Mozilla Raking in Millions? 386
truthsearch writes "Internetnews.com wonders about the money Firefox is making in revenue thanks to Google. From the article: 'Mozilla gets paid a publicly undisclosed amount for each Google search query made from Firefox by a user.' This revenue is used to pay the recently formed Mozilla Corporation's 40 full-time equivalent employees and fund project and infrastructure development."
How do we know... (Score:2, Insightful)
TFA says "millions" (Score:5, Informative)
Re:TFA says "millions" (Score:2)
This implies at least 10 million but less than 100 million.
Re:TFA says "millions" (Score:3, Informative)
That means $10-$99 millions.
Well, if it's this big supposedly (Score:5, Insightful)
Non-profits, while they don't pay taxes, go through the same auditing process that private companies do. They also have to submit a "Form 990" to the Feds, which is roughtly equivalent except that it is public information. The first section of the form is gross revenues, under which income from contributions and program service revenue are different lines.
So, if the line for program and service revenue is nearly 100 million, they're probably not getting it from giving backrubs.
There may be additional state disclosures required, depending on where they're incorporated. For example, here in Massachusetts, it's possible to find out CEO salaries for non-profits. This is designed to prevent people from funneling estate money to their heirs through shell charities.
Re:Well, if it's this big supposedly (Score:5, Insightful)
In statement 7, the explanation is:
Qualified sponsorshiop payments received as the result of agreements between various search providers and Mozilla. These arrangements facilitate the dissemination of the Foundation's Firefox browser, thereby increasing the accessibility of the internet. Mozilla receives payments for allowing the Internet search provider to occupy its default or primary search location, or for the opportunity to be included in the Firefox web browser.
(Original is all caps. Lameness filter wouldn't let me post it that way)
Re:TFA says "millions" (Score:3, Insightful)
If they are then (Score:4, Insightful)
I salute them!
With? (Score:5, Funny)
With which finger?
Re:If they are then (Score:2)
By the way if KDE does not they goofs.
After all they invented the gg: url and google search is considerably more prominent in Konqueror compared to Mozilla.
Worth It (Score:2, Insightful)
So what? (Score:5, Insightful)
They get the money from the search bar from gogle. Users benefit, google benefits, Mozilla benefits. Profits go to development of their current and future products. Want to know more? Why not contact them directly?
Google = "Rich Sugar Daddy"? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Google = "Rich Sugar Daddy"? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Google = "Rich Sugar Daddy"4 (Score:3, Insightful)
Mozilla. And of course AOL which put a lot of money into the project initially. Opera has not been able to rely on donations from other companies
Sure. But why do you think all of those companies were willing to donate time and money to Mozilla, but not to Opera?
Re:Google = "Rich Sugar Daddy"? (Score:5, Interesting)
Do we care? Opera could have been Firefox if they had GPLed it. Mozilla saw their opportunity and now they're benefiting from their foresight.
Opera could become an open source (as in "freedom") company any time they want, and they'd instantly see a jump in the number of people using their browser, because suddenly it would be included in Red Hat, Debian, Ubuntu, and so on. Instead they've decided to sell (via a third party) closed-source browsers for mobiles. Good for them, and if they ever decide to put the big "GPL" stamp on their software, then they can count on a sudden jump in the number of people using their software. You can only get that jump with GPL, though.
Re:Google = "Rich Sugar Daddy"? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Google = "Rich Sugar Daddy"? (Score:3, Insightful)
Heck, Google even pays people to work on Mozilla (Ben Goodger?), and I think IBM and several other major companies do as well.
Re:Google = "Rich Sugar Daddy"? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Google = "Rich Sugar Daddy"? (Score:3, Insightful)
1: Opera would be making just as much money if they had as many users as Firefox. Google just pays Adsense cash out. Also, there would be MONSTROUS vetching if they paid all those bloggers but not the Mozilla Foundation. Opera can only blame themselves for being less popular than Firefox.
2: Opera Software a tiny 230-person company? Uh................. Compared to Mozilla, which was / is freeware? Who measures the size of a freeware company? I mean, the Mozilla
Re:So what? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:So what? (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh for God's sake what do you expect, that the Mozilla developers should be "pure" and "untainted" by commercial interests that might "bias" them towards pushing their solutions over others for reasons other than technical? Get over yourself, there just aren't enough programmers willing to live like paupers giving up their lives in some mother theresa style gesture doing volunteer development work while starving and living in the gutter ... you can't *make* software for free, programmers not only need money, they tend to demand a lot of it ... further it's a free market, the Mozilla Foundation have found a business model that allows them to make money off a free browser and there is nothing wrong with that ... if it was so terrible, then the free market would reject it and come up with alternate solutions. If their browser was shit nobody would use it no matter how much they astroturfed, and if they were raking in unjustifiable amounts of money and spending it on yachts then the free market would eventually find another cheaper way to make browsers. Nobody is forced to use FireFox and people are broadly capable of knowing whether the browser they are using sucks or not. Having more "motivation to market" (and money to do so) is a good thing, you speak as though marketing itself is some form of evil.
Funny how it's always "other people" we expect to live to insanely idealised standards of devotion to ideologies of untainted technical purity, while for ourselves it's always OK to maximise the income we can earn from our own endeavours.
Re:So what? You're missing the point (Score:3, Insightful)
transparency is crucial to ethical behavior
Just a question, do you think that all private companies should be required to publicly disclose their financials, like publicly traded companies are, in the interests of "ethical behaviour"?
If you owned a private business would you think it's best to keep your finances public? (One problem with this line of thinking is that the smaller the business, the more blurry the line between the individual and the company --- at some point one would inevitably have to al
It's the GPL, silly! (Score:5, Insightful)
They get "an unreasonable amount of support" because they use the GPL, there is no conspiracy, take away the GPL and they all look pretty much the same. In fact that is the whole point, they can't legally take away the GPL for code that has already been released. Rightly or wronly many "intellectuals" associate open source with freedom and indepenence.
Money motivates and astroturf happens, but "on sites like this", the GPL stamp is what drives the genuine enthusiasim amongst people who do know their stuff. If you don't "do software" for a living the GPL may seem obscure, but trust me, the GPL is important not only to geeks, but also an ever growing number of corporations and governments.
When I worked for IBM in the 90's, the then CEO, Lou Gerstner said: "All software has been written, it just needs to be managed". None of us geeks had a fucking clue what he was talking about and simply laughed at his seemingly bizzare pronouncments. Ironically I now make a good living by stiching software components together, many of them open source.
Re:So what? (Score:4, Insightful)
Choice? The FireFox search bar is configurable, so your post is either ignorant or a troll. It's not like the Skype case AT ALL: The Skype case was extra effort to create artificial limitations ... tell me, in what way have they gone to extra effort to create artificial limitations?
It seems obvious to me that users benefit when the Mozilla Foundation is able to fund development of alternate browsers. If they had no money, we wouldn't have FireFox ... "having FireFox" seems like a benefit to me.
Re:So what? (Score:5, Insightful)
Google was the most popular search engine long before FireFox ever had that search box. Thus even if Google weren't funding Mozilla at all, it would still be the most obvious and logical "default choice", provided one does not limit people from choosing others or making it difficult to do so (which they haven't). I mean, it (a) just wouldn't have made sense anyway to deliberately choose a less popular search engine and (b) choosing some other search engine would still be unfairly favouring one over another. Asking the user every time they run FF for the first time would be silly. No, the only clear choice is to please the most users by choosing the most popular search engine.
I still don't agree that it's anything like the Skype situation. In the Skype situation, they had something they'd developed that worked on all platforms, and then they sat down and intentionally spent additional time and effort to deliberately break it on some platforms. In the case of the search box in FF, they started with nothing, i.e. no search box at all, and sat down and added a new feature that contains no limitations. It's like someone gives you a free ice-cream and you complain because it's not your favourite flavour. What Skype did takes something away from users, what FF have done has only added.
Re:So what? (Score:2)
There has to be *Some* default, although it could ask you during installation i guess.
This is in contrast to microsoft's approach, which is to have msn as both the default and the only option that's available without actively seeking out and installing alternatives.
Re:So what? (Score:2)
You do have choice. Plenty of it. [mozilla.org] All you have to do is click the symbol in the left-hand corner of the search bar and choose another search engine. In addition, although Google is the default, there are other search engines included with Firefox without ever needing to add others. Plus you can change your start page from the orignal Google search anytime you want; mine is currently set at DeviantArt. Thus, you can change your start page from Google and your default search engine without even needing to dow
Re:So what? (Score:4, Insightful)
In my opinion, they should focus on two completely separate subjects:
* Performance improvements, mostly in the form of memory usage reductions and removal of memory leaks. One suggestion I've heard a few times is to run all plugins in a separate process which would occasionally get replaced.
* Hurry up tith the stack of next-generation tools for making it possible to create pages with advanced client-side logic without hacks like AJAX. XForms, a cleaned up JavaScript language, a much expanded JavaScript library including image creation and compression.
--
Axel
Re:So what? (Score:3, Insightful)
Fuck that, complete and compliant implementation of CSS2.1 and of every CSS3 module that's ready for implementation please.
Oh, and they can't use a "cleaned up Javascript language", Javascript has been standardized as ECMA-262 "ECMAScript" and t
Re:So what? (Score:3, Informative)
Thats not too small! (Score:2, Interesting)
I guess its a stupid question - seems to be a win-win situation at the outset - though google paying firefox seems more "dont be evil" driven than bottom-line minded. I mean even if they didn't pay, what were the chances that it wasn't going to be google up there?
Re:Thats not too small! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Thats not too small! (Score:3, Interesting)
Google has the same system for Opera, which leads me to conclude they want Opera and Firefox to be the top browsers (which wouldn't be a bad situation, if you ask me).
Judging by how little I use Google's front page any more, I am guessing that the future of search engines is through the browser's search bar. Should the day come where the world is dominated by Mozilla and Opera, it would be very hard for any other search engine to buy into the "put me first in your browser's search bar" setup when Google
Re:Thats not too small! (Score:2)
Google aren't really the ones giving the money. Advertisers are giving Google money whenever someone uses the Google search bar on Firefox and ends up clicking on the ads on the resulting search page. Google themselves get the money and give Mozilla a cut.
Through the sheer number of searches being done in Firefox, Mozilla ends up getting a rather large cut.
Re:Thats not too small! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Mozilla and the Prophets of Global Warming Doom (Score:2)
Manhaters? How do you work that one out?
The point of the article? (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course it's publically undisclosed. Why do they need to disclose it? They have no obligation to, really, as a private entity (rather than being on the stock market or so).
If they are raking in the money, great! Software developers need to get paid!
Re:The point of the article? (Score:2)
Re:The point of the article? (Score:2)
Re:The point of the article? (Score:2)
Re:The point of the article? (Score:2)
Re:The point of the article? (Score:2)
Re:The point of the article? (Score:3, Informative)
For example, for 2004,
http://www.guidestar.org/FinDocuments/2004/200/09
Re:The point of the article? (Score:4, Informative)
Also of note is that the Mozilla Foundation spent nearly all of the money it had at the beginning of the year. In other words, their 2004 budget was just about equal to their assets at the beginning of the year. Which is pretty much what you want from a non-profit.
Who else is contributing? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Who else is contributing? (Score:2)
Re:Who else is contributing? (Score:3, Insightful)
Kept at bay?
WTF, they're two frigging clicks away or something, just click "Add Engines" in your search bar and boom dozens of search engine plugins for you to install...
I feel cheated. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:I feel cheated. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:I feel cheated. (Score:3, Insightful)
Help them make more... (Score:5, Informative)
Interesting to note the default "google" keyword for the address bar puts the sourceid=firefox in there
As an aside, for those who want to make their own custom keywords (and don't know how to), here's an example: Bookmarks->Manage Bookmarks, click on any of the bookmarks under "quick searches", click new bookmark (top left), I made one for acronyms using acronym finder.
Name: Acronym Finder
Location: right click here, copy link location, paste (/. chews up the link) [acronymfinder.com]
Keyword: af
Description: You can put whatever you want here, it's optional
Then you click ok. Now when in firefox you can just search for acronyms by typing af + the acronym, for example: af HTTP
For other websites that use a link similar to the acronymfinder one, just insert %s where your query would go. In my example it's in Acronym=%s. You can also note the other default quicksearches that already exist (ex. slang for urban dictionary, dict for dictionary.com)
Re:Help them make more... (Score:2, Informative)
How much ? (Score:5, Interesting)
- Of the 100 million downloads lets say 20% are daily/active users -> 20 2illion users.
- Of the 20 million daily users, lets says 20% do make at least 1 search query. -> 4 million queries/day.
- If google pays around 0.02c a query. They get 80k/day x 30 days = 3.2Mil x 12 months =~ 38 Mil right there. A conservative number
Re:How much ? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:How much ? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:How much ? (Score:2)
what a dumb article (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:what a dumb article (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyway I as a potential donater want to know what I'm donating to? (I don't think this is the case but...) If Mozilla's turned into a profit-hungry corporation, but is still trying to imply it needs my £10 a month to feed its hungry developers, then that's deception on a large scale, and I'm not interested.
There's a conscious difference in most people's minds between donating to a company that's explicity not out to make a profit and buying product from one that is.
Re:what a dumb article (Score:5, Informative)
You can't really object to the Mozilla Corporation saying "Oh, they'll put all that money in the pockets of their shareholders" because the only shareholder they have is a non-profit entity.
The corporation does not disclose how much they make and they pay taxes.
Re:what a dumb article (Score:2)
While the details of what Mozilla.org will have to report to these entities isn't revealed, some metrics are disclosed if you look for them. To maintain the "non-profit" designation (it's not necessarily a 501C type organization), how the money is spent regarding employees, etc. has to fall into certain broad criteria specified by Mozilla.org's Board as well as certain percentages. Because Mozilla.org's "benefit to the commun
to bad this doesn't work for .... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:to bad this doesn't work for .... (Score:2)
I think the hardest part would be finding companies that are as open-minded as Google is. Most companies don't like trying new things, whereas Google understands that its success is due to it trying new ways of doing things.
This isn't the first time (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:This isn't the first time (Score:3, Informative)
"FOSDEM: The Mozilla Foundation's partnership with Google has kept it afloat for the past few months, and is now allowing it to hire more staff"
Seems to suggest that the google deal came through roughly at the same time. however that headline was misleading to suggest google was keeping Mozilla foundation afloat. see
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/007658 .h [mozillazine.org]
Excellent example (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe Linux could have a "You know, Windows has a lower TCO" message when it's booting up.
It's just enough money (Score:2)
Personally, I am also not using the search box at all, nor the google: keyword, I just use a link to google in the toolbar. I'll try to rig it a bit in firefox's favor now, but I won't rig every pc I work on this way.
what's wrong with making money? (Score:2)
Re:what's wrong with making money? (Score:2)
Who owns who (Score:3, Insightful)
Also, Google might actually be dependant on being represented in Firefox. What if Mozilla screws them and get a deal with Yahoo? Ooops... there goes say 100 mio. daily searches..
Re:Who owns who (Score:3, Interesting)
But what if you don't count pr0n searches? (Score:4, Funny)
open, transparent organisation (Score:2, Insightful)
One blogger has speculated that the figure is as high as $72 million in fact.
Mozilla Corporation board member Chris Blizzard said that the $72 million figure is not correct, "though not off by an order of magnitude."
Why not call it by its name? What's wrong with giving actual numbers? If someone gives these guys money why no
Money Raising Methods (Score:2, Insightful)
Not that its really
No prob! (Score:3, Insightful)
Time to switch to Opera I guess...at least I know who is making what there.
they are making a fortune. FACT (Score:3, Interesting)
53,846 @ 3,557clicks = $261.67
now thats per month and im a small publisher
firefox probably gets that many searches every minute!
also they pay up to $1 for every person who downloads firefox from a referal from my site
!!
Re:they are making a fortune. FACT (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:they are making a fortune. FACT (Score:3, Funny)
but not to worry google have to find my site with adsense first if they want to charge me with breaking the tos
Bandwidth Fairies (Score:5, Insightful)
Here all this time I thought the bandwidth to distribute 100 million coppies at 5 mb each & the occasional updates was being pulled out of the ass of bandwidth faries.
Re:Bandwidth Fairies (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Bandwidth Fairies (Score:3, Funny)
for profit or non? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:for profit or non? (Score:3, Insightful)
Nobody knows how much money Google has given Mozilla. But hey, it's Google, Google's rich, therefore Google must have given Mozilla 50 BILLION DOLLARS hence Mozilla must be an evil den of scam artists, cheating HARD WORKING salt-of-the-earth taxpayers out of money to feed their children whilst they worship Satan and drink baby blood for refreshment.
Um. Right.
Mozilla has a large number of employees it has to pay. I work for a software sta
Mozilla and Google (Score:3, Informative)
Map of Mozilla HQ [google.com]
Map of Google HQ [google.com]
so... what ? (Score:2)
OMG burn the browser! (Score:3)
Of course, everyone knows that is a lie, as soon as they get money they will tie the product to intel and force me to upgrade to large and larger versions which do the same thing with built in backward incompatability!
Damnit! I am going back to Firefox 0.4a thankyouverymuch.
Focus on mozilla? (Score:3, Interesting)
Good for FF... (Score:3, Interesting)
Look at the biggest names in Open Source, they all have some income generating stream somewhere. If this is how Mozilla drums up money for FF than more power to them as it's the least intrusive money making scheme i've seen in software yet. (Compare to banner ads for instance)
Re:Spend some of that on disable-output-escaping? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Spend some of that on disable-output-escaping? (Score:5, Interesting)
So now I'm on Opera 9.0TP2 and enjoying it. 84 MB of memory used after 12 days of Opera running, God knows how many tabs opened and closed and how many sites (incl. Flash and videos) visited. And I currently have 18 tabs open. *AND* it's a technical preview (not even beta software).
The biggest insult added to injury was the "it's not a memory leak, it's a feature!" attitude from Mozilla.
I don't plan on switching back to Firefox, ever.
Re:Spend some of that on disable-output-escaping? (Score:3, Informative)
This is true, but when you close Opera it keeps all your tabs and stuff so that when you open it again they're all still there (at least this is how it is by default and I've never known anybody who cared to change it). So, unlike Firefox, if it starts leaking memory to an unacceptable degree, you can just close it and reopen it and you're all set. In firefox, if you tried to do this, you'd lose all the tabs you had open, obvi
Re:Spend some of that on disable-output-escaping? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Spend some of that on disable-output-escaping? (Score:2, Insightful)
This disable-output-escaping makes simply no sense if you're having a valid xml-doc and an xslt-stylesheet to produce _valid_ xhtml (cause you don't need it for that).
It does, however, if you're trying to build makefiles with xml/xslt... but then you chose the wrong tool to produce the final result.
Your browser is made for displaying websites, not producing some weird output.
Because of this, the mozilla-guys are completely right if they say "no we won't".
Re:Phase 2? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Phase 2? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yup and it isn't as if there is anything morally wrong about OOS projects making money as long as it doesn't violate GPL and the profits go toward funding the project? Personally I don't mind, there are plenty of examples of non-profit organizations that have revenue streams so why get upset over the Mozilla project joining that group as long as the money doesnt' corrupt them?
Re:Phase 2? (Score:2)
Re:do no evil? (Score:2)
Re:do no evil? (Score:2)
Re:What's also funny is its really hard to get rid (Score:2, Informative)
Ever heard of UA strings?
GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: www.google.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.0.1) Gecko/20060203 Fedora/1.5.0.1-1.1.fc4.nr Firefox/1.5.0.1
Re:If You Work For Free, You Are an Idiot (Score:3, Insightful)
So. . . You don't do anything if you aren't being paid, (or unless you are paying some company for the pleasure of spending your time with their product or service)?
I hope you are mis-reporting yourself.
I use Firefox and I am very glad to have it. I am not a programmer, so I give my time in other ways to the world in the desire to make things better for the people a