Francesco Poli wrote:
I'm no expert in fund-raising strategies: could you please explain what you mean? How can MoFo raise funds by preventing other people from calling "Mozilla Firefox" a distributed modified version of its XUL-based web browser?
One example is that we have a deal with Google such that they are the default search and on the default home page in Mozilla Firefox. I suspect (and I wasn't involved in negotiating it, so can freely speculate) that we would probably not have got that deal if we couldn't guarantee that all the builds we distribute and publicise would have Google as the default search.
Google are happy to pay to ride the wave of publicity we've managed to generate for Firefox. But they'd be less happy to pay if we couldn't guarantee product quality, or we couldn't guarantee their placement. We do both using the trademarks.
(Note: I'm not certain of the exact terms, so I don't know whether the deal is linked to all "Mozilla Firefox" builds or all "Firefox" builds. I know the Community Edition terms for using "Firefox" don't let you change the default search engine.)
Gerv