Mozilla Won’t Be Going Public Anytime Soon

The web loves its rumor mill. Recently, on the speculations of industry analyst Henry Blodget, who wrote that Mozilla stood to gain greatly from going public, despite

the fact that to do so might be seen to run contrary to the open-source ethos, renewed discussion of what a Mozilla IPO might mean for the industry began to surface once

again. It’s clear that, though the for-profit Mozilla Corporation was formed from the original nonprofit Mozilla Foundation, the high-ups at Mozilla still view their work

as a continuation of the original values of the Mozilla project, and the fact that the sole shareholder in the corporation is the non-profit Mozilla Foundation stands to

ensure that for years to come.

Ars Technica examines the subject in detail in a new article on their site – it turns out there’s more to Mozilla’s denial than a simple statement. The fact that the

corporation is owned by a non-profit organization would make an IPO difficult. Also, as Anders Bylund writes, Blodget’s comparison to Google isn’t warranted; there isn’t

a vastly widening circle of owners with Mozilla as there was with Google – instead, there is effectively a single owner.

This goes far beyond a simple “no, we won’t.” With public statements like these, management would lose lots of face if they ever turned coat and went public. And

while Blodget likes to draw parallels to the Google IPO four years ago, the situation at Mozilla today is really very different.

Source: Ars

Technica