Firefox and the anxiety of growing pains

It sounds like Mozilla has some spare cash:

...a windfall came in the form of a royalty contract with Google, which, like the other search companies, is always competing for better placement on browsers...In the last two years, the deal has brought in more than $100 million

The dilemma is what should an open-source, community driven organization do with such a large amount of money.

Mozilla's solution is to put money into what Kapor calls "community purposes." To that end, the foundation is looking for a new executive director who would focus on worthy projects, although no decisions on what constitutes a worthy project has been made. "We go out and ask," Baker said, "and even the community is not actually clear where large amounts of money should go."

If I can put my two cents in here, I think involving the community in such a discourse is a good idea. This may sound naive, and you may be thinking that this is impossible. Perhaps you're right. But it would be nice to see Mozilla maintaining it's obligation connection to the community. I realize that there will always be someone who is disappointed, and maybe a majority will be disappointed by any decisions which are made, but open discourse is a great way to find a common spirit at least.

I think investing in open projects supporting innovation, education, development of new human resources (within and without the Mozilla organization) is a good start. And it sounds like they're going to try and do exactly that. Way to go Mozilla.