My OperaMozilla plans profit sharing - sort of
Friday, March 24, 2006 2:33:07 PM
In a previous blog post I reported that the Mozilla Foundation, which develops and releases the Firefox web browser and the Thunderbird email program, had pulled in tens of millions of dollars based on search advertising deals with Google, Amazon, and other web portals. Published reports in the computer trade press put the amount of revenue for 2005 at $72M USD. This figure is in dispute but the order of magnitude of the revenue stream is not.
The question, of course, is what Mozilla plans to do with all that money? With fewer than 50 full time employees, Mozilla relies on the free labor of thousands of programmers around the world to develop its products under the opens source banner. Well, now comes the monkey wrench in the open source gearbox. Some people who worked on Firefox now feel like chumps having donated their time, talent, and energy only to see a few folks rake in the cash. To its credit the Mozilla foundation has figured out it needs to find a way to share the wealth.
According to a report on CNET, the foundation plans to directly fund developers and community programming projects that support open source projects. Here's a condensed version of the news report.
Mozilla plans to fund developer community
By Ingrid Marson, CNET
Story last modified Thu Mar 23 06:41:30 PST 2006
The Mozilla Foundation is planning to use some of its millions of dollars in revenues to fund active members of its developer community. Mitchell Baker, the chief executive of the Mozilla Corporation, the commercial subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation, said Mozilla plans to put some of its excess revenues back into the community.
"The Mozilla Group--the foundation and the corporation--has a set of employees that provide a critical mass where things can happen, but it is only a piece of the project. There are vast numbers of things that happen outside our employee base," she said. "We have a commitment that while we have funds beyond our operating levels, some of it should to go to community members. We want to do that in a way that promotes the community."
[snip]
"There's not a model in the open-source community that we can point to and copy," she said. "We have contributors spread around the world doing a range of different things and we need to work out what would make sense for them. We don't want to set up a model, have a big PR event about it, disperse the money and then find out it has no effect or gets to the wrong people."
Though a number of open-source projects, such as JBoss and MySQL, have used their revenues to hire contributors, it is relatively unusual that money is put straight back into the community, according to Rishab Ghosh, the program leader of an EU-funded open-source research project at Dutch research institute MERIT.
OK, this sounds a lot better than another Silicon Valley take-the-profits-and-run story. Obviously, Mozilla has its work cut out for it in terms of figuring out how to share its profits without becoming, de facto, a global body shop for open source programmers. There is a lot of talent out there and finding a way to shape it constructively to advance open source projects could be Mozilla's biggest challenge to date. If they are successful, it could also be their biggest accomplishment.
The question, of course, is what Mozilla plans to do with all that money? With fewer than 50 full time employees, Mozilla relies on the free labor of thousands of programmers around the world to develop its products under the opens source banner. Well, now comes the monkey wrench in the open source gearbox. Some people who worked on Firefox now feel like chumps having donated their time, talent, and energy only to see a few folks rake in the cash. To its credit the Mozilla foundation has figured out it needs to find a way to share the wealth.
According to a report on CNET, the foundation plans to directly fund developers and community programming projects that support open source projects. Here's a condensed version of the news report.
Mozilla plans to fund developer community
By Ingrid Marson, CNET
Story last modified Thu Mar 23 06:41:30 PST 2006
The Mozilla Foundation is planning to use some of its millions of dollars in revenues to fund active members of its developer community. Mitchell Baker, the chief executive of the Mozilla Corporation, the commercial subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation, said Mozilla plans to put some of its excess revenues back into the community.
"The Mozilla Group--the foundation and the corporation--has a set of employees that provide a critical mass where things can happen, but it is only a piece of the project. There are vast numbers of things that happen outside our employee base," she said. "We have a commitment that while we have funds beyond our operating levels, some of it should to go to community members. We want to do that in a way that promotes the community."
[snip]
"There's not a model in the open-source community that we can point to and copy," she said. "We have contributors spread around the world doing a range of different things and we need to work out what would make sense for them. We don't want to set up a model, have a big PR event about it, disperse the money and then find out it has no effect or gets to the wrong people."
Though a number of open-source projects, such as JBoss and MySQL, have used their revenues to hire contributors, it is relatively unusual that money is put straight back into the community, according to Rishab Ghosh, the program leader of an EU-funded open-source research project at Dutch research institute MERIT.
OK, this sounds a lot better than another Silicon Valley take-the-profits-and-run story. Obviously, Mozilla has its work cut out for it in terms of figuring out how to share its profits without becoming, de facto, a global body shop for open source programmers. There is a lot of talent out there and finding a way to shape it constructively to advance open source projects could be Mozilla's biggest challenge to date. If they are successful, it could also be their biggest accomplishment.
