Over at BTD, Venkat takes note of Google hiring Ben Goodger, one of the Firefox team's lead developers. He notes that the Mozilla Foundation is a nonprofit, but speculates that this move is still in some way representative of Google getting into the browser market.

I'm not so sure about that. Catherine was the first to point this story out to me, wondering what it might mean. I'm not convinced it means much of anything. If Google wants Firefox they can just take it -- the source code is licensed under the semi-famous GNU Public License, a so-called "viral" license that boils down to allowing folks to do whatever they want with the source code, so long as they release the source code to their own product (or at least the portion of it based on the borrowed GPL code). It's a neat idea, but not only has it not yet been tested in court, it also doesn't prohibit Google from doing anything other than creating a closed-source browser from the Firefox code. So if Google wants to release a Google-branded version of Firefox, they don't have to hire Goodger to do it. Google already has plenty of extremely skilled programmers who could handle that task. And if for some reason they wanted to go closed-source, hiring Goodger wouldn't help with that, either -- he doesn't own the Firefox project, and he presumably can't change the license under which it's released by personal fiat.

What about technical reasons? Well, hiring Goodger seems likely to ensure that future versions of Firefox play nicely with Google's various offerings, but that's probably not a particularly worrisome area for our friends in Mountain View -- Firefox is already tightly integrated with Google, and open source folks share the same enthusiasm for open standards that Google does. Every party involved already pledges allegiance to the official geek-approved pantheon of acronyms (e.g. XMLRPC, SOAP, XHTML). So why bother?

It basically boils down to prestige. There's a precedent for this: Transmeta employed the ur-geek himself, Linus Torvalds, for several years. Transmeta is in the energy-efficient processor business, and while they enjoyed excellent Linux support by virtue of their relationship with Torvalds, Transmeta's products aren't marketed specifically for Linux use. It'd be a stretch to say that Torvalds represented a great technical investment -- by his own admission Linus spent a lot of time working on non-Transmeta-related tasks prior to leaving for OSDL (which is still partially backed by Transmeta).

Transmeta was happy with their arrangement because the mere existence of an ltorvalds@transmeta.com email account instantly produces a huge amount of geek cred. Whenever Linus would go speak at a conference his nametag would have "Transmeta Corp." on it, and for a probably-still-reasonable programmer's salary, Transmeta got a ton of favorable press from places like Slashdot and The Register.

I suspect Goodger's hiring was similarly motivated. Google's rolling in money after a predictably explosive IPO; they like and want to encourage Firefox; and now that they're officially a corporate behemoth, it's worth buying good PR in non-obvious ways. Goodger's salary will no doubt support technical developments that are generally beneficial to Google, but it will also function as a precisely targeted and cost-effective PR exercise.

UPDATE: How's that for a coincidence -- the nerd-friendly ISP SpeakEasy has just released a customized version of Firefox. No money was exchanged between Speakeasy and the Mozilla Foundation.