The Mozilla Foundation has moved into Chinese waters by establishing an affiliate Web site and non-profit organization in Beijing, the open-source group recently announced.

The site and Mozilla China -- as the non-profit is called -- are intended to drive the development, promotion, and use of Mozilla products in particular, open-source software in general, the foundation said in a statement.

"Mozilla China will be responsible for promoting our mission of software choice and innovation throughout China," said Mitchell Baker, president of the foundation, in that statement. "China is [also] a great resource for the open source community and we look forward to building a strong developer community."

The non-profit will be sponsored by the Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences (ISCAS) and Sun Microsystems' Chinese R&D center.

Mozilla China's chief responsibility will be to lead the development of Mozilla source code in China; Sun has already created a Mozilla browser development team in Beijing to build Chinese editions of the Firefox and Mozilla browsers.

The group's Web site is here.