Mozilla: $100 Million revenue
By Bala Shah

The Open Source software movement is one of the greatest idealistic collaborative efforts of the modern world.  Highly skilled techies volunteer their time and specialized skills to create systems and products like internet browser Mozilla Firefox.  Firefox is a great browser and best of all it is free. Its latest version has been downloaded by more than 125 Million users.

Firefox is hugely popular in India and neighboring Pakistan and Sri Lanka. In August, 2010, Techgoss had interviewed Mozilla in an attempt to quantify the contribution of Indians to the debugging of its software (Article republished below).

Mozilla has just published its annual financials and it has been a very good year

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Mozilla remains well positioned, both financially and organizationally, to advance our mission of building openness and participation into the Internet. Our financial situation is very similar to last year and our revenues continue to grow steadily.

For the calendar year 2009, Mozilla's consolidated reported revenues (Mozilla Foundation and all subsidiaries) were $104 million, up 34 percent from 2008 reported revenues of $78 million. Revenues include a 2009 reported loss of $104,000 in investments from the Foundation's long-term portfolio as a result of economic conditions and investment values at the end of 2009. This compares to our 2008 loss from investments of $7.8 million. Excluding investment gains and losses, revenues from operational activity were $104 million compared to $86 million in 2008, an annual increase of 22 percent. The majority of Mozilla revenue continues to be generated from the search functionality included in Mozilla's Firefox product from organizations such as Google, Yahoo, Yandex, Amazon, eBay and a handful of others.

Mozilla consolidated expenses for 2009 were $61 million, up approximately 26 percent from 2008 expenses of $49 million.

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(Techgoss had published the following on Aug 16, 2010)

Mozilla: subcontinent contribution
By Bala Shah

The Open Source software movement is one of the greatest idealistic collaborative efforts of the modern world.  Highly skilled techies volunteer their time and specialized skills to create systems and products like internet browser Mozilla Firefox.  Firefox is a great browser and best of all it is free. Its latest version has been downloaded by more than 125 Million users.

Firefox is hugely popular in India and neighboring Pakistan and Sri Lanka.

In one of the great ironies of the software development industry, Mozilla, whose open source software depends on voluntary effort to produce world class free browsers like Firefox, gives a bounty of up to $3000 if anyone can find serious bugs in their software.  Google followed Mozilla’s example by bumping up their bounty. Microsoft refuses to pay any such bounty.

PC World has published an article in August, 2010 in which it detailed how the open-source Mozilla project has been offering cash bounties for security bugs for six years now, but often bug finders simply turn down the cash reward.  If you needed any further proof about the idealism of the Mozilla movement,  it was in the PC World article which detailed how between 10 percent and 15 percent of the serious security bugs reported since Mozilla launched its bug bounty program have been provided free of charge. Many of the volunteers refused the $3000 bug bounty asking for it to be donated.  Some modestly ask Mozilla to keep the money but just send them a T-Shirt.

Techgoss was intrigued and contacted Mozilla about how many people from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka helped find such bugs, and did take or turn down the reward.  Mozilla’s Director of Special Projects, Chris Hofmann told Techgoss:

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We have many contributors from these regions who contribute code, testing, localization, marketing and more. There have not been any submissions of bugs for the bounties from those countries to-date.  We are definitely seeing an increase in participation from countries around the world and are looking forward to seeing our first contribution from this region.
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