Mozilla’s reliance on Google is increasing: 90% of 2012 revenue

Not sure what's the state now but a few years ago the CEO was being paid ~400K/yr to run Mozilla Corp. For that kind of money, one would expect that Mozilla would have more diverse revenue than being a one-trick pony.

I would not exactly call this hypothetical person completely independent. Sure, they can go off and find somebody else to rely on anytime they want, but they are currently relying on one company in particular.

Well, even if he could shop around for another job, relying on MS like that means a sudden firing combined with an illness/mortage and/or worsening job market conditions can seriously hurt him.

The concern from people is always about too much power (control) in the hands of a select few.

What choices will they make?

Will they be the best choices?

How will we know?

How much transparency will there be?

Some of these might not apply directly to the open source world, but Google is at the forefront of decisions on the internet.

It doesn't have to be overt, I doubt Mozilla makes many decisions by asking themselves, "will this make Google happy or unhappy?"

But consider that Mozilla knows what Microsoft and Yahoo's top bids were. Their ability to switch from one funder to another is dependent on how high those bids were.

So more accurate reasoning is "Search advertising is the best, Mozilla drives a lot of traffic, any search engine would love to have 'control' over Mozilla's choice of default search provider and how that works to insure they get the traffic from Mozilla customers."

So no, Mozilla doesn't need a 'backup' plan unless Bing goes away.

That should make Mozilla feel uncomfortable whenever their agreement with Google is up for extension.

On the plus side, they know they can get money elsewhere if Google were to drop out; they could jump to the Bing camp. That's about their only alternative, though.

Also, their ability to get a good new contract depends heavily on their market share.

Imagine that that software engineer at Microsoft was becoming less productive and knew that Microsoft was hiring young engineers and that there was only one other company he could get a job, and that that company was also hiring young engineers. That should make him worried.

Their current revenue model isn't "Google", it's "the search box on Firefox". Now, you can debate whether it is sensible to rely on the search box, but it isn't tied to Google. Microsoft or Yahoo would probably love to get there instead.

Mozilla is pumping out mostly user facing open source software, which will probably attract less money than, say, Red Hat.

Also, it's not that no company except Google is backing them. It's that they get a huge amount of money from their search box - currently paid by Google. Microsoft might well be happy to become the default and pay just as much.

I wish Mozilla would stick to its principles and switch the default to a privacy conscious search engine like DuckDuckGo and give it a much needed boost in keyword relevance data.

So while Firefox would likely survive, it'd imagine it would look much more like the post-Netscape, pre-MFL years. No more work on stuff like Rust, Servo, asm.js, things like Thunderbird would atrophy...

That said, I'm not sold on Mozilla needing Google; I'm sure they could swing a deal with Bing. What strange bedfellows that'd make.