The Mozilla Foundation is an independent, nonprofit organization.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Of course, it's hard to support full-time programmers, so we do get funds from a set of companies that are interested in the health of the Mozilla project and so are willing to support the people working for the Foundation as well.
The Mozilla project is big in terms of lines of code and complexity.
I tell people that the history of Mozilla and Firefox is so one of a kind that it should not be used - ever - as an example of what's possible.
Mozilla has one foot in the Valley, Silicon Valley product technology, and partly one foot in the social enterprise space.
Open source production has shown us that world-class software, like Linux and Mozilla, can be created with neither the bureaucratic structure of the firm nor the incentives of the marketplace as we've known them.
The voice I've chosen to turn to is that of NPR. With a reputation for some of the finest journalism in the country, the nonprofit organization is renowned for its unbiased stance - to the point that it's been accused of being both conservative and liberal.
Facebook, Google, Apple, Yahoo - there's a common theme. None of these companies ever sold. By staying independent, they were able to build a great company.
Huge open source organizations like Red Hat and Mozilla manage the collaboration of hundreds of people who don't know one another and have spent no time hanging around the water cooler.
I got bitten by the free software bug in February of 1998 around the time of the Mozilla announcement.
There's no Peter York Foundation, and you're no one without one.