Firefox fans pay

In a remarkably aggressive move involving open source software, Spread Firefox is looking for donations to put a full-page ad in the New York times.

Firefox 1.0 is coming soon, let’s keep building momentum and fill the ad — the first-ever, full-page advertisement in a major daily newspaper created and paid for by the open source community.

The sign-up includes:

• The full-page ad will include the names of everyone who supports the campaign along with a message about the benefits/features of Firefox.
• The ad will only include verifiable, personal names: no URLs, emails, etc.
• An individual contribution of $30 will get your name included in the ad ($10 student rate).
• The campaign will act as a fundraiser to support all Firefox 1.0 launch activities,

As if Internet Explorer wasn’t a big enough advertisement for using Mozilla Firefox. :)

In related news, Silicon.com relates that Mozilla’s Firefox release has now surpassed the 5 million donwload mark:

Five million Firefoxes released into the wild

James Governor, an analyst at Red Monk, said that it is not just Web users that are interested in Firefox. software vendors are also showing an interest. “For the last seven years ISVs generally supported IE only, now that�fs changing,” said Governor. “We are starting to see ISVs developing Web applications which support both IE and Firefox.”

Hardly surprising considering the long-suffering security problems that Internet Explorer doggedly suffers from.

Kudos to whoever is paying the bandwidth fees for Mozilla, though. :)

Link: Firefox fans pay