6 (a) Blake Ross & David Hyatt Browse for Dollars with Mozilla Firefox
Servicing Millions, Earning Millions
Blake Ross and David Hyatt are the developers of the popular Mozilla Firefox open source internet browser. Blake was nominated for the Renegade of the Year award[i] of Wired Magazine in 2005. It is estimated that Blake’s personal net worth is $120 million. 
Blake Ross was born in Miami, Florida in 1985. Since childhood, the Internet became his hobby. He developed his first website at the age of 10 and also began to program during his school days. While just 15 and studying at Gulliver Preparatory School, he worked as an intern with Netscape and made contributions to the open source software.
While working there, he was dissatisfied with Netscape’s current browser and along with David Hyatt developed the easy to use Firefox browser which was completely open source. Within the first year of its release in 2004, Firefox was downloaded more than a 100 million times. In the meanwhile, Blake has enrolled at Stanford University but had to eventually drop out to focus completely on Firefox.
Firefox has grown since then and today is the second most popular browser after Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and the most used platform independent browser with a quarter of the browser market share[ii]. Although Firefox is a not for profit product, the revenues are earned by Mozilla Corp. through search engine companies[iii].
[i] “Blake Ross”. Wikipedia.com. 22 Feb 2010. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blake_Ross>
[ii] “Mozilla Firefox”. Wikipedia.com. 22 Feb 2010. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Firefox>
[iii] “Firefox Myths”. Comcast.net. 22 Feb 2010. <http://home.comcast.net/~SupportCD/FirefoxMyths.html>
