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.

In November, I wrote about Ulteo's Open Virtual Desktop, an open source desktop delivery utility. Simply described, the Ulteo Open Virtual Desktop (OVD) is a browser-based operating system and applications suite that is controlled and configured, ideally, by your organization's systems administrators. This makes managing, working, and collaborating from remote locations possible so long as there is a computer nearby with a Java-enabled browser and internet connection.

This week, Ulteo announced some major updates to its OVD, including the ability to deliver Linux and Windows applications (or a mix of both), Active Directory and LDAP authentication capabilities, several file server options, and collaboration support.

OStatic has recently been enjoying some very healthy traffic and growth, and I'd like to thank all of the members, readers and writers who make our site and this blog lively every day. It's a labor of love. One of our main charters on the OStatic blog is to regularly provide roundups and individual reviews of good open source software, tools and resources. We've done quite a few of these since our last uber-roundup, so here is an updated collection of 25 of our most popular roundups and educational resources for open sourcerors. We hope these help you.

In October, Mozilla witnessed a surge in Firefox 3's market share as it continued its plan to decommission Firefox 2 -- and the Gecko engine that powered it -- before the end of December.

For two weeks in October, Firefox 3 claimed 20% market share, something that web metrics company Net Applications predicted might happen within a month of the new version's June release. Stalled growth, and Chrome's appearance caused some backslide, but Firefox 3's pulse is getting stronger.