Mozilla released its financial statement for 2012, and in it revealed that once again, search engine partnership revenue was Mozillas biggest source of income -- and not just any search engine, but Google in particular. Its never been a huge secret that the creator of the Firefox browser relies on royalties provided by search engines, generated by people who search the Web through Firefox. But the exact percentage may come as a shock: 97.9 percent of Mozillas revenue came courtesy of its deals with search engines. Its safe to assume the biggest percentage of that revenue comes from Google, especially in light of a statement in Mozillas financing FAQ about its partnership with the search giant. Open source software companies generally have few options when it comes to making money from their products. For higher-end software like Red Hat Enterprise Linux or EnterpriseDBs editions of PostgreSQL, the most common approach is to sell support or to provide for-pay editions of the product that specifically target enterprises. Since Firefox doesnt lend itself to such actions, monetizing searches made through Firefox makes sense. But several things about Mozillas relationship with Google make this a troubling proposition. One is Mozillas stance on the open Web thats increasingly at odds with the way Google has approached the subject. Its going to get harder for Mozilla to continue justifying a partnership with a company with whom it disagrees so much -- especially if Mozilla comes under increasing pressure from its open source confederates to make a break from Google. Then again, its highly ironic that the very revenue Mozilla makes from Google is being used to put it that much more back in its place.
Posted on: Wed, 27 Nov 2013 14:58:18 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015