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Over 27% of Firefox Patches Come from Volunteers

dolphinling writes "Everyone is aware that the Mozilla Corporation makes some money, and employs some people now. Google has full-time employees working on Firefox too, as do a number of other places. Yet despite that, in the six months up to Firefox 2 some 27% of the patches to Firefox were submitted by key volunteers, and those patches represent 24% of changes made to the source code. What's more, those numbers only counted contributers with 50 patches or more, so the actual numbers are probably quite a bit higher. It's good to see that even as Mozilla does so well in the business world, it can still keep its ties to the community so strong." They were running these number to find out who they need to start offering support to. So: contribute to Firefox, and you know you'll get a hand up. Nice work, folks.

2 of 107 comments (clear)

  1. Re:making money by linvir · · Score: 4, Informative

    Why the hell would anyone want the search bar if you can simply type "google xxx"?
    It's a lot more effort to type "google" than it is to press CTRL+K

    I use this all the time, and I definitely don't consider it a waste of screen real estate. The only time I ever remove the Google toolbar is when I'm setting up KDE on a small desktop.

    As for wikipedia... well, that's all Google's really for nowadays anyway: a faster search engine for wikipedia with a decent built in spellchecker.

  2. Mozilla makes $50 million a year by gtoomey · · Score: 4, Informative

    Mozilla doesn't just make "some money", it makes $50 million a year from firefox.

    http://www.netscape.com/viewstory/2007/01/03/firef ox-a-50-million-dollar-cash-cow