Firefox

Interesting questions about Mozilla financing.

There is nothing wrong or immoral about making money. The economic development of the planet including the poorest members of society depends on everyone being able to generate an income. This is nicely articulated by Jeffrey Sachs in his book “The End of Poverty”. If there’s nothing inherently wrong with making money and we all, even the staff of the Mozilla Foundation, need to do it in order to put food on the table then why is Mitchell so coy about where the money comes from? Maybe the problem is that once you start digging beneath the surface a little bit it turns out that the free software movement is just as dependant on “filthy lucre” as the rest of us. It may in fact be more dependant than commercial software companies because it has no other independant source of income. The reality is that the Mozilla Foundation is nicely capitalized and funded in various ways by some very large, very profitable commercial companies and a few rich donors. I could not seem to find a list of these benefactors on the Mozilla Foundation site; again I'm puzzled by the apprent lack of transparency. Why does the core principle of openness appear not to extend to how the Foundation is financed?

Related Products: Visit our store

Read more from this blogger: A little light opera...