⚠ | In 2005, I published this article on Deflexion.com and in 2021, I migrated it to Infinite Ink. I have not yet updated it and, unfortunately, some of the links are broken. |
I am in the process of trying to understand why The (for-profit) Mozilla Corporation is needed. Here are some links related to this.
mozillaZine: Mozilla Foundation Announces Creation of Mozilla Corporation
mitchell’s blog: Organizing the Mozilla Project — Mozilla Corporation (Mitchell Baker is the President of the Mozilla Corporation)
mozilla.org: Mozilla Foundation Reorganization
Slashdot: Mozilla Foundation Launches Mozilla Corporation and Mozilla Raking in Millions?
Techdirt: Mozilla Goes Corporate
lots more at planet.mozilla.org, which aggregates Mozilla-related blog postings
From what I have read so far, it does not make sense. Please someone give an explicit example of a scenario where it is better for the internet for Mozilla to be a for-profit entity rather than a not-for-profit entity. As others have said, it is perfectly fine for a non-profit entity to make a profit (and plow that profit back into the non-profit entity).
For now, I’m skeptical. My thoughts are that…
It is a way for the Mozilla Foundation to avoid disclosing all their finances. As a non-profit, I think they must make their finances public.
They are now going to be playing on the same playing field that Microsoft is playing on and they can’t win on that field. They lost when they were Netscape and they will lose again. The can, however, win if they stick to the non-profit FLOSS field. (There is probably a good quote related to this in The Art of War.)
This is going to screw up the momentum and good will that the Mozilla products currently enjoy.
As a protest, I have removed all the Firefox, Thunderbird, and Mozilla Suite advertisements on my sites and I will no longer recommend Thunderbird or Mozilla Suite as IMAP clients. They are sucky IMAP clients anyway, but I used to recommend them because I had hoped that the spirit of Free/Libre Open Source Software would prevail and they would eventually become decent IMAP clients.
If you are looking for a browser, I recommend the non-commercial
SeaMonkey suite, which I discuss in my blog item titled
SeaMonkey Suite and Send This Page.