UPDATED 19:12 EDT / JANUARY 29 2020

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Mozilla aims to make money from its Thunderbird email client

Struggling nonprofit organization The Mozilla Foundation will try to squeeze some revenue out of its open-source Thunderbird email client after moving the project to a new subsidiary called MZLA Technologies Corp.

Mozilla said this week that Thunderbird will remain both free and open-source, but the move away from the Foundation to a corporate entity suggests it’s hoping somehow to generate money from it.

The move will also make it easier to generate funds for its future development, Mozilla said. Thunderbird is currently financed mostly by charitable donations from its users.

“Moving to MZLA Technologies Corporation will not only allow the Thunderbird project more flexibility and agility, but will also allow us to explore offering our users products and services that were not possible under the Mozilla Foundation,” Philipp Kewisch, Mozilla’s product manager, said in a statement. “The move will allow the project to collect revenue through partnerships and non-charitable donations, which in turn can be used to cover the costs of new products and services.”

Whatever revenue Mozilla manages to squeeze out of Thunderbird will certainly be welcomed. The once high-flying organization has struggled to stay relevant in recent years after the declining popularity of its flagship Firefox web browser. Firefox was once the most popular browser on the Web, but in recent years it has fallen by the wayside as more people jump to Google Chrome. Firefox’s market share was just 4% at the last count, according to the most recent data from the U.S. government’s Digital Analytics Program.

The decline of Firefox has meant that Mozilla’s biggest source of revenue has dried up. The nonprofit once pulled in $300 million a year from Firefox thanks to a deal that made Google Search its default search engine, but with fewer users, it’s not making nearly as much money as it used to. Indeed, Mozilla was recently forced to lay off about 70 of its staff in a move that it said would give it more time to make money from different software products.

As a result, it’s no surprise that Thunderbird is being given the corporate treatment. “Ultimately, this move to MZLA Technologies Corporation allows the Thunderbird project to hire more easily, act more swiftly, and pursue ideas that were previously not possible,” Kewisch added.

Firefox is managed in a similar manner to the new Thunderbird setup, run by a separate corporate entity called Mozilla Corp., another subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation.

Image: Peter Eck/Flickr

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