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.
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.
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.
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.
With Mozilla, the supply is one item, the default search engine for the search bar, something which has high demand. That means if Google were to become less interested in paying for the search bar, Bing would be waiting at the gates to do so. They could lose money if that were to happen, given that Google was the highest bidder, but that in no way makes them beholden to Google.
I wouldn't be looking forward to the next set of negotiations if I had Microsoft and Yahoo as my fallback positions.
Yet, I think you'd be right to question the independence of a politician who got 90% of their funding from Google. Maybe it is different because people interested in entering politics have less integrity and produce nothing of value so they are more in thrall to their biggest customer. ;-)
Maybe it is more like the academic projects I've worked on. 100% of the money is from the US Government but none of us are patriotic in the least. We just care about doing the research.
Or how about the US government, which gets most of its funding from US tax payers and China and never seems to do anything that pleases either group.
Or children that get all of their basic needs met by their parents and still grow up to rebel and hate them.
I think politicians are just a special case in being particularly worse than the average human being in terms of ethics, morality and intelligence. :-)
Mozilla is a non-profit foundation that sells its search box to fund a corporation that develops a free web browser.
They don't compete.
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.
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.
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/11/intern...
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp
And there's also Google trends.
I tend to see that too. its pretty evil too. get flash update? chrome bundled at random. navigate google sites? site may not display correctly unless you download this "link to chrome"
and so and so forth. for many users its confusing and they don't know how it happened or how to go back.
$400k is what one-trick ponies like doctors and lawyers and traditional industry local small business owners earn.
Or a little under twice that of the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom ( pop. 60 million ), when summing his MP and Government jobs.
The combined ministerial and parliamentary salary of the Prime Minister is £142,500 at April 2013
I'm fairly confident in saying that David Cameron puts in considerably more effort than the CEO of Mozilla. I really don't see how anyone can justify $400k for such a job.
...and the President of the United States [1]...
> and traditional industry local small business owners earn.
Chrome probably got there the same way Firefox got there - a well meaning individual (you, in the case of Firefox) installed it and told them to use it because it is "better".