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by doubled112 387 days ago
And Thunderbird?
3 comments

It is the MZLA Technologies Corporation a subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation. Firefox is developed by the Mozilla Corporation a wholly owned part of the Mozilla Foundation.
How did they even get this corporation owned by a foundation situation? That just seems like some kind of tax trick.
Yes. Mozilla was originally only the non profit, but it was ruled that selling the search rights violated nonprofit status. So they paid a couple million in back taxes and had to spin off a corporate entity that's fully owned by the nonprofit.
Do you have any info on this lawsuit? I am struggling to find it.
It wasn't a lawsuit, the IRS audited them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#IRS_audit
Thank you!
Novo Norodisk has a similar corporate structure, being owned majority by the Novodisk Foundation[0]

[0]: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/novo-nordisks-unique-structur...

It's a "we want to sell something, but non-profits aren't allowed to do that" trick. And it means the for-profit subsidiary has to pay normal taxes.

OpenAI is structured the same way, so they can sell access to their models. At least until it switches to being entirely for-profit, if that is allowed to happen.

My guess. is going to be sold to a tech giant, and probably extinct. Maybe Microsoft buy it and rename as outlook for Linux.
Last time I heard, Thunderbird has zero people on it for years but eventually they manage to afford to pay someone part time to work on it :smh:
Thunderbird is quite healthy and received $8.6M in donations in 2023[0] which is used to employ 24 people[1].

Unlike Firefox, donations are used to fund development.

[0]: https://blog.thunderbird.net/2024/10/thunderbird-annual-repo...

[1]: https://blog.thunderbird.net/2023/05/thunderbird-is-thriving...

I guess what we need is a non-profit fork of Firefox that takes donations directly and focuses only on the browser.
To be honest, I'm pleasantly surprised. Thanks for the info.
I did change quite significantly in recent times, so there is certainly work done.

On the other hand it is a mail client and it does exactly what it is supposed to do for years on end. And I believe it is the best mail client too.