Asa Dotzler

mountain view, ca

open source software development

"Another is where commercial organisations see a need for software to exist but do not seek direct financial benefit from it. A prime example of this is Google's support for the development of the Firefox browser."

Can you explain to me what you mean by "Google's support for the development of the Firefox browser"?

Google, for a short period of time, employed several Firefox hackers. That hasn't been true for quite a while.

If that's not what you're suggesting, and you're talking about Mozilla's search revenue, then I think you're also mistaken there. Google does not underwrite Mozilla. Google pays Mozilla, just as several other search services, for Firefox traffic. That's not some benevolent contribution, it's a simple traffic revenue relationship. Firefox, with 160 million users, can drive significant traffic to any default or included services and those services are happy to pay for the traffic.

If I've missed your point, and you're talking about some other kind of development support, I'm curious to know what that is.