Chris Beard is a Canadian business leader, appointed in April 2014 as the interim CEO at Mozilla Corporation.[1][2][3]
Beard has mostly worked in senior product and marketing roles in a range of companies, including HP, Sun Microsystems and CMO at Mozilla from 2004, specifically to launch the Firefox browser. In July 2013 he joined Greylock Partners as an executive in residence.[4][5]In January 1998 he founded The Puffin Group, which was acquired by Linuxcare two years later.
The Mozilla Corporation (abbreviated MoCo) is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation that coordinates and integrates the development of Internet-related applications such as the Firefox and SeaMonkeyweb browsers and the Mozilla Thunderbird email client by a global community of open-source developers, some of whom are employed by the corporation itself. The corporation also distributes and promotes these products. Unlike the non-profit Mozilla Foundation, and the Mozilla open source project, founded by the now defunct Netscape Corporation, the Mozilla Corporation is a taxable entity. The Mozilla Corporation reinvests all of its profits back into the Mozilla projects.[3] The Mozilla Corporation's stated aim is to work towards the Mozilla Foundation's public benefit to "promote choice and innovation on the Internet."[4]
