The Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit organization that exists to support and lead the open source
Mozilla project.
Founded in July 2003, the organization sets the policies that govern development, operates
key infrastructure and controls Mozilla trademarks and copyrights.
It owns a taxable subsidiary: the Mozilla Corporation, which employs many Mozilla developers
and coordinates releases of the Mozilla Firefox web browser and Mozilla Thunderbird email
client.
The subsidiary is 100% owned by the parent, and therefore follows the same non-profit
principles.
The Mozilla Foundation was founded by the Netscape-affiliated Mozilla Organization.
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."
The Mozilla Foundation is guided by the Mozilla Manifesto, which lists 10 principles which
Mozilla believes "are critical for the Internet to continue to benefit the public good as
well as commercial aspects of life."
History On February 23, 1998, Netscape created the
Mozilla Organization to co-ordinate the development of the Mozilla Application Suite.
When AOL 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, employed 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.
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.
Subsidiaries Mozilla Corporation
On 3 August 2005, the Mozilla Foundation announced the creation of Mozilla Corporation, described
as "a taxable subsidiary that serves the non-profit, public benefit goals of its parent, the Mozilla
Foundation, and that will be responsible for product development, marketing and distribution
of Mozilla products."
It also handles relationships with businesses, many of which generate income.
Unlike the Mozilla Foundation, the Mozilla Corporation is a tax-paying 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.
Beijing Mozilla Online Ltd
Beijing Mozilla Online Ltd, a.k.a.
Mozilla China, is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Corporation with its headquarters
in Beijing.
Financing The Mozilla Foundation is funded by donations
and "search royalties".
Since 2005, the vast majority of funds have come from Google Inc.
Initial funding in 2003 came from AOL, who donated US$2 million, and from Mitch Kapor
who donated US$300,000.
The group has tax-exempt status under section 501(c)(3) of the U.S. tax code, though the
Mozilla Corporation subsidiary is taxable.
In 2006, the Mozilla Foundation received US$66.8 million in revenues, of which US$61.5 million
is attributed to "search royalties" from Google.
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.
The original contract expired in November 2006.
However, Google renewed the contract until November 2008 and again through 2011.
On 20 December 2011 Mozilla announced that the contract was once again renewed for at
least three years to November 2014, at three times the amount previously paid, or nearly
US$300 million annually.
Approximately 85% of Mozilla’s revenue for 2006 was derived from this contract.
People The Mozilla Foundation Board of Directors
has six members: Mitchell Baker
Brian Behlendorf Joichi Ito
Bob Lisbonne Cathy Davidson
Ronaldo Lemos 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; some individuals on that committee later became Foundation or Corporation board
members or employees.
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, 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.
At the end of 2010, the Mozilla Foundation partnered with Knoxville Zoo in an effort
to raise awareness about endangered red pandas.
Two red panda 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 broadcast a 24 hour live
video stream of the cubs for several months.
See also
List of Mozilla products Mozilla Firefox – Mozilla's web browser
Mozilla Thunderbird – Mozilla's e-mail client Mozilla Sunbird – Mozilla's standalone calendar
client Notes
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.
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 mozilla.org Staff Members and Meeting Minutes