as to Netscape times. At the same time began the Mozilla Foundation to give its brands and logos attention to develop copyright policies and to launch marketing campaigns.

With the founding of the Mozilla Corporation of all corporate tasks are delegated. The Foundation today deals only with the management of projects ( ie Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird, but still does not " marketed " projects Camino, SeaMonkey, etc.) and the creation and enforcement of policies in the development and commercialization. The Foundation owns the trademarks and other intellectual property; the Corporation has licenses for these. She also has control over the source code repositories of the Mozilla projects and decides who is allowed to upload code.

On 13 February 2007, version 0.9 of the "Mozilla Manifesto" was presented to the public, in which the basic principles of the Foundation are described.

Financing

The Mozilla Foundation accepts financial donations and funding. In addition to AOL's two-million - dollar donation Mitch Kapor was added $ 300,000 to the foundation. The Foundation is tax exempt under IRC 501 c 3 of the U.S. Tax Code, the Mozilla Corporation not.

The Foundation also has agreements with various search engine providers. So Google is in many - but not all - language versions default search engine in the Firefox search bar. In the Russian version, it is, for example, Yandex. In addition, there is a special Firefox Google search page.

In 2007, Mozilla a 75 million U.S. dollars. Thus, revenues increased by twelve percent. Expenses increased by 68 percent to 33 million U.S. dollars. In 2006, the Foundation had revenues of 66.8 million U.S. dollars, of which 61.5 million came from agreements with search engine providers. 85 percent of this revenue comes from Google. This was offset by expenses in the amount of 19.8 million U.S. dollars. The surplus is largely invested as a reserve in low-risk capital market investments to secure the foundation of sustainable funding for their activities even in a run-down of revenue for a long time.

Board of Directors

The board of the Mozilla Foundation consists of six members:

Christopher Blizzard, too, was part of the board, but joined the board of the Mozilla Corporation, Joichi Ito for it joined the Foundation. Bob and Carl Malamud Lisbonne were elected in October 2006 to the Board.

The Mozilla Foundation has next to a group of employees that focus on the work on the projects:

  • Chelsey Novak
  • David Boswell
  • Frank Hecker
  • Gervase Markham
  • Mark Surman (Managing Director)
  • Zak Greant

In addition, the Corporation has some employees, many of whom have worked, of course, before the establishment of the Corporation to the Foundation.

The Mozilla project has traditionally been managed by a committee called mozilla.org staff; the members are now all board members or employees in Foundation or Corporation.

International Marketing

Mozilla Europe, Mozilla Japan and Mozilla China are non-profit organizations that are legally independent from each other, but the Mozilla Foundation are close to and promote the marketing of Mozilla products in the regions.

Mountain View, California Mozilla Calendar Project Lightning (Software)
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