Sun and corporate open source

Sun and corporate open source

Posted May 3, 2008 18:52 UTC (Sat) by KaiRo (subscriber, #1987)
Parent article: Sun and corporate open source

It's hard to go by as a Mozilla insider and not comment on your point of

Making any changes to Firefox which could threaten Mozilla Corporation's revenue stream from Google.

So here it is:

The big difference here is that Sun is, of course, a company driven by making the most possible profit for its shareholders (who want to see that profit in money), so (it thinks) it needs to keep control of things to ensure this goal can still be reached (and this goal is of course not what drives an open source community).

The Mozilla Corporation on the other hand has only one shareholder, it is a 100% subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation, so it needs to make the kind of profit the Foundation wants. Now that Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit, mission-driven organization. It does not want the most possible money from the Corporation, it wants to see its mission succeed. That mission is the Mozilla Manifesto, which was chosen in a community process with the help of lots of "external developers", i.e. non_mozilla-employees, to extend and better describe the meaning of the early mission statement, which was to preserve choice and innovation on the Internet.

Now, if any proposal comes along that would play out the revenue stream that the Mozilla Corporation gets through e.g. Google against the Mozilla Foundation mission, i.e. the Mozilla Manifesto, you can bet that even if the first choice would be trying to fit both goals, in the end the Manifesto would win. That's why you can, if you want, delete every usage of the Google search by your Firefox installation, and the Mozilla employees even will help you as part of their job if you find there's some place where this isn't possible.

Mozilla puts the value of the mission, which is basically a better and continuously really open Internet, above the value of money. It's just a good thing that there is obviously a way to earn money by following the mission, which in turn can be used for spreading the mission even more. And this is very compatible with an open source community.

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