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> Mozilla had 3 years to become profitable. Mozilla is a non-profit. This doesn't make sense. Google was paying $300M/year to Mozilla, and I seriously doubt t

> Mozilla had 3 years to become profitable. Mozilla is a non-profit. This doesn't make sense. Google was paying $300M/year to Mozilla, and I seriously doubt that Mozilla's expenses would be more than that. Most of the work is done by unpaid coders anyways; they don't need vast teams of sales people selling Mozilla, it sells by itself.

neurobro 12y ago
Mozilla Corporation is a taxable entity owned by the non-profit Mozilla Foundation. The tax system in the US apparently doesn't take kindly to non-profits funding open-source projects because they "can" be used commercially. e.g. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/07/open-source-madness https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/07/open-source-madness $300 million revenue with ~1,000 employees is about $300,000/employee. Pretty good but no guarantee of profitability.
throwaway863434 12y ago
Mozilla Corporation--the wholly-owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation and that has gutted Mozilla into a support community that's as organic and empowered as the support communities for any other pseudo-grassroots company--is absolutely a for-profit company. > Most of the work is done by unpaid coders anyways The only proper response to this is "lol". If you did a comparison, the skew of Mozilla employee versus non-employee contributions would be even more stark than the respective ones from the stats for the Linux kernel that everyone bandies about all the time. > they don't need vast teams of sales people selling Mozilla, it sells by itself Wish you could've got this through to Mozilla this when they were facing the prospects of looking for replacement for John Lilly and everybody seemed to be jumping ship to Facebook. They could've saved a ton of cash on the incompetent business folks they brought in and whose only contribution has been to shit on the Mozilla brand and to "other" the existing volunteer community. Or are you on some sort of [delay](http://olduse.net/ http://olduse.net/)?

neurobro 12y ago

Mozilla Corporation is a taxable entity owned by the non-profit Mozilla Foundation. The tax system in the US apparently doesn't take kindly to non-profits funding open-source projects because they "can" be used commercially. e.g. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/07/open-source-madness https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/07/open-source-madness $300 million revenue with ~1,000 employees is about $300,000/employee. Pretty good but no guarantee of profitability.

throwaway863434 12y ago

Mozilla Corporation--the wholly-owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation and that has gutted Mozilla into a support community that's as organic and empowered as the support communities for any other pseudo-grassroots company--is absolutely a for-profit company. > Most of the work is done by unpaid coders anyways The only proper response to this is "lol". If you did a comparison, the skew of Mozilla employee versus non-employee contributions would be even more stark than the respective ones from the stats for the Linux kernel that everyone bandies about all the time. > they don't need vast teams of sales people selling Mozilla, it sells by itself Wish you could've got this through to Mozilla this when they were facing the prospects of looking for replacement for John Lilly and everybody seemed to be jumping ship to Facebook. They could've saved a ton of cash on the incompetent business folks they brought in and whose only contribution has been to shit on the Mozilla brand and to "other" the existing volunteer community. Or are you on some sort of [delay](http://olduse.net/ http://olduse.net/)?