Open source is all well and good, but what should happen to all the money that’s generated in its creation? A very good question, and one the New York Times tackled today. Told against the backdrop of a failed presidential campaign and the spirit of the grassroots movement, the article looks at the success of the Mozilla Foundation and its Firefox Web browser. The non-profit group’s browser has been downloaded an estimated 75-100 million times, representing 15 percent of the market. Moreover, some 1,000-2,000 people have contributed actual code to the browser, with many more having beta tested it.
What to do?
Nobody knows, that’s what. Who should get what, and how much? How many lines of code do you need to have contributed to receive any sort of reimbursement? Weren’t all those guys on Slashdot during Firefox’s early days (as Phoenix) just happy to contribute to something anti-Microsoft? And who could forget when Google gave Mozilla all that cash in exchange for prominent search bar placement? How involved, really, is Google in Firefox development?
I don’t know, I just found the piece interesting. It asks important questions not only of Firefox, but of the open source movement as a whole. Add to that charges that Firefox is getting bloated with new features with seemingly every major release and you can appreciate the article even more.
Firefox and the Anxiety of Growing Pains [New York Times]
(note: Firefox has been downloaded more than 300M times, resulting in somewhere between 75 and 100 million users.)
(note2: Google was featured as the default search in Mozilla applications going back to 1999, years before there was any money associated with that. Google continues to be featured because we think it’s the best default for most of our users.)
(note3: You can easily determine how involved Google is in Mozilla development by following the development process in the newsgroups, the wikis, the CVS repository, and Bugzilla. The quick answer is “not very much”.)
Mozilla is re-investing its profits in the Mozilla community and Mozilla projects. We’ve gone from 10 employees at the beginning days of the Foundation to around 100 today. We’ve gone from one small office in Mountain View, CA to having offices in Canada, Europe, Japan, and China. We’ve gone from serving a few tens of thousands of downloads per day at the beginning of the Foundation to serving over 500,000 Firefox downloads per day plus about 100,000,000 Firefox updates every 6-8 weeks. We’ve gone from a handful of Firefox localizations at the beginning of the Foundation to 40 supported localizations that ship simultaneously with every Firefox release and security update. We’ve gone from hundreds of thousands of web page sessions at Mozilla web properties to many millions of sessions per day. We’re supporting our development, testing, marketing, and other volunteers with hardware, software, connectivity, travel, and more.
If you’ve got suggestions of other ways that Mozilla can invest in supporting and extending the Mozilla community, we’re all ears.
- A
(Mozilla Community Development)