Regarding Mozilla providing hosting, for a slew of liability reasons, we cannot offer hosting to our communities. It’s a legal thing that we have to follow due to liability laws and we have to stay consistent with our global community. So, in the mean time, we’ll just have to help pay for hosting to various communities who seem to need it most.

Regarding the download from our site, well, we do provide that. But, we also have a series of mirrors across the globe that help distribute the work and the bandwidth that is necessary when updating to major releases. We are still operating on a highly-leveraged budget at the Mozilla HQ, so we can’t buy up and establish massive data centers. We have to rely on partner mirrors and community efforts to make sure our users get all the updates needed for our software.

Does that seem to make sense? Again, thanks for the questions.

-Seth

Mozilla Italia needs better web hosting as we close in on the release of Firefox 3. The user community has been growing in Italy and we are going to pay for hosting costs to make sure that there is enough bandwidth and service available to support the upcoming release (and increased traffic due to downloads).

Just wanted to know - We (The Israel/Hebrew) community correctly using sourceforge as webhosting and thinks about moving on for some time. Why can’t Mozilla help with hosting to the local communities?

And why do you offer users to download from your site? Why not to place a link to mozilla.com?