Technology Nonprofit Mozilla Creates Corporate Subsidiary

The Mozilla Foundation that organizes development of the Firefox Web browser has formed a corporate subsidiary, an unusual move for a technology nonprofit.

Mozilla Corp. will work mainly on developing and delivering free software products such as the Firefox browser and Thunderbird e-mail program. The foundation will manage projects, set policies and organize developers.

The new business will be based in Mountain View, Calif., as is the foundation. It is expected to have about 30 employees, compared with three or four at the foundation.

Its software will remain free.

Frank Hecker, director of policy for the Mozilla Foundation, said the for-profit arm will give the project more options. Already, Google Inc. pays Mozilla an unspecified amount to ship Firefox with a version of Google’s search engine as the default home page.

In the future, the project could consider letting other companies hire its employees to develop new features, Hecker said. There are no plans, though, to offer paid technical support services.

Creating a business is unusual in the open-source world, where communities of programmers -- often from different companies -- develop software. Some popular projects, however, have formed nonprofit legal entities to relieve some of the burden of business.

The developers of the popular Apache Web server did that in 1999, forming the Apache Foundation. The Mozilla Foundation was formed as a nonprofit in July 2003 to provide organizational, legal and financial support to the Mozilla project.

To date, the Mozilla Firefox Web browser has been downloaded more than 75 million times and its market share is estimated to be approaching 10%.