Mozilla Corporation

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Mozilla Corporation

Type of Company	Private
Founded	Mountain View, California (2005)
Headquarters	Mountain View, CA, USA
Key people	Mitchell Baker, President
Products	Mozilla Firefox Mozilla Thunderbird more...
Employees	60+
Website	mozilla.com

The Mozilla Corporation is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation that coordinates and integrates the development of Internet-related applications such as the Mozilla Firefox web browser and the Mozilla Thunderbird email client by the growing global community of open-source developers, only some of whom are employed by the corporation itself. The corporation also distributes and promotes these products. Unlike the non-profit Mozilla Foundation, the Mozilla Corporation is a taxable entity. In contrast to most commercial organizations, the Mozilla Corporation is not motivated by a desire for profit, reinvesting all profits back into the Mozilla projects. The Mozilla Corporation aims to work towards the Mozilla Foundation's public benefit goals of "preserving choice and innovation on the Internet."

As explained in a MozillaZine article: "The Mozilla Foundation will ultimately control the activities of the Mozilla Corporation and will retain its 100 percent ownership of the new subsidiary. Any profits made by the Mozilla Corporation will be invested back into the Mozilla project. There will be no shareholders, no stock options will be issued and no dividends will be paid. The Mozilla Corporation will not be floating on the stock market and it will be impossible for any company to take over or buy a stake in the subsidiary. The Mozilla Foundation will continue to own the Mozilla trademarks and other intellectual property and will license them to the Mozilla Corporation. The Foundation will also continue to govern the source code repository and control who is allowed to check in."

The Mozilla Corporation was established on August 3, 2005 to handle the revenue-related operations of the Mozilla Foundation. As a non-profit, the Mozilla Foundation is limited in terms of the types and amounts of revenue. The Mozilla Corporation, as a taxable organization (essentially, a commercial operation), does not have to comply with such strict rules. Upon its creation, the Mozilla Corporation took over several areas from the Mozilla Foundation, including coordination and integration of the development of Firefox and Thunderbird (by the global free software community) and the management of relationships with businesses.

With the creation of the Mozilla Corporation, the rest of the Mozilla Foundation narrowed its focus to concentrate on the Mozilla project's governance and policy issues. In November 2005, with the release of Mozilla Firefox 1.5, the Mozilla Corporation's website at mozilla.com was unveiled as the new home of the Firefox and Thunderbird products online.

In March 2006, Weblogs, Inc. founder Jason Calacanis reported a rumor on his blog that Mozilla Corporation gained $72M during the previous year, mainly thanks to the Google search box in the Firefox browser. [1] The rumor was later addressed by Christopher Blizzard, a member of the Mozilla board, who wrote on his blog that "it’s not correct, though not off by an order of magnitude". [2]

Recently, Microsoft posted a letter on a blog [3] and offered to open up a new open-source facility at its headquarters in Redmond, Wash., to Mozilla software engineers. Mozilla responded by accepting the offer. [4]

On September 6, 2006 the Mozilla Corporation hired Window Snyder, former security strategist at Microsoft. [5]