Open Source Capitalism

Another thing I loved about Jonathan Schwartz’s session was his gentle needling of Mitchell Baker over Mozilla’s business model. She seemed extremely sheepish about the fact that they have set up a for-profit subsidiary and went to great lengths to explain that they aren’t really succumbing to the profit motive. They just want “a vehicle to extract the value inherent in the Firefox brand.” Or something like that.

Jonathan made the point that there is no shame or contradiction in open source companies trying to make money. After all, they need to keep the lights on. The paradox inherent in Mozilla’s current funding structure was ably illustrated by interviewer Tim O’Reilly’s query about the many Firefox developers employed by Google. He asked whether this presented a problem to the extent that Google is famously secretive about its inner workings. Are the developers able to speak freely about their technical requirements with their colleagues who aren’t at Google? Mitchell’s response was solid enough: if an external organization wants changes to the Mozilla core, they have to be open about their plans and motivations. If not, they can always build an extension. But wouldn’t it all be simpler if they could be paid directly by the people whose product they’re building?

Update: Based on the last couple of sentences of my original post, I probably deserve some kind of prize for most unclear use of pronouns in a single paragraph. The antecedent of “they” changes fast and furiously, so try to keep up. In retrospect the last sentence should have read something like “…if Mozilla’s developers could be paid directly by the people whose name is on the product they’re building?”

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7 Comments »

1. Mitchell may have been less than wolfish (if not sheepish), but her point stands: mozilla.com is not sun.com, it’s not beholden to shareholders. It is beholden only to the Mozilla Foundation board.

   If we were out to maximize revenue, we would do things contrary to our mission, which is about maximizing market share, interoperation, and innovation on the web.

   Ok, maybe a profit-motivated public company could choose to maximize market share instead of revenue — that still doesn’t make Mozilla and Sun equally open and equally profit-motivated (which seemed to be Schwartz’s bogus point).

   You should visit us in Mt. View some time if you are in town. You claim that we are building Google’s product, but Mozilla has had default search set to google.com for years, back to the late ’90s. Were we building “their product” then? If we change default search engines in some market or distribution channel, do we all get “fired”?

   We’re an open source project. No one buys placement. Google won default search placement by acclamation long ago, and if it loses fair and square with our community, we’ll move it out of first place.

   /be

   Comment by Brendan Eich — 10/8/2005 @ 10:20 am

2. Thanks for your comments, Brendan. Apparently my syntax got a bit twisted at the end there since you read something into my post that I definitely didn’t mean. The antecedent of “their” in the last sentence is meant to be the Mozilla Foundation, not Google. I’m not claiming that you’re building Google’s product, and I don’t believe that.

   Nor am I claiming that Sun has a better business model than you guys. Actually I’d hate to be in Sun’s position right now. What I am saying is that I don’t think that it is necessarily good or in Mozilla’s interest that some of its key contributors are paid by outside parties, whether Google or whoever else. If the model is such that this is necessary, then I, for one, would be for adopting a model that doesn’t. If this means more aggressive pursuit of revenues, that isn’t anything to be ashamed of.

   I didn’t say anywhere that Mozilla should be a public company. Then you would certainly be beholden to your financial shareholders, with raising shareholder value (though not necessarily revenues or profits) as your ultimate strategic goal.

   But the vast majority of for-profit companies are private, not public and can pursue whatever strategic goals they want, including innovation, interoperability and greater market share.

   Comment by Matt — 10/8/2005 @ 2:03 pm

3. Thanks for clarifying. Two points:

   1. Many things seem simpler at first, including putting all 100+ active cvs.mozilla.org committers under one org chart and one payroll, and trying the traditional “Netscape vs. MS” thing again. But there is no way that will work any better this time than it did last time.

   One company employing all the top hackers ain’t necessarily simpler, and there are other problems besides complexity to avoid. We are non-traditional in approach to competitors, partners, and end users, and we will remain so. It’s one of our strengths — it is not a weakness.

   One example: acting as stewards of the open source may require anti-forking effort in the form of neutral APIs agreed upon by hackers employed at various web service or portal companies, with Mozilla folks mediating and even leading, but without any deals or contracts — just meritocratic API hacking by people trying to share the same open source base.

   Whereas consolidating too much in the short run might provoke a fork by someone who feels left out. This kind of fork happens all the time, although most such forks are silent, and eventually die silently.

   2. You’re right, shareholder value != revenue growth, but often enough, and over the long haul, they’re the same thing.

   Sun has been losing money, and that’s not good for its share price.

   Mozilla is making some money now, but we don’t have to worry about share price, which enables us to use those funds to further our longstanding mission: to keep the web from being tilted toward one browser, to keep innovation and interoperation alive across platforms using open source.

   How we will do this entails all of the community, which will produce more innovation within and on top of Firefox than any one company; the Foundation, which can make grants and help ally Mozilla with other open source projects; and the Corporation, which can do more traditional partnering and business development.

   /be

   Comment by Brendan Eich — 10/9/2005 @ 4:45 am

4. I’m all for experimenting with different models for organizing and running business. The modern corporation is, after all, a fairly recent invention, so there’s plenty of scope for searching for improvements. Moreover, technology has changed (and continues to change) a lot of the ground rules. I discussed this in more detail here, though I wish I’d make it clearer that “charge for open source software” doesn’t necessarily mean traditional upfront licensing fees.

   I’m not suggesting that Mozilla take on the form of a traditional company. My point was really two-fold:

   1) Depending on third parties to employ key developers entails a lot of potential problems. I don’t think this level of involvement is required to get important tech companies to endorse Firefox’s APIs, and it raises a lot of tricky conflict-of-interest issues. In my mind a straightforward grant from Google, Yahoo, etc. would be preferable.

   2) More importantly, there is a very strong anti-capitalism undercurrent in the open source world. I assume this is why Mitchell was so hasty to explain that the new corporation is not really out to make money in the traditional sense. My personal feeling is that this attitude has a real negative impact on the open source world. It’s good to be idealistic, but I do feel that a strong dose of the profit motive is essential to the long-term health of the open source movement.

   Comment by Matt — 10/11/2005 @ 3:19 pm

5. Good news…

   The three Rs of Microsoft support: Retry, Reboot, Reinstall.
   …

   Trackback by Joseph — 11/1/2006 @ 6:35 pm

6. Nice…

   Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day;
   teach him to use the Net and he won’t bother you for weeks.
   …

   Trackback by Emily — 11/1/2006 @ 6:35 pm

7. […] source should stop being so coy and simply embrace capitalism. Mozilla is, in any case, already neither fish nor fowl. The company has significant revenues and a growing employee base, not something one would normally […]

   Pingback by Is Open Source Too Pure? · Get Latest Mozilla Firefox Browsers — 8/9/2007 @ 9:23 am

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