OStatic

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.

Mozilla Labs has unveiled a new project, Raindrop, that it characterizes as an open experiment in messaging on the web. From the messaging team behind Mozilla's Thunderbird email project, Raindrop uses a mini web server to sift conversations from various sources such as mail, Twitter and RSS feeds, then attempts to pull out the important parts and have them rise to the top. It works with Firefox, Safari or Chrome, and though it's still in its infancy, the open source project looks promising and bears some very rough resemblance to what Google is trying to do with Google Wave.