I'm all for them donating money for FOSS projects, but I had the impression that Mozilla doesn't make the most amount of money, being a non-profit and all. Can someone who knows more comment on this?
In the United States, a non-profit does not earn money for owners or investors. NP's do make money via donations and services provided. While many NP's make very little money or mostly distribute donated funds, other NP's can make large amounts of money. Money retained in excess of expenses, must be used to further a NP's mission.
A NP Hospital uses its excess funds to provide free services to those who cannot afford healthcare and does community outreach and eduction.
Mozilla uses its money to supports other OSS projects, advocates for OSS.
(This is a very simple explanation with many details of how NP's operate ignored, or the various legal types of NP's.)
But the profits in a co-op still go to the owners, hence it's not a NP. I'm sure a NP could be structured like a co-op though, where workers get input into decision making.
I'm on the board for a co-op (housing co-op, not worker co-op) that's incorporated as a non-profit. I know we've talked about how we could have incorporated as a cooperative instead, and I think we could have been a cooperative non-profit....we just weren't.
Co-op is about ownership (and the seven principles, but legally I think chiefly about ownership), whereas I don't think non-profit status is, for the most part.
They could have hired more developers, returned the money to doners, increase the salary of their employees and what not. The only thing they can not do is give the money as dividend to the owners the way for-profit companies do all the time.
Mitchell Baker has spoken many times publicly about why she chose the NPO structure for Mozilla. It was due to the Browser Wars of the 90s (when she was counsel at Netscape) and not wanting to go through that again.
Mozilla has a revenue stream of hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Most of it comes from partnerships with the search engines. Non-profit just means that making money is not their primary goal but it is one the important goals in order to make them self sufficient and enable them to work towards their true goals.
This is something that has bewildered me -- Where does all that money go!?
I understand it is not cheap to hire developers but it just seems really weird that the Mozilla foundation has had over a billion dollars flow through it and all they have to show for it is a web browser (and other software).
You might be right. According to openhub Firefox had 1121 contributors last year. Compared to that Chromium had 1919 contributors. Not all of them work for Mozilla and Google respectively and not all employees commit to the code base...
They just seem to be not very good at it, because from 40 -> 50 - memory usage is much worse than previous versions (Yes, I know switching to the MP model has to do with it, but if your architectural changes hurt usability for security I consider that quite poor), the developer tools are still trash, and performance is still worse than chrome.
There's a big misunderstanding out in the world about what exactly "Mozilla" is. The Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit. They are an advocacy group for open internet standards, essentially. They do not do any of the software development on Mozilla projects. That would be the Mozilla Corporation, which is wholly owned by the Foundation. The Corporation is decidedly not a non-profit.
If the only restrictions on nonprofits are what profits are returned to the owners, if The company is wholly owned by a non-profit what can it do that it couldn't if it wasn't itself a non-profit?
IANAL, and I'm hazy on the details, but I think this lets the for-profit one hold on to more money (but also be taxed more?). There still aren't any shareholders (unless you count the Foundation as one).
Basically, there are limits to what a non profit can do and still be a non profit (keeping a larger cash reserve is one of them iirc) Legally keeping the revenue generating business seperate (and having that revenue feed back to the nonprofit) as a for-profit, taxed organization, is useful.
It seems to be a common pattern. Googling "501(c)(3) for profit subsidiary" gives a bunch of links explaining the reasons why many choose to do this.
That's literally why the Corporation exists. It's a sham to be able to do whatever they want and still maintain the perception that Mozilla is a non-profit.
