Mozilla – $78m
Year after year Mozilla keeps making money, even though it gives its software away for free. For the 2008 year, Mozilla is just now releasing how much revenue it generated and it was another growth year for the open source group.
Revenue at Mozilla was reported at $78.6 for 2008 which is a 5 percent jump over the $75.1 million reported in 2007. The revenue growth rate appears to have slowed somewhat, back in 2005, Mozilla’s revenues were only $53 million. As has been the case over the last several year the bulk of Mozilla’s revenue is driven by search revenues generated from Firefox by Google, Yahoo, Amazon and eBay.
So whenever you start a search using the default start page in Firefox, you’re really helping to support Mozilla. So while other commercial entities lower their cost by cutting employees, Mozilla is going the opposite route, as it continues to invest in people.
Overall, a decent year for Mozilla. It is certainly the money that helps to fund the leadership and engineering people to continue to advance Firefox and by extension the web itself. It’s a virtuous circle whereby the more we all use Firefox, the more money they take in so the more they can invest back into making Firefox better for all of us.