Mozilla Foundation

The Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit organization that exists to support and provide leadership for the open source Mozilla project. The organization sets the policies that govern development, operates key infrastructure and controls trademarks and other intellectual property. It owns a taxable subsidiary called the Mozilla Corporation, which employs several Mozilla developers and coordinates releases of the Mozilla Firefox web browser and the Mozilla Thunderbird email client. The Mozilla Foundation is based in Mountain View, California.

The Mozilla Foundation describes itself as "a non-profit organization dedicated to preserving choice and promoting innovation on the Internet".

History

The Mozilla Foundation was launched on July 15, 2003 as America Online (AOL) drastically scaled back its involvement with Mozilla, laying off or reassigning most of the Netscape browser developers and announcing that it would no longer finance the day-to-day running of the project. The Mozilla Foundation essentially replaces mozilla.org (also known as the Mozilla Organization), a much looser and more informal group that was established as an autonomous division of Netscape in 1998. AOL assisted in the initial creation of the Mozilla Foundation, transferring hardware and intellectual property to the organization and employing a three-person team for the first three months of its existence to help with the transition. AOL promised to donate $2 million to the foundation over two years.

Mozilla Corporation

On August 3, 2005, the Mozilla Foundation launched a wholly-owned subsidiary called the Mozilla Corporation to continue the development and delivery of Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird. The Mozilla Corporation takes responsibility for release planning, marketing and a range of distribution-related activities. It also handles relationships with businesses, many of which generate income. Unlike the Mozilla Foundation, the Mozilla Corporation is a taxable entity, which gives it much greater freedom in the revenue and business activities it can pursue.

Operations

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 launched.

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.

Funding

The Mozilla Foundation accepts donations as a source of funding. As well as AOL's initial $2 million donation, Mitch Kapor gave $300,000 to the organization at its launch. The group has tax-exempt status under IRC 501(c)3 of the US tax code, though the Mozilla Corporation subsidiary is taxable.

The foundation has also struck a 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 amount of money brought by this sponsorship deal has not been officially disclosed.

People

The Mozilla Foundation Board of Directors has five members:

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 this time.

The foundation also has a number of paid employees, who focus on project and policy issues:

Frank Hecker — Executive Director
Gervase Markham
Zak Greant

The Mozilla Corporation also has a number of employees, many of whom worked for the foundation before the establishment of the corporation.

The committee that runs the Mozilla Foundation is known as mozilla.org staff and is composed of a mixture of foundation employees and volunteers.

References

External links

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