Linux Magazine’s Top 20 Companies to Watch in 2008
Who knows what the future will hold? Well, heaven knows we don’t or we’d have already won the lottery a few times and retired to a private island somewhere. However, we can look at the past to make a few reasonable predictions– such as the companies in the free and open source software community that are going to have a major impact on the market in 2008.
Mozilla isn’t quite like any of the other companies on the list– but, technically, the Mozilla Corporation (which owns the non-profit Mozilla Foundation) is a for-profit venture, even if its goal is simply to advance Firefox and other FOSS projects.
With Firefox 3.0 on the horizon, we think that the MozCorp folks are important to watch for a couple of reasons. First, because Firefox has been, slowly but surely, increasing its market share over the past few years.
Second because Web applications are becoming increasingly important for users and Firefox is at the forefront of enabling more elegant Web applications. Specifically, the work on offline applications that has gone into Firefox 3.0 is likely to be very important to vendors producing Web applications– and important to the users of those apps.
The decision in 2007 to form a company behind Thunderbird, dubbed” MailCo” as of this writing, also looms large in our decision to tap MozCorp as a player for 2008. While we like Thunderbird, we think that the mail client was something of a distraction for MozCorp, and Firefox is more than enough to keep an organization busy.
(8 votes, average: 3.75 out of 5)
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