Mozilla Looks Good, As Long As Google Funnels the Money
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The financial statements published by the Mozilla Foundation show how much it depends on Google for its survival. While that is well and good, it becomes apparent that there is/was no reason to abandon Thunderbird, or move it to another system of development and support.
According to the report on Ars Technica, Mozilla is not only getting lots of money from Google, it sees itself as a philanthropic institution as well. Several good sized chunks of the money gotten from Google are being routed to other open source projects.
from the Ars article
Mozilla also uses its resources to provide grants to other organizations. Approximately $300,000 was contributed to various organizations by Mozilla in 2006, and much more is being doled out in 2007—including grants to the Participatory Culture Foundation, which makes the Miro video player.
This is certainly nice, but one wonders what could be accomplished with that money used for the Thunderbird project, or SeaMonkey, or even Firefox.
Now I’m sure that many will think I’m picking on the darling of the free software community, but I don’t see that the millions of dollars spent are showing up as incredible gains in the products.
Opera is not being propped up by Google, and yet it manages to compete quite nicely, and is more standards compliant than Firefox. I would think that a number one priority of Mozilla would be standards compliance. Opera moves along, manages to be faster than Firefox, more compliant with standards, and yet gets fewer users because of the ability to configure the program with extensions. The last time I looked, those extensions were being written by unpaid third parties, for the love of the project.
So the question becomes, for me anyway, just what is Google getting for its money? Is Mozilla just a money sink for Google? Just another ‘up yours’ to Microsoft? When do we begin to see the effect of millions of dollars on the project?
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[tags] Mozilla, Google, Ars Technica, Microsoft [/tags]
3 Comments
verdican
October 24th, 2007
at 4:40pm
It all depends on overall popularity in my opinion. When a peace of software is so ‘good’ that everyone knows about it; it’s much more likely that major companies are going to buy it. Now, I don’t know the real reasons Google bought Mozilla, but it seems to me that if Google didn’t buy it, Microsoft would. These giant corporations are always trying to fight with each other trying to be at the ‘top of the food chain’.
The thing with Opera is that not as many people know about it. You have to understand that there are a lot of people in the world who aren’t up to date with software. Those who are elderly or adults who aren’t really interested in software don’t really know about Opera. They probably wouldn’t even know about Firefox if people hadn’t talked about it all the time. For those people who have heard of Opera; many of them don’t really want to change. They think that Firefox is a great browser and that they don’t need to change to Opera, that is, until it’s all over the news that Opera is indeed better then Firefox. Of course, once that happens, there will be large companies trying to buy it. You just wait and see. If Opera continues to develop the way it’s developing right now; I can guarantee that a company is going to buy it before the end of 2010.
Who knows. Maybe the money Google has given to Mozilla will end up creating a new application that will revolutionize internet browsing. Maybe the money is just going to make Firefox look a lot cooler then it does now. Maybe the money is being used to by alcohol for the employees. We’ll just have to wait as see now won’t we?
the oracle
October 24th, 2007
at 4:46pm
verdican, Google hasn’t bought Mozilla outright, but they may as well have.
I don’t object to the connection, I simply think more progress should be coming from all that money, and Thunderbird shouldn’t be treated like a redheaded stepchild.
BTW, I am using the first beta of Kestrel.(Opera 9.50) It’s smokin’ fast, and has not hiccup’ed or crashed like the first alphas, but still redraws pages like nothing I’ve seen in a while.
verdican
October 24th, 2007
at 5:33pm
I agree. I think that because Firefox has funds, it really should be ‘better’ then Opera. However, as I stated before; a lot of it depends on how the community acts to Opera/Firefox. People are just more familiar with Firefox and unless they are proved wrong otherwise; they will continue to use Firefox over Opera. Not everyone knows how to make the decision of using Opera over Firefox. They think that Firefox is a great browser, so why should they convert to Opera?