The state of Mozilla

For those who have not yet seen it, the "Beyond Sustainability" report by Mozilla CEO Mitchell Baker is worth a read. This document provides an overview of the state of the Mozilla project from a few different points of view. Some of the highlights are:

• Mozilla brought in $66.8 million in 2006, while spending less than $20 million. As a result, Mozilla is putting aside some nice piles of cash; total assets at the end of 2006 were just over $74 million.

• Expenditures were mostly on software development ($12 million), but Mozilla also spent almost $5 million on sales and marketing. $300,000 was donated to various community efforts, a number which is expected to grow significantly in 2007.

• Interest in the software remains strong: toward the end of 2006 Mozilla was serving 600,000 Firefox downloads - every day.

• The development community appears to be growing, with "over 1000" people contributing code to Firefox 2. Only 50 of those people are employed by Mozilla. The Mozilla community may not yet be up to the size of the Linux kernel, but it is clearly one of the largest and most active development communities out there.

There are a number of interesting things to ponder in this announcement. Many of them tie back to one core point: 85% of Mozilla's 2006 revenue came from Google. Of the rest, a significant amount was interest earned on Mozilla's money stash. So Google must clearly have a high degree of influence over what goes on at Mozilla Corp. Even if Google sticks to its "don't be evil" mantra, questions will be asked.

A classic example would be the recent decision to push the Thunderbird mail client out of the nest to fend for itself. It does not take too much imagination to see a conflict of interest between promotion of Thunderbird and Google's Gmail service. It would not be surprising if Google did not want its money going to pay for the development of a project which could be seen as competing with its own offerings. The claim is that Google has nothing to do with the decision to spin off Thunderbird, and it could well be true. But there will always be cause to wonder - though the recent addition of IMAP service to Gmail can only serve to lessen any conflict of interest with Thunderbird.

Mitchell's posting talks about the influence Mozilla has had in the restoration of a standards-based Internet. That can only be true; the net (and the world wide web in particular) was clearly going in a proprietary direction before Firefox brought competition back to the browser arena. Your editor, who once relied heavily on the user agent switcher extension, now cannot remember when its use was last required. In this regard, Mozilla has clearly been a beneficial force for the free software community, and for the net as a whole.

That result, perhaps, has been the biggest outcome that Google will have sought from its financing of Mozilla. Google depends on an open net for its business.

The posting also makes this claim:

While getting free software onto all of those Windows desktops must be a good thing, it is not clear how many of them are really learning anything about free software in the process. Meanwhile, there is a steady stream of grumbling about how Mozilla seems to have forgotten Linux in its drive to colonize Windows desktops. Integration with Linux distributions is not always as good as one would like, Mozilla's security update and support policies are not distributor-friendly, the trademark policy is obnoxious, and so on. These issues would not appear to have kept distributors from shipping Firefox or users from running it, though.

One potential issue, as Don Marti pointed out, is that this growing pile of money cannot fail to attract the attention of patent trolls. A body of software as large and complex as Firefox must inevitably violate no end of software patents given the ease with which those patents are obtained in the U.S. There is probably trouble ahead in this regard, though that remains true for much of the commercial free software community in general.

One other future concern is what happens when the current contract with Google expires - next year. Perhaps it will simply be extended and business as normal will continue. Or perhaps Google will conclude that the goal of re-opening the web has succeeded, that Firefox users are highly likely to use Google's services anyway, and that there is no great need to send as much money in that direction. A project which spends over $2 million in administrative overhead cannot handle the loss of a large part of its funding without significant changes.

What a lot of this comes down to is one single subject which was not addressed in this report: if Mozilla is to continue to grow, be sustainable, and be independent in the future, it needs to diversify its income stream. Any business (and Mozilla Corp. is certainly a business) which is dependent on a single customer is in a risky position. Your editor is in no position to say how that diversification should be done - that's Ms. Baker's job. But it is easy to say that the effort which has so spectacularly driven the web toward open standards and free software would be in a better position to drive the next big set of changes if it stood on a wider base.

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TWELVE MILLION DOLLARS on development?  Are they serious?  How many people do they have?
Expenditures for an open source project are pretty much just salary, no?

Based on the article, they have 50 developers who commit to mozilla.

Perhaps there are a bunch of developers who develop other things?
Or perhaps 50 very well paid developers? I was curious about these numbers too.

Don't forget it's not just salaries, there are hardware costs to support software development;
training; potentially building costs; administration of those employees; tax etc.

About 6 years ago, the figure at a large IT company was an expectation that an *average*
employee cost $150,000 a year. Software development would be higher than that average due to
the higher salaries, and it's 6 years later.

$240,000 a year to have a well-paid (but not stupidly paid) developer and all the associated
costs doesn't sound that far-fetched to me.

I also wonder why it is that most other organisations still prefer to jump 
on the WebKit bandwagon - I mean, with all the money they earn, they could 
write 2 html engines, right?

No this is a corporation and must cover various items:

1) Salary
2) Taxes (there is cash that must be withheld and covered outside of that 'taken' from
salaries)
3) Health Insurance which for a company can be 30% of salary depending on state/region/etc
4) Retirement which for a company can be 20% of salary counting various fees and staff.
5) Outside training/ conferences/ etc etc
6) Expenditures on computers, servers, electricity, network etc. [If developers work from home
that might be billable to the company.]
7) Expenditures on physical layout for HR, Accounting and other staff that have to deal with
all the paperwork that is required for state, federal and international taxes (every state
that a developer lives in requires different forms and different filings).
8) Janitor contracts etc

money spent on development isn't just the developers, it can also include QA and documentation
staff.

Just a note that the typo `pipe dread' is a lovely coinage (`pipemare' is more descriptive but
too opaque).

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/10/free-imap-for-gmai...

So it's not like Thunderbird is a competitor any more than any other IMAP client.

It's still a competitor to the non-IMAP using Gmailers... which would be the vast majority of
them I would assume.

Seeing the kind of money they're making, I'm amazed that they let Thunderbird go.  In the
short-term, at least, T-bird wasn't going to sink the ship. 

Money is not the only limiting resource in software development.  It's not even a particularly
important one, esp. here.

My impression from occasional reading of sundry Mozilla-er's blogs is that they are girding up
for more knock-down battles over the future of the web -- their current market share is both
precarious and relatively small, the Suns/Adobes/Microsofts of the world are drooling at the
possibility of co-opting the web, and Mozilla is trying to fight this battle this while
dragging along an insanely unwieldy codebase.  They have cash, cleverness, and sometimes
wisdom, so I think they have a chance -- but not without focus.

Attention is perhaps *the* most important resource in software development (esp. in FOSS), and
Thunderbird is a distraction from their chosen core mission.  That means splitting up is
better for them and better for Thunderbird.

We didn't "let Thunderbird go". It's just a separate company under the Mozilla Foundation now.

> Your editor, who once relied heavily on the user agent switcher extension,
> now cannot remember when its use was last required.

You obviously don't do your taxes online at TurboTax.com... ;-/  Sadly, every year (for about
the past 10), I've had to use the UA switcher to pretend to be on Windoze, because their
stupidly pointless checking refused to let me proceed otherwise...  Thankfully, in recent
years, I don't have to pretend to be using IE, at least; just Firefox on Windoze...  It's
still stupid...  Everything on the site works flawlessly with Firefox on Linux, so the check
amounts to nothing more than excluding potential customers for no reason at all...  (Yeah, I
know, I shouldn't bother to be a customer if treated like that, but originally when I started
they were about the only option for doing online tax filing from Linux (even if some trickery
is required to do it), and now I'm just too hooked to change now, since I'd really miss the
ability to import last year's data into appropriate spots and such...)

> if Mozilla is to continue to grow, be sustainable, and be independent in
> the future, it needs to diversify its income stream.

Or, just get bought up outright by Google, it sounds like... ;-)

Wal-Mart does it a lot. 

The condition where one of your customers is a big enough percentage of your income that the
tail wags the dog is called "monopsony", the opposite of monopoly.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopsony