Oops, we made a billion dollars

In a 2005 article on techworld.com there is an amusing quotation by someone described as “a Mozilla spokesman in Europe” who said “It’s not the case that someone is taking Firefox and making a lot of money. The revenue we have made is almost accidental.” I think the concept of open source software is very cool, and if people are making money from it, then that’s the type of capitalism I like – people making money by genuinely helping other people and not simply taking money from the person at the keyboard. But I’ve never heard of accidentally made revenue!

When one of my cool geek friends heard that I had to parade as a pseudo-geek and produce a blog on the open source movement he took pity on me and showed me the way to a most fascinating article. It discusses the rise in wealthy open source software companies.

This really got me thinking about the nature of open source, just because it’s free does not mean that it’s against the nature of the development stream to make money from the service. With an organisation like Mozilla, for example, one of their biggest sources of income comes from the inclusion of the Google search box in the browser toolbar. Because millions of people use Firefox, Google can boost their advertising revenue with those numbers and are willing to pay Mozilla to help them do that.

Chair of the Mozilla Corporation (which is the profit making arm of Mozilla), Mitchell Baker, in her blog post celebrating the 10 year anniversary of Mozilla affirmed the fact that Mozilla has no plans to go public and sell shares etc. And if they’re making billions of dollars a year already, then it makes perfect sense not to. Although, if I could get my hands on shares for a company that makes billions by accident, I’d sign up and hope they made me a billionaire too.