Date: 08/04/05 (Mozilla)    Keywords: software, browser, html, web, google

Hi Folks:

Mozilla was born as a grass-roots organization to design a product using the brainpower by thousands of users around the globe. It was not organized as a profit-oriented organization. Ever since its appearance in the spotlight at the end of last year, its star product Firefox, has enjoyed a tremendous acceptance in the browser community. Every month, Firefox has gradually gaining ground at the browser behemoth Internet Explorer. To date, the free software has been downloaded more than 75 million times and its market share is estimated to be approaching 10 percent.

In an effort to attend a new wave of users and its recent relationship with Google, Mozilla has organized a subsidiary under the name of Mozilla Corp. Mozilla Corp. will work mainly on developing and delivering free software products such as the Firefox browser and Thunderbird e-mail program. The foundation will manage projects, set policies and organize relationships among developers.

The new business will be based in Mountain View, as is the foundation. It is expected to have about 30 employees, compared with three or four at the foundation, Baker said. Its software will remain free.

Frank Hecker, director of policy for the Mozilla Foundation, said the for-profit arm will give the project more options. Already, Google Inc. (GOOG) pays Mozilla an unspecified amount to ship Firefox with a version of Google's search engine as the default home page.

Is something sniffing in the air? Is Mozilla preparing itself to enter the commercial field based on its success with Firefox? Who knows? Let's keep our radars active.

For more information, you can click on the following web-link:

http://apnews.myway.com//article/20050803/D8BOF6M00.html

Cheers,

Omar.-

Source: http://www.livejournal.com/community/mozilla/302541.html