CoolCatBad Posted August 4, 2005 Share Posted August 4, 2005 Firefox and Thunderbird etc. will always be free. The orginization hasn't changed fundamentally, the (non-profit) Mozilla Foundation has only formed a subsidiary (commercial) Mozilla Corporation to deal with corporate users. The Corporation is wholly owned and directed by the Foundation. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Andrew Lyle Global Moderator Posted August 4, 2005 Global Moderator Share Posted August 4, 2005 This was their plan all along...1. Steal users away from IE with a "free" and "open" product 2. ??? 3. Profit! 586317443[/snapback] LOL nice number 2 hahah i don't mind. so they are changing from non-profit, to commercial use... meh, everyone wants to make money. this just means, firefox will never have a Final build. it will always be an on going project, and not beat out by competitors. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
vcv Posted August 4, 2005 Share Posted August 4, 2005 There could well be a backlash, depending on how things go. The Open Source community is very passionate, and they surely don't like it when people take the work of a dedicated group of volunteers and try to profit off of it. 586322115[/snapback] But they won't be profiting off the work of the volunteers. They'll be profiting from the service that they themselves provide. What is wrong with that? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mufdvr3669 Posted August 4, 2005 Share Posted August 4, 2005 Doesn't really change the focus of the company with the change from Not for Profit to for profit. Just allows them to do different things. Heck, you can be CEO on a not for profit company and make millions of dollars a year and pay anyone whatever you want. Doesn't make a not for profit company any more noble. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fred Derf Veteran Posted August 4, 2005 Veteran Share Posted August 4, 2005 This was also on the Front Page: https://www.neowin.net/comments.php?id=29774&category=main [Thread Title Edited] Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ambience Posted August 4, 2005 Share Posted August 4, 2005 As long as the ethic to create a free open-source browser which everybody could use remains at the core of the Mozilla Foundation, we shouldn't have anything to worry about. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
exobot Posted August 4, 2005 Share Posted August 4, 2005 READ THIS: http://www.mozilla.org/reorganization/ Mozilla have not changed to a for-profit corporation, they have started up a new wholly owned taxable subsidiary: the Mozilla Corporation. The Mozilla Foundation and The Mozilla Corporation are two different things. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ThePast Posted August 4, 2005 Share Posted August 4, 2005 To think (as many did and still do) that the development of Firefox ever was a altruistic project is beyond naive. Naturally from day one the motive was to make money. I doubt that they will ever charge for Firefox, but what they (Time Warner/AOL/Netscape/Mozilla) understood some time ago was that mobile browsers is a huge money maker. So Firefox came into being with the help of volunteers and donors, how much of Firefox that's inside Minimo I don't know but I would be surprised if lot of the volunteer work has/will be put into Mozillas Commercial mobile browser. I wonder what it feels like having put in hours and hours of voluntary work into Firefox just to see ones efforts being used to make profit on a commercial product. Firefox and the AOL connection: "It has been a long-standing objective of the Mozilla team to create an independent organization so we can continue to lead and innovate," said Mitchell Baker, Chief Lizard Wrangler at mozilla.org, who will become President of The Mozilla Foundation.? "We're grateful for the past and ongoing support of America Online, and we look forward to continuing to work with AOL over coming years.? Mozilla was developed in an open source environment and built by harnessing the creative power of thousands of programmers on the Internet.? Going forward, we will continue to partner with developers and industry leaders to keep content on the Web open." Source Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
halflife28 Posted August 5, 2005 Share Posted August 5, 2005 Firefox will stay alive and free. I think it would violate the MPL license don't you think. There will be alot of mad code contributors. Mozilla will probably be looking at alot of lawsuits if they start selling other people's code away. Just my 2 cents. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+M2Ys4U Subscriber¹ Posted August 5, 2005 Subscriber¹ Share Posted August 5, 2005 I wonder what it feels like having put in hours and hours of voluntary work into Firefox just to see ones efforts being used to make profit on a commercial product.586324130[/snapback] For everyone who's scared they'll loose Fx, use one of these: (That's a fork, and I'm suggesting you fork the codebase and go create your own distro) That being said, companies like Red Hat and Novell make quite a bit of money out of Linux, but look how many people are willing to chip in to help Linux grow. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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