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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.
you damn near got me fired!
A goal is a dream with a deadline
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.