The Mozilla Corporation is a for profit company completely owned by the nonprofit the Mozilla Foundation. Originally there was just the nonprofit, but that caused tax issues with the money generated from the search deal, and after paying a few million to the IRS they switched to the current setup.
I don't think it's fair to claim the nonprofit side only exists to "claim legitimacy." All of their revenue goes back into the corporation or the foundation.
This a very common arrangement used by charities to enable a commercial process that funds the charity. For example, high street charity shops may be part of the commercial sub-entity so that their accounts are processed like a normal company, but 100% of their profits become donations to fund the parent charity's activities, called the charitable purpose(s).
If they didn't separate into a parent charity with a commercial sub-entity, all of the activities of the sub-entity would be subject to charity auditing, accounting and purpose rules, which in practice would make it difficult to run a shop competitively, or alternatively the parent could not have charity status and the shop profit would be subject to tax instead of all being directed to the audited, charitable purpose(s).
In Mozilla's case, if it was a tax-exempt non-profit without a commercial sub-entity giving 100% of profits to its parent, it would not be able to take Google funding as a trade in exchange for making Google the default search engine without losing its tax-exempt status, and it might not be able to pay its software engineers a competitive market rate, even if it needs to do that to compete. It would be able to take donations (not as a trade in exchange for something, just as a donation), but that wouldn't be enough to develop a competitive browser.
> In Mozilla's case, if it was a tax-exempt non-profit without a commercial sub-entity giving 100% of profits to its parent, it would not be able to take Google funding as a trade in exchange for making Google the default search engine without losing its tax-exempt status, and it might not be able to pay its software engineers a competitive market rate, even if it needs to do that to compete.
That doesn't sound like a bad thing. Googles funding is not a boon but a shackle that holds FF back. Same for developers that expect SV market rates - those will be developers that are used to user-hostile software developement practiced in other SV companies.
> It would be able to take donations (not as a trade in exchange for something, just as a donation), but that wouldn't be enough to develop a competitive browser.
How do you know? Individual donations are also far from the only possible way to fund a real charity.
I don't think it's fair to claim the nonprofit side only exists to "claim legitimacy." All of their revenue goes back into the corporation or the foundation.