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Submission + - Robotic submarine maps worlds deepest sinkhole

Submitted by holy_calamity on Monday May 21, 2007 @05:34AM

holy_calamity writes: The world's deepest water-filled sinkhole has finally been mapped — by a robotic submarine who's descendants may swim on one of Jupiter's moons. The last attempt to find the bottom yielded the SCUBA diving depth record and the death of a diving legend. The sub's SONAR found that the divers were about 10m from the floor, and that the sinkhole which is over 300m deep could be connected to even deeper caves.

Submission + - NYT Shines a Light on Firefox's Financial Sucess

Submitted by

NewsCloud

on Monday May 21, 2007 @03:03AM

NewsCloud writes: "Noam Cohen raises the issue of Mozilla's amazing financial success with Firefox's Google relationship.:

"Thanks to the Google agreement, the Mozilla Foundation went from revenue of nearly $6 million in 2004 to more than $52 million the next year [similar revenue is expected in 2006]...In 2005, the foundation created a subsidiary, the for-profit Mozilla Corporation,...mainly to deal with the tax and other issues related to the Google contract...By creating a corporation to run the Firefox project, Mozilla was committing to be less transparent. In part, that is because Google insists on the secrecy of "its arrangement and agreements," said board member Mitch Kapor.

The article compares this approach to Wikipedia's ongoing fundraisers and raises the issue of transparency in open source projects. i.e. should Firefox's 1,000 to 2,000 developers and 80,000 evangelists have full knowledge of how revenue is spent as well as the extent to which Google is able to influence strategy vs. other stakeholders."

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