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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.
Everyone is aware that the Mozilla Corporation makes some money
I am so out of touch. Must be getting old.
How do they make money?
There's more to Mozilla than coding - volunteers also do quality assurance, documentation, and other things that aren't reflected in these numbers, but are just as important to the finished product.
and those patches represent 24% of changes made to the source code.
When do we get to rename FireFox to Apache Broswer?
Have you read my journal today?
Hey, good point.
Me: "Firefox deleted my bookmarks when I updated to the new version."
Mozilla: "Shut up. That's fixed in the new version. Download it here."
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
Volunteers would probably patch IE too, except they can't, because it's closed source... hence the main issue with closed source. Even if you wanted to fix it, and you knew how, and you had the time, you still can't fix it.
stuff |
Won't you please help support their work? Just visit any web site, you'll get some downloaded for free!
Mozilla doesn't just make "some money", it makes $50 million a year from firefox.
f ox-a-50-million-dollar-cash-cow
http://www.netscape.com/viewstory/2007/01/03/fire
you damn near got me fired!
A goal is a dream with a deadline
Just because the folks submitting patches aren't being paid by Mozilla, doesn't mean they aren't monetizing their accomplishments.
... maybe 30% of them accepted as-is (or a bit less, this is off the top of my head).
Finding a popular / useful OS project to work on is a very common (and worthwhile) practice used to build resumes and compensate for lack of 'proven' experience. Another *really* good example of this is Xen.
I don't have statistics like these for Xen, however a quick glance through their mailing lists (xen-devel) will show a flurry of activity daily, sometimes up to 15 - 20 patches a day being submitted,
The point is, being able to augment your resume or CV with "Patches xxx, yyy zzz for Firefox, xxx yyy zz for Xen, xxx yyy zzz for Open Office) really helps to show that you like doing what you do and quite a few people happen to think you're rather good at doing it.
So if you submit, say 10 patches, 3 of them get accepted which helps to get you that 80K a year job, well you did in fact (indirectly) get compensated for your efforts and so did everyone who uses the browser that now works a little better due to your contribs.
I really fail to see anything 'sinister' about that in and of itself, but had no idea that Mozilla brought in that kind of dough. I would have guessed maybe 1 - 2 million, not 50. But even knowing that, I still see it as a win-win situation. Maybe I'm a little more laid back than most.
This is not true.
Every single change in the Mozilla code base is proposed/discussed in a Bugzilla entry, usually called "a bug" no matter if it refers to a defect to be fixed, an enhancement or a new feature.
Patches are attached to those "bugs", and they always require peer review to be accepted and eventually committed, even if they come from Mozilla Corporation paid staff.
So, "they just commit" applies to nobody.
There's a browser safer than Firefox, it is Firefox, with NoScript
Bug 306276 (windows not going where the user wants to put them under OS X) annoys the hell out of me. So much so that I'd happily pay $100 a fix for this in v1.5 or v2.
Is there a centralised system for offering this sort of incentive to volunteers?
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
Even more remarkable: 13 percent of the patches were submitted by Al Gore.
Ba-doom boom
Always someone has power over you. The thing to consider is this: Is the power good, or bad?
Yes, peer review applies to the trunk as well.
The main difference is that new features and "risky" fixes (i.e. large patches with high regression danger) are almost never accepted in a branch, unless they answer an urgent security need.
Trunk, instead, is considered a playground for innovation, but changes are nevertheless bound to the same proposal/discussion/review/commit life cycle.
--
There's a browser safer than Firefox, it is Firefox, with NoScript.
There's a browser safer than Firefox, it is Firefox, with NoScript
Only thing I wish was if they made a good set of centralized documentation for extension development. There are many people who simply give up on extensions because the whole process is such a giant PITA. Hell, some of the fucking documentation is plain wrong unless I'm reading it wrong (like session store and when it does certain things) which is even worse. Other parts are incomprehensible on their own. Finding out how to do something non-trivial should not involve searching five+ different locations (forums, 2+ websites, googling for good measure, other extension's source code, firefox source code).
I mean given the extensions are pretty much Firefox's only strength (Opera is leaner, faster and has more built in features) you'd think they'd put a lot more effort into making it as easy as possible for people to make them.
Wow, so what would that be... damn near 28%?
It was a sad day for me when the Abe Vigoda: Dead or Alive monitor quit working. I liked the Abe face in the corner.
riding round the world on an old motorcycle
I would just like to say thank you to all the volunteers and paid staffers working on FireFox. It's a marvelously useful piece of software and whether you're a core developer or volunteer helping with documentation, I sincerely appreciate FireFox and the universe of helpful plugins available for it.
You've all done a fantastic job and don't get nearly enough credit for how great it really is.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Voting doesn't do anything either. You can tell this, not just by developer comments, but by the fact there is no report in Bugzilla to show the top N voted bugs. (It's possible to make a custom report that kind of gets the result, but if voting were important for decision making it would presumably be a default report).
Many highly voted bugs have been open for years. This is very dissappointing to me as it's these ones (when in core parts of the browser) that I believe the Mozilla developers should be working on. But they show more interest in shiny new features - fine when you're a volunteer, not so great when you're getting paid.
For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert. - Arthur C. Clarke