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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.
Sure, they give the software away, but they make it up in volume!
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.
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.
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Won't you please help support their work? Just visit any web site, you'll get some downloaded for free!
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.
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
Using the mouse! That's faster than hitting [Windows Key]->"S"->[enter]->[enter], arrowing to "Accessibility options", pushing enter, then pushing [tab] nine times, then using the arrow to get to the "Mouse" tab, then pushing [alt-m] to turn on mousekeys, [alt-a] to apply the change, then using my number pad to navigate to the search bar and click it. danke! :)
A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take away everything you have.