Mozilla sets up corporate subsidiary

By Steve Malone

Posted on 3 Aug 2005 at 09:51

The Mozilla Foundation, the organisation behind the Firefox browser, is to set up a corporate subsidiary to manage the increasing business demands of its projects. By creating the Mozilla Corporation, the Foundations believes, it will be able to widen the appeal of Firefox and other free software projects such as the Thunderbird email client under development.

The Mozilla Corporation emphasises that its software will remain free.

The new Corporation will have around 30 staff based in California, compared to the four of the existing Foundation. It will be headed by Mitchell Baker who becomes the President of the Corporation.

Speaking to Associated Press, Baker said 'The Mozilla Corp. is not a typical commercial entity. Rather it is dedicated to the public benefit goal at the heart of the Mozilla project, which is to keep the Internet open and available to everyone.'

Although the formation of a legal corporation is unusual in open-source circles, where often projects are created by ad hoc groups of programmers, it is not unique. Several years ago the developers of the highly successful Apache web server set up the Apache Foundation.

Baker admits that the Mozilla Corporation has taken its cue from the Apache Foundation, saying that `With this reorganization, the Mozilla Foundation will look much more like the Apache Foundation than it currently does'.

The Firefox browser that was launched officially at the end of last year, was developed as an alternative to the ubiquitous Microsoft Internet Explorer web browser. Since the official 1.0 version appeared last November, the Foundation claims that over 75 million downloads have taken place and has achieved a market share of over 10 per cent.

Microsoft has also noticed the success of the browser. Concerned by the inroads Firefox has made to its market share, it has brought forward its own Internet Explorer 7.0 release to this year. Originally the next Microsoft browser was not due until the release of Windows Vista in 2006.