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by kbrosnan 397 days ago
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.
1 comments

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.