Mozilla Foundation

Mozilla Foundation Logo of the Mozilla Foundation (See: the Mozilla mascot) Founder(s) Mozilla Organization Type 501(c)(3) Founded July 15, 2003 Location Mountain View, California, USA Origins Mozilla Organization Products Mozilla Firefox web browser Mozilla Thunderbird e-mail client List of Mozilla Foundation products Focus Internet Revenue $104.3 million (2009)[1][2] Subsidiaries Mozilla Corp. Mozilla Messaging Inc. Website mozilla.org Entrance to downtown Mountain View office building currently home to both the Mozilla Foundation and the Mozilla Corporation Former office next to the Googleplex shared by both the Mozilla Foundation and the Mozilla Corporation until July 2009

The Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit organization that exists to support and provide leadership for the open source Mozilla project. The organization sets the policies that govern development, operates key infrastructure and controls trademarks and other intellectual property. It owns two taxable for-profit subsidiaries: the Mozilla Corporation, which employs several Mozilla developers and coordinates releases of the Mozilla Firefox web browser, and Mozilla Messaging, Inc., which primarily develops the Mozilla Thunderbird email client. The Mozilla Foundation was founded by the Netscape-affiliated Mozilla Organization, and was officially launched on July 15, 2003. The organization is currently based in the Silicon Valley city of Mountain View, California, USA.

The Mozilla Foundation describes itself as "a non-profit organization that promotes openness, innovation and participation on the Internet.".^[3] The Mozilla Foundation is guided by the principles of the Mozilla Manifesto which is declared in several languages.^[4][5] Mozilla Europe, Mozilla Japan, and Mozilla China are non-profit organizations whose mission is to help promote and deploy Mozilla products and projects. They are independent of, but affiliated with, the Mozilla Foundation.

History

On February 23, 1998, Netscape created the Mozilla Organization to co-ordinate the development of the Mozilla Application Suite. It consisted mostly of Netscape employees but operated independently of Netscape. The Mozilla Organization claimed to be developing the Mozilla browser for testing purposes only, and not for use by end users. This led to the creation of Beonex Communicator, which released end-user versions during the period that the Mozilla Organization oversaw the project (although most end-users simply downloaded the "official" Mozilla builds^{[citation needed]}).

When AOL (Netscape's parent) drastically scaled back its involvement with Mozilla Organization, the Mozilla Foundation was launched on July 15, 2003 to ensure Mozilla could survive without Netscape. AOL assisted in the initial creation of the Mozilla Foundation, transferring hardware and intellectual property to the organization and employing a three-person team for the first three months of its existence to help with the transition and donated $2 million to the foundation over two years.

Subsidiaries

Mozilla Corp.

Main article: Mozilla Corporation

On August 3, 2005, the Mozilla Foundation launched a wholly owned subsidiary called the Mozilla Corp. to continue the development and delivery of Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird. The Mozilla Corp. takes responsibility for release planning, marketing and a range of distribution-related activities. It also handles relationships with businesses, many of which generate income. Unlike the Mozilla Foundation, the Mozilla Corp. is a taxable entity, which gives it much greater freedom in the revenue and business activities it can pursue. The majority of the revenues comes from Google Inc., which is the default search engine on Mozilla Firefox.

Mozilla Messaging Inc.

Main article: Mozilla Messaging

On February 19, 2008, Mozilla Messaging Inc. was announced, which like the Mozilla Corp. is a wholly owned for-profit subsidiary of Mozilla Foundation. Its focus was developing software to tackle the problems in Internet communication, including the Thunderbird email client.

On April 4, 2011, it was announced that Mozilla Messaging Inc. would be merged into the Mozilla Labs group of the Mozilla Corporation.^[6]

Mozilla Online Ltd

Mozilla Online Ltd (Chinese: 北京谋智网络技术有限公司) is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Corp.^[7] headquartered in Beijing.

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 started.

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.

Financing

The Mozilla Foundation accepts donations as a source of funding. Along with 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 $66.8 million in revenues, of which $61.5 million is attributed to "search royalties".^[8]

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, however Google renewed the contract until November 2008 and has now renewed the contract through 2011.^[9] Approximately 85% of Mozilla’s revenue for 2006 was derived from this contract." This amounts to approximately US$56.8 million.^[8]

People

The Mozilla Foundation Board of Directors has five members:^[4]

• Mitchell Baker (Chair)
• Brian Behlendorf
• Brendan Eich
• Joichi Ito
• Bob Lisbonne

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 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.

Support for natural ecosystems

Mozilla is dedicated to preserving and promoting a healthy online space. As the community develops new versions of Firefox and Thunderbird, park names are chosen as the code names for each product release.^[10]

Donations

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 US$10,000 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 done by developers would be through insecure and unsafe methods and thus gave the funds as a thank you.^[11]

At the end of 2010, the Mozilla Foundation partnered with Knoxville Zoo in an effort to raise awareness about endangered red pandas. Two red pandas (a.k.a. firefox) cubs born at the Knoxville Zoo have officially become a part of the Mozilla community. The cubs are named Spark and Ember by online voters and Mozilla broadcasted a 24 hour live video stream of the cubs for several months.^{[12][13][14][15]}

See also

	San Francisco Bay Area portal
	Free software portal

• List of Mozilla Foundation products
• Firefox – Mozilla's web browser
• Thunderbird – Mozilla's e-mail client
• Sunbird – Mozilla's standalone calendar client

Notes

1. ^ "Mozilla Foundation and Subsidiary: 2009 Independent Auditors' Report and Consolidated Financial Statements" (PDF). Mozilla Foundation. 2009-12-31. http://www.mozilla.org/foundation/documents/mf-2009-audited-financial-statement.pdf. Retrieved 2011-1-23. 
2. ^ "Mozilla 2009 Financial FAQ". Mozilla Foundation. 2010-11-18. http://www.mozilla.org/foundation/annualreport/2009/faq.html. Retrieved 2011-1-23. 
3. ^ "The Mozilla Foundation". Mozilla Foundation. http://www.mozilla.org/foundation/. Retrieved 2011-1-23. 
4. ^ ^{a b} "About the Mozilla Foundation". Mozilla Foundation. http://www.mozilla.org/foundation/about.html. Retrieved 2011-1-23. 
5. ^ "The Mozilla Manifesto". Mozilla Foundation. http://www.mozilla.org/about/manifesto. Retrieved 2011-1-23. 
6. ^ Paul, Ryan (5 April 2011). "Thunderbird returns to nest as Mozilla Messaging rejoins Mozilla". Ars Technica. http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2011/04/thunderbird-returns-to-nest-as-mozilla-messaging-rejoins-mozilla.ars. Retrieved 2011-04-05. 
7. ^ "谋智网络是Mozilla Corp.在中国的全资子公司..."谋智网络 » 关于我们 » 职业机会
8. ^ ^{a b} "2006 Independent Auditor's Report and Consolidated Financial Statements" (PDF). http://www.mozilla.org/foundation/documents/mf-2006-audited-financial-statement.pdf. 
9. ^ Mozilla Extends Lucrative Deal With Google For 3 Years
10. ^ "Mozilla parks". Mozilla Foundation. http://www.mozilla.org/parks/. Retrieved 2011-1-23. 
11. ^ OpenBSD Journal - Donations Update
12. ^ "Meet the Newest (and Cutest) Mozillians". Mozilla Foundation. http://blog.mozilla.com/blog/2010/12/03/meet-the-newest-and-cutest-mozillians/. Retrieved 2011-1-23. 
13. ^ "Firefox Live Blog with Knoxville Zoo". Mozilla Foundation. http://firefoxlive.squarespace.com/. Retrieved 2011-1-23. 
14. ^ "@cubcaretaker on Twitter". Mozilla Foundation. http://twitter.com/cubcaretaker. Retrieved 2011-1-23. 
15. ^ "Firefox live". Mozilla Foundation. http://firefoxlive.mozilla.org/. Retrieved 2011-1-23. 

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. http://www.mozilla.org/press/mozilla-2005-08-03.html. Retrieved August 3, 2005. 

External links

• About the Mozilla Foundation
• 2005 presentation about the Mozilla Foundation
• Press release about the creation of the Mozilla Foundation
• Details about the reorganization caused by the formation of the Mozilla Corporation
• mozilla.org Staff Members and Meeting Minutes

Coordinates: 37°23′17″N 122°04′58″W / 37.38792°N 122.08284°W / 37.38792; -122.08284