Mozilla's nonprofit status key to its growth
In May, every major browser--Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera--gained market share against Microsoft's Internet Explorer, which dropped nearly 1 percentage point, according to data from Net Applications. No other browser, however, has taken as big a share as Mozilla's Firefox browser, which now claims 22.51 percent of the global browser market, and tops 48 percent in Europe.
The secret to Mozilla Firefox's success? Money, according to Chairman Mitchell Baker at last week's D7: All Things Digital Conference. Or, rather, the way Mozilla makes it, as the conference report suggests:
Mozilla can't be successful with a for-profit model. "We are only successful because of our current status."
There are many ways to read this, but I'd suggest the most accurate reading is, "We depend upon community and that community is motivated to contribute to us because we're a 'public benefit organization dedicated not to making money but to improving the way people everywhere experience the Internet.'"
This is similar to why the Linux Foundation and Eclipse Foundation work so well, and why I've suggested that the foundation model may be an ideal way to build open source. This model is critical to Firefox's past success and future ambition, as Baker implies.
Mozilla Firefox is arguably becoming the world's dominant Web platform, and some suggest it can even compete with such services as Facebook. Application vendors can't really afford to spread resources across multiple Web platforms, so it's critical that Mozilla continues to fend off competitors like an increasingly community-rich Google Chrome browser with optimal code and corporate policies that entice community.
In reality, I doubt there's much separation between Mozilla, the corporation, and Mozilla, the foundation, but there is a world of difference between how Mozilla presents itself to the open-source development community and the most community-friendly of open-source companies, like Red Hat. Mozilla Corporation is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation, and money always seems to take second place to community with Mozilla.
This makes Mozilla projects like Firefox a safe place for an open-source community to congregate, contribute, and win. For this reason, Microsoft and Google are going to struggle to compete with Firefox, because both have too much vested, corporate interest in steering the Web to their own parochial interests, whereas Mozilla can exist solely to make Firefox better for the world.
It's hard to compete with good intentions, well-protected by good corporate structure.
Correction @ 1:09 PDT: It was rightly pointed out in the comments that Firefox's market share in Europe is currently 31 percent, not 48 percent, as I reported. My apologies.
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Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
Have these projects benefited from the same business model? No, they are still trying to eek out whatever itty bitty market share that exist. So whatever works for Mozilla does not necessarily work for everywhere in Open Source. I suspect as Chrome begins to claim market share against both IE and Mozilla, you are gonna see some Fireworks! Don't be surprised if you see Bing as default search engine in Firefox 2 years from now.
To Mr. Dee. Matt is not saying the foundation model is good for ALL open source. He is saying that it has benefits for Mozilla, and is probably a good model to look at for many open source development systems. It of course won't work for everything. In terms of the Google search thing, let's not kid ourselves. Google was big when Firefox made that agreement, but they were made larger by the agreement. Google wouldn't have nearly the success they have now if Firefox weren't using them as the default search engine, and if that weren't true they wouldn't have agreed to pay Mozilla all that money. Chrome is about creating a platform that furthers their other projects. The fact that is inherently is in competition with Mozilla is a problem, but browser market isn't Google's goal. It might be a necessary step to their goal, and that will cause sparks, but Google will think twice before giving up that default search status. I have worked in not-for profits, and you need a way to make revenue to continue operating, the search deal is just that, and can be changed if necessary. Mozilla's large bank account and savings patters are probably in place because they know things can change at a moments notice. They are more ready for it than people give them credit for.
to TotallyMadeUpName. Static market share numbers like you show here are a moment in time. Without knowing the trends they are moving in they are somewhat meaningless. When you look at those numbers in relation to how many months in a row IE has lost ground and Firefox has gained ground the 48 to 31 isn't nearly as impressive.
Finally to Matt. While I obviously disagree with the above arguments I do also have to point out certain flaws in the foundation model. While being pushed by vaguely related business needs can cause less than ideal ends for the final user, being motivated to make sales does push forward development. Firefox had become a completely unacceptable memory hog, far beyond the realms of reasonable inefficiencies. The only way they got away with it was having IE as the other only option. Better than IE doesn't take much, and Opera while nice had some issues. Then Chrome came along and poof Firefox got into the efficient code game again. Having a little of all columns makes for better products overall, and while your comment about people not being able to afford to deploy across platforms has more than a kernel of truth, the fact that people can't afford browser mono culture and the problems it breeds rings awfully true as well. The fact that even in the Firefox/IE duopoly the kinds of flaws that Firefox 2.0 harbored still reared their ugly head and could only be vanquished by a third competitor says a lot.
Rather than being a good way to operate Open Source projects, this may be the only way. Red Hat is sitting atop a pyramid of non-profit projects, with Fedora at the top and all of the various projects for the components of Fedora below that. And they are the only Open Source company that has shown long-term viability so far.
I continue to believe that the Profit-Center Open Source model as practiced by Alfresco et al tends to diverge from Open Source far enough to lose the key advantages of Open Source over the long term. This is shown today in the difficulty that Profit-Center Open Source projects have in getting customers to be software contributors, and their general lack of engagement with large non-customer software contributor communities, who favor projects like Druipal which are less bound to whatever Profit-Center Open Source companies exist around them. Eventually the Profit-Center Open Source companies will end up operating as proprietary software companies, or folding their tents.
I think the real key to business success is engaging both non-customer contributors and customers - which are two very different communities. MySQL was very successful at this before Sun.
- by BrucePerens June 2, 2009 2:12 PM PDT
- Well, I think that most of the folks in the software contributor communities are employed in a cost-center capacity (IT department, etc.) and are not garage hobbyists. They are the folks who have decided to choose a project with an active developer community composed of other cost-center employees. Drupal certainly qualifies as one. I don't see so far that Alfresco wishes to be one. It's not clear how you would build a bridge to that community under your present model.
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(10 Comments)As I am launching a project-based company (for a presently unannounced project) this is on my mind. MySQL got the relationship with the contributor community right, and I'd like to emulate that.