The Mozilla Foundation produces and distributes open source software, notably Firefox and Thunderbird. Since 2005, the Foundation has had a for-profit subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation, which deals with the development and marketing of Mozilla technologies and products. The Mozilla Corporation shares the aims of the Mozilla Foundation, and reinvests all of its profits towards the mission goals of the Mozilla Foundation.
The Mozilla Corporation was established “to support the Mozilla Foundation’s mission to ensure choice and innovation on the Internet by leveraging the economic value of Firefox which has resulted from its growing marketshare. By forming a commercial subsidiary, the revenue-generating activities of the new entity can provide funds to support development, testing, and productization of the various Mozilla open source technologies.” Basically, though its conception was not profit-motivated, Firefox turned out to be such a good and widely-used product that its use could be monetized. It just made sense to make use of that revenue stream to help support the organization.
Mozilla is a respected and well-known organization. Its model is nontraditional and generative. Its software is open source and free to use, and others are free to distribute and modify them. All the content of its site is copyrighted under a Creative Commons license. Interestingly, most effective restrictions on what one can do with Mozilla’s software stem from Mozilla’s trademark policy. Mozilla is happy to let you do what you want with its software, but there are limitations to how you can talk about and brand what you’ve done.