NASA's new bug tracking system PRACA was written using open-source Bugzilla tools that will save NASA considerable amounts of time and money. By using open-source Bugzilla tools, technicians will be able to make changes to either PRACA or IFI more or less on the fly, rather than having to submit any proposed changes to the publishers of proprietary software, steps that often took weeks to achieve.

Firefox 2 was announced as finalists in the 2008 IDSA (International Design Excellence Awards) in the Interactive Product Experiences category. The IDSA is the voice of the industrial design profession, advancing the quality and positive impact of design.

Investor’s Business Daily has written an interesting profile piece about Mozilla’s Mitchell Baker. “Baker had been put in charge of the newly created Mozilla Organization, a unit of Internet pioneer Netscape Communications. Amid the tech collapse of 2001, Baker got the ax yet refused to leave. ‘Executives were stunned a week later when they learned she was still working on the project and making phone calls,’ said Brendan Eich, Mozilla’s chief technology officer. ‘She could do that because Mozilla had become a community project.

Revenues for the organization behind the open-source Firefox browser were up 12 percent to $75 million, with search-related royalties from Google accounting for 88 percent of the total, or $66 million. (Another $2 million or so came from other search engines). Those revenues come from Mozilla’s portion of the search advertising revenues generated by the default Google search box in the Firefox browser.
Google’s overall percentage of Mozilla’s revenues is even bigger than it was in 2006, when it accounted for 85 percent.

Interestingly, both Mozilla and Microsoft unveiled new t-shirt initiatives last week, and although there are obviously more important things about each company than the way they sell shirts, the differences between the two stores say a lot about the way we each do business.