page_title: Mozilla Foundation
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Mozilla Foundation / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Mozilla's headquarters at 331 E. Evelyn Avenue, Mountain View, CA.
context_page_description: The Mozilla Foundation is an American not-for-profit organization that exists to support and collectively lead the open source Mozilla project. Founded in July 2003, the organization sets the policies that govern development, operates key infrastructure and controls Mozilla trademarks and copyrights. It owns a taxable subsidiary: the Mozilla Corporation, which employs many Mozilla developers and coordinates releases of the Mozilla Firefox web browser and Mozilla Thunderbird email client. The Mozilla Foundation was founded by the Netscape-affiliated Mozilla Organization. The organization is currently based in the Silicon Valley city of Mountain View, California, United States.
  The Mozilla Foundation describes itself as "a non-profit organization that promotes openness, innovation and participation on the Internet." The Mozilla Foundation is guided by the Mozilla Manifesto, which lists 10 principles which Mozilla believes "are critical for the Internet to continue to benefit the public good as well as commercial aspects of life."
context_section_description: On February 23, 1998, Netscape created the Mozilla Organization to co-ordinate the development of the Mozilla Application Suite. When AOL (Netscape's parent) drastically scaled back its involvement with Mozilla Organization, the Mozilla Foundation was launched on July 15, 2003, to ensure Mozilla could survive without Netscape. AOL assisted in the initial creation of the Mozilla Foundation, transferring hardware and intellectual property to the organization, employed a three-person team for the first three months of its existence to help with the transition, and donated $2 million to the Foundation over two years.
  Initially, the remit of the Mozilla Foundation grew to become much wider than that of mozilla.org, with the organization taking on many tasks that were traditionally left to Netscape and other vendors of Mozilla technology. As part of a wider move to target end-users, the foundation made deals with commercial companies to sell CDs containing Mozilla software and provide telephone support. In both cases, the group chose the same suppliers as Netscape for these services. The Mozilla Foundation also became more assertive over its intellectual property, with policies put in place for the use of Mozilla trademarks and logos. New projects such as marketing were also started.
  With the formation of the Mozilla Corporation, the Mozilla Foundation delegated all their development and business-related activities to the new subsidiary. The Mozilla Foundation now focuses on its Webmaker initiative (which aims to raise the level of users' Web Literacy) as well as on governance and policy issues. The Mozilla Foundation owns the Mozilla trademarks and other intellectual property, which it licenses to the Mozilla Corporation. It also controls the Mozilla source code repository and decides who is allowed to check code in.
caption: Entrance to the Mountain View office which is home to both the Mozilla Foundation and the Mozilla Corporation
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