There has been many reports of the Mozilla foundations efforts to make some money from their efforts. Many have thought to accuse Mozilla of “selling out” Open Source by making money and I thought it worthwhile to put that idea to rest.
The first thing to keep in mind is that there is no part of Open Source that states that your organization must never make any money, after all, people must eat right? Secondly, the Firefox, Thunderbird and Mozilla code bases are still Open Source and free, meaning anyone that wants to can still get their favourite email client or web browser free and clear, just as they always have. Some Open Source companies make their money by providing services and support for their Open Source products. Redhat Linux is one such example, but all OSS companies and organizations need some sort of business plan in order to pay for costs, staff and so on. As long as the software is Open Source, who really cares that the company or organization doesn’t want to depend entirely on the kindness of strangers?
So in essence, Mozilla used to rely entirely on donations from people and companies, they will still do so in the future to some extent or another but now they have the chance to help themselves make better Open Source products and there are not many out there who could really call them to task for it. If you don’t like it, download the source code of one or all the programs and create your own OSS browser/email client based on them. The fact that you can do that is the real reason OSS is becoming an unstoppable force in the software world.
