$66.8 Million in 2006 with Open Source
Posted by Johan Cyprich on 23 Oct 2007 | Tagged as: Business
The Mozilla Foundation released their 2006 revenue report last night. They made $66.8 million which is 26% higher than what was made in 2005. Their expenses for 2006 were $19.8 million which leaves a comfortable profit for that year.
Their most popular products are the open source applications, Firefox (web browser) and Thunderbird (e-mail client). Both have significant market shares and are a good alternative to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Outlook.
Most of Mozilla’s revenues come from the Google search bar in Firefox and through the default search page it uses. Each time you do a search with Google through Firefox, the Mozilla Foundation receives a small payment. The Google contract will expire in 2008, so Mozilla will either have to renew it or find an alternate way in making money.
The Mozilla Foundation is likely the most profitable open source developer and it shows that you can build a successful organization on this business model. Most open source groups make far less and in fact don’t generate enough revenue to sustain themselves. To put things in perspective, Microsoft’s 3rd quarterly revenues this year was $14.4 billion. Commercial applications are still much more profitable than their open source counterpart.
| Related posts: | |
|
|
Share this post:
Follow Me:
Did you find this post interesting and useful? You can keep up to date on this blog by subscribing to my RSS feed, or you can have new posts sent to you by e-mail. You can also follow me on Twitter.
No Comments »