The Mozilla Foundation has posted its financial statements and tax info for 2008, and a FAQ on the topic for those of us with short attention spans. While plowing through financial statements may not be the most exciting topic for Free and Open Source advocates, it’s worth taking a look at what Mozilla has achieved as an independent project, where it’s going, and how other projects might be able to emulate Mozilla’s success to fund more and more FOSS development.
The good news is that, as of the end of their 2008 fiscal year, Mozilla is weathering the lousy economy pretty well. According to Mitchell Baker’s post, reported revenues were up 5% from 2007, and the bulk of that revenue comes from the Firefox search functionality linking back to Google, Yahoo, Amazon, and eBay. But Moz got dinged by the financial crisis in 2008, losing nearly $8 million of its long-term portfolio.
