Mozilla Corporation’s president, Mark Surman, today announced plans to tackle what he says are ‘major headwinds’ facing the company’s ability to grow, make money, and remain relevant.
“Mozilla’s impact and survival depend on us simultaneously strengthening Firefox AND finding new sources of revenue AND manifesting our mission in fresh ways,” says Surman.
To do this, Mozilla plans—no groaning—to ‘diversify’ its efforts.
How? It will continue to invest in privacy-respecting advertising; fund, develop and push open-source AI features1 in order to retain ‘product relevance’; and will go all-out on novel new fundraising initiatives to er, get us all to chip in and pay for it!
Helping to co-ordinate, collaborate and come up with ways to keep the company fixed and focused on these fledgling effort is a brand new Mozilla Leadership Council.
The new council is composed of executives from each of Mozilla’s distinct orgs: Mozilla Corporation; Mozilla.ai2; the (not-for-profit) Mozilla Foundation; (for-profit) MZLA Technologies/Thunderbird); and Mozilla Ventures, its venture capital arm.
Additionally, new board chairs have been announced for Mozilla Foundation, Mozilla Corporation and Mozilla.ai who have “experience bridging business, technology and the public interest”.
Mitchell Baker, co-founder of Firefox, departs. She is no longer chair or a member of either Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation boards.
Where’s Firefox in all this?
Firefox is mentioned in the announcement a few times, but not in a particularly active sense — strange given it remains the golden goose responsible for bringing in Mozilla’s biggest source of revenue: the Google search deal cash.
Mozilla big-wigs sound more interested in everything but Firefox, as a wry observation in LWN‘s comment section observes:
‘While we still mention Firefox in this press release because it’s the only thing we do that anyone actually wants us to do, we will also do a thing nobody wants, a thing nobody wants, and ask for money.’
—so droll! ;)
Admittedly Mozilla is in a difficult position—some of its own making, I’ll accept.
Yet as I’ve said before (and will bore you all by saying again) the web will be a far poorer, much ickier, and notably less FOSS-ier place without Mozilla around to push hard on its manifesto and holding a spotlight up to big tech.
Finding an equitable, sustainable future to maintain its flagship browser and advocate for an open web needs to be Mozilla’s priority.
AI, ads, and a heads-up it will nag us for cash regularly is not the most appealing of announcements it could make. Whether spelunking in other areas to hit lofty revenue goals for its corporate arm proves the best way to achieve it is for history to say.
Ultimately, if that is what’s required to keep Mozilla’s mission alive I think I can suck it up for the greater good.
Can you?
- Mozilla is all-in on AI; Surman describes it as Mozilla’s North Star for the work it will do over the next few years. I wrote about its new ‘Orbit’ AI add-on for Firefox recently. ↩︎
- Familiar face: Jane Silber, former Canonical CEO, is current Interim CEO of Mozilla.ai ↩︎