The Mozilla Foundation has announced the creation of the Mozilla Corporation, a wholly-owned subsidiary that will continue the development, distribution and marketing of Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird. Unlike the non-profit Mozilla Foundation, the Mozilla Corporation will be a taxable entity (that is, a for-profit rather than a non-profit) but the Foundation is eager to emphasise that it will pursue the same public benefit goals as the Foundation itself and will not be driven purely by revenue goals.

The change will not affect the day-to-day development of Mozilla, with the current system of module owners, drivers, reviewers and super-reviewers staying in place. End-users are unlikely to notice any difference either, though the Mozilla Foundation and the Mozilla Corporation will eventually have separate websites. At the moment, only Firefox and Thunderbird will be developed under the auspices of the Mozilla Corporation; other projects, such as Camino and SeaMonkey, will continue to be overseen by the Mozilla Foundation…

Full story:
Mozilla Foundation Announces Creation of Mozilla Corporation – MozillaZine Talkback

Mozilla Foundation Reorganization [RSS]

/. “In a bid to attract a larger following among developers, Red Hat has spun off its Fedora open source project into a more independent foundation. As part of the transition, the Fedora open source project will transfer development work and copyright ownership of contributed code to the foundation but Red Hat will continue to provide substantial financial and engineering support.” From the article: “The proposed patents common, which mimics the Creative Commons licensing scheme for creative works including art and music, is designed to enable developers to exchange ideas with fewer concerns about patent infringement. and Red Hat’s efforts to lobby for patent reform in the U.S. and Europe.”

* Slashdot | Redhat Spins Off Fedora Project

/. “RFID Journal has an artricle about how an open source foundation is creating a new Internet based on RFID tags. ‘The founders [RadioActive Foundation] liken the EPCglobal Network as a whole to the Internet, with RFID tags acting as URLs, and the tags’ associated data being the Web site for that tag . The software the foundation develops, Michael Mealling adds, will act similarly to an Internet search engine. With Discovery Service software, for example, companies will be able to search for an RFID tag without requiring connected links between each point of the tag’s travels.’ Pretty neat concept, probably decades away.”

* Slashdot | RFID: The Next Internet?