[OWW-SC] Article on Mozilla Foundation

[Sri Kosuri]

Considering our ongoing discussions on the volunteer community,
fundraising, and long-term sustainability.. I thought the following
article in the NYTimes on the Mozilla foundation was interesting:

May 21, 2007
Link by Link
Firefox and the Anxiety of Growing Pains

By NOAM COHEN
IF the open-source software movement were an upstart political
campaign, Chris Messina would be one of its community organizers — the
young volunteer who decamps to New Hampshire, knocking on doors,
putting up signs.

In 2004, Mr. Messina, a 26-year-old Web entrepreneur from San
Francisco, found his dream candidate in Firefox, the open-source
Internet browser that is a rival to Microsoft's Internet Explorer.

Unlike the other candidate he volunteered for that year, Howard Dean,
Firefox is still racking up victories. And unlike Mr. Dean, the people
behind Firefox have a dilemma: what happens — and what is owed to
volunteer contributors — when an open-source project starts to become
successful?

Some 1,000 to 2,000 people have contributed code to Firefox, according
to the Mozilla Foundation, which distributes the Firefox browser. An
estimated 10,000 people act as testers for the program, and an
estimated 80,000 help spread the word.

•

In 2004, with the release of version 1.0, Firefox became the dream of
techies like Mr. Messina. Much in the way he helped coordinate
supporters for Mr. Dean online, he got behind Spread Firefox, a
campaign to rally the open-source base behind the browser.

That effort culminated in a fund-raising drive to advertise Firefox in
The New York Times. The ad, a double-page spread designed by Mr.
Messina, ran on Dec. 16, 2004.

"It was 10,000 people, putting in like 5 bucks to — I don't know what
the highest was," he said. "It was in the spirit of the Howard Dean
campaign."

The Firefox campaign has been very successful, according to Mitchell
Baker, the chairwoman of the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation that directs
the project.

"The best we can figure, 75 to 100 million people are using Firefox,"
she said. "Those people did not get it in a box. That is 75 million
decisions, somewhere around the world to put this piece of software on
someone's machine."

According to outside estimates, Firefox has about 15 percent of the
market, Internet Explorer has more than 78 percent, and Apple's Safari
a little less than 5 percent. Mozilla has 90 employees and revenue of
more than $100 million in the last couple of years.

Mozilla plans to make enough money to keep growing. But a windfall
came in the form of a royalty contract with Google, which, like the
other search companies, is always competing for better placement on
browsers. Under the agreement, the Google search page is the default
home page when a user first installs Firefox, and is the default in
the search bar. In the last two years, the deal has brought in more
than $100 million. (Google has a similar placement with Apple's
Safari.)

So far, no one has figured out how to balance keeping an open-source
or collaborative project fully financed while remaining independent
and noncommercial. Wikipedia, for example, holds occasional
fund-raisers, while its leaders debate if it should take steps toward
some sort of sponsorship or advertising.

Thanks to the Google agreement, the Mozilla Foundation went from
revenue of nearly $6 million in 2004 to more than $52 million the next
year. The foundation plans to increase its work force, and to add some
engineering capability. In 2005, the foundation created a subsidiary,
the for-profit Mozilla Corporation, also led by Ms. Baker, mainly to
deal with the tax and other issues related to the Google contract.
(The foundation's 2006 tax return has not yet been made public, but
Ms. Baker said the Google revenue will remain about the same.)

She described the decision to align with Google as an organic one that
predates the official release of Firefox. "We had Google in a beta
version for a long time, so we approached them first," she said.

Mitch Kapor, who is on the Mozilla board, said that accepting a deal
with Google was a no-brainer. "Always on my mind, in all my
involvement is, how is it going to be sustainable?" he said. "I am a
big believer that begging is not the right business model. When it
began to become clear there was a business opportunity, in monetizing
search in the browser, I saw this as a great opportunity."

•

But with opportunities came changes. By creating a corporation to run
the Firefox project, Mozilla was committing to be less transparent. In
part, that is because Google insists on the secrecy of "its
arrangement and agreements," Mr. Kapor said. (Google declined to
comment for this article.)

Because transparency is one of the principles of the so-called Mozilla
manifesto released in February, Mr. Kapor said, there was "some
tension around getting the deal done and disclosure."

Another complication for Mozilla, some critics say, is that it could
be perceived as acting as an extension of Google. For example, they
note that one of Google's growth areas, Web-based software
applications, would have a better chance of success with a browser not
controlled by its biggest rival, Microsoft.

The exact nature of Mozilla's relationship with Google has been good
fodder for bloggers. When Mr. Messina recently posted a 50-minute
video of his thoughts about Firefox development, the comments included
a back and forth between Asa Dotzler of the Mozilla Corporation, and a
commentator on the blog named Corey.

When Corey wrote that "it seems like half" of the top contributors to
Mozilla "work directly for Google," Mr. Dotzler responded harshly,
dismissing the claim outright: "No one who has looked at the actual
development of Firefox recently could say with a straight face that
Google employees are top contributors to Mozilla."

Finally, there is the problem of what Mozilla should do with the
money, at least the portion that isn't being reinvested in the
Firefox. Throwing money around among volunteers can backfire, Ms.
Baker said, though the foundation has been quietly assisting
contributors who are hampered by poor equipment.

Instead, Mozilla's solution is to put money into what Mr. Kapor calls
"community purposes." To that end, the foundation is looking for a new
executive director who would focus on worthy projects, although no
decisions on what constitutes a worthy project has been made. "We go
out and ask," Ms. Baker said, "and even the community is not actually
clear where large amounts of money should go."