Baidu will contribute to Mozilla's piggybank too

Mozilla's Chinese subsidiary has inked a search box deal with Baidu, the leading search engine in China (not to mention a white-hot stock).

With the arrangement, recapped on Techmeme, Mozilla gets a little diversification. As previously noted, Mozilla is largely funded by revenue from Google, which pays to be in the upper right search box of Firefox. Ryan Paul at Ars Technica was kind enough to post a Google translation of the Chinese release, but frankly I still had trouble following it.

But that's no biggy because the only thing that matters is that Mozilla diversifies the revenue stream a bit. The deal with Baidu could provide a template for other local markets--or entice Google to pay up a little more for international markets. To date, Mozilla has units in Europe, Japan and China. Only the latter has a local champion, but at least the search revenue template is in place should Mozilla expand abroad.