Mozilla Wants to Make Some Cash

Mozilla Foundation has decided that it's time for certain activities to start making money; for this purpose, the non-profit organization is "giving birth" to Mozilla Corporation.

You don't have to worry, this new entity won't try to sell Firefox and Thunderbird, on the contrary, Mozilla Corporation will even try to finance the Firefox project so that it remains Open Source.

"The Mozilla Corporation is not a typical commercial entity. Rather, it is dedicated to the public benefit goal at the heart of the Mozilla project, which is to keep the Internet open and available to everyone," Mitchell Baker, a former Netscape attorney who becomes president of Mozilla Corp., said in a statement.

Mozilla Foundation was created two years ago, mainly with 2 million dollars donated by America Online Inc. Currently, Mozilla's main project, the Firefox browser, is Internet Explorer's main competitor, having a market share of 10-11%.

According to the foundation's data, the browser has been downloaded 75 million times, the security features being Firefox's main advantage over Internet Explorer. Of all the Mozilla Foundation employees, over 40 will move to the newly started corporation, and only three of them will still be working at the Mozilla Foundation, which relies a lot on the volunteers involved in the project.

At this moment, the only income source for Mozilla is the searching box, which allows users to select the desired engine, (Google, Yahoo, Amazon sau Ebay) and the contracts with these companies generate annually a few millions dollars, Baker said.

Mozilla Coporation will deal mainly with the marketing and distributing of the products created by the foundation.

Mozilla Foundation's board will now include Baker, Mitch Kapor, Brian Behlendorf, Brendan Eich, and Joichi Ito. Red Hat Inc.'s Chris Blizzard is leaving the Foundation board to join the board of Mozilla Corp. The corporation's board will also include Blizzard, Baker and Reid Hoffman, chief executive officer of LinkedIn Corp.