According to figures relating to the audited financial statements and tax form for 2006, posted at Mozillazine by Mozilla CEO Mitchell Baker, the project is doing pretty well with revenue up and outpacing rising expenses. "Mozilla remains financially healthy: we're able to hire more people, build more products, help other projects, and bring more possibilities for participation in the Internet to millions of people. The Mozilla project is growing in almost every way - size, scale, types of activities, new communities, and in reach" Baker says.
Revenues for 2006 were $66,840,850, which represents a 26% increase over 2005 figures, and can be pretty much accounted for by search functionality revenue in Firefox. Or put another way, Google continues to bankroll Firefox. Although there were other revenue sources such as the Mozilla Store and some public donations, Baker concedes that it is Google which is the main injector of money into Mozilla.
When it comes to expenses, those grew from $8.8m to $19.8m but can be summed up in two words: infrastructure and people.
"By the end of 2006 Mozilla was funding approximately 90 people working full or part-time on Mozilla around the world. Expenditures on people accounted for roughly 70% of our total expenses in 2006. The largest concentrations of people funded by Mozilla were in California, Tokyo, Toronto, and Paris. The number of funded people and of multi-person locations continues to grow. As of October 2007 we have additional concentrations of people in Beijing and New Zealand, with announced plans to increase the number of people in Europe" Baker says.
Mozilla's technical infrastructure also grew more than just a little during 2006, serving around 600,000 Firefox downloads, 2.1 terabytes of data and 25 million update requests every day. The investment in infrastructure meant that, for example, server response time fell by 50% for much of Europe following the introduction of a European data centre.
Mozilla by the numbers:
- 1000+ people contributed code to Firefox 2
- 10000 people downloaded nightly builds every day during 2006
- 16000 people reported bugs or potential issues during 2006
- 65000 people participated in the Spread Firefox program
- Firefox 2 shipped in 37 languages and is now available in 44
- Thunderbird 2.0 shipped in 33 languages and is now available in 36
"Our financial status allows us to build on sustainability to do ever more. More as an open source project, and more to move the Internet overall increasingly towards openness and participation" Baker concludes.
