[Commons-Law] Mozilla revenue speculation erupts

[Hasit seth]

Hi Jeebesh,

    I have no problems with the body corporate structure of an
oragnization. I mean you can run a charity as a Sec.25-A(?) company in
India (haven't read company law in a long time). Same in the US too.
Nope, I have no "anger" against Mozilla! There is no choice in hating
since bloated codebase for both IE and Mozilla sucks!

    My point is different. The news item shows a contradiction between
the whole idea of open source being a different kind of model of
software development than the regular business of software. Open
source is a model that shuns business nature of software creation but
works on a community model powered by a rhetoric of freedom, etc.
Mozilla activities show that: (1) good software needs support - they
have 40 paid people to do that (2) you cannot hire people without
paying them, so where does the money come from? In case of Mozilla the
money is coming from Google's pay-per-click. And it is not peanut
money, but significant money. Note that this is just a cloning effort,
not a risk taking venture where a new kind of idea is being tried out.
Imagine where the money will come from when an untested concept is
being rolled out. So much of risk captial flowed into dot-com era, of
which we are seeing fruits now (google's advertising based free
service validates all that failed dot-com boom stood for). All this
just shows that this whole community stuff is a mild utopia, since it
shuns the fact that this is regular economic activity - creating,
updating and marketing software. Then why have a hobby horse of doing
something spectacular about freedom and software being something like
air and water that is fundamental to human exisitence, etc, etc.

    I am not blind to the fact that several open source projects are
running on pure community participation. That is great, I love the
idea of enthusiasts pooling together to clone an existing idea.  But
the idea has its limits and social movement people seem to get carried
away as usual whenever they see something "revolutionary". Why is
money and manpower needed to maintain Mozilla/Firefox when community
is all you need? We are not talking about nominal charge to distribute
a CD, but a pay-per-click revenue generated quitely through directing
users to google. This is just a case in point. Dual distributions
under an "open source license" and a neat regular license is another
example where the reality of business nature of software sets in.

Regards,
Hasit

>
> Message: 2
> Date: Sat, 11 Mar 2006 14:55:38 +0100
> From: <jeebesh at sarai.net>
> Subject: Re: [Commons-Law] Mozilla revenue speculation erupts
> To: <commons-law at sarai.net>
> Message-ID: <88cb6d1d7a47d2017085bdcad3f9b240 at sarai.net>
>
> Hi Hasit,
>
> Failed to get your point and may i say anger at Mozilla et al. As far as i
> know having a Corp and Foundation is a very ordinary practice in US. What
> is puritanical about it. On the contrary this is the standard
> organizational convention - profits and philanthropy -  in US. And frankly
> Mozilla's revenue is very negligible in contemporary corporate standard to
> even merit serious financial analysis.
>
> best
> jeebesh
>