Chris Hofmann, Mozilla’s Director of Engineering, is asked in an interview about the benefits Firefox gains from being open-source. His reply is almost exhilerating:
The list is long here. The Mozilla Open Source Project has over 80 full-time contributors that work at the Mozilla Foundation, IBM, Sun, Redhat, Novell, Google, and many other companies. We have academic researchers and interns putting in full-time effort helping to improve the code. There really is a collaborative effort among all these participants to make great software. It’s a scientific approach to developing code that involves lots of peer review and open discussion about every change. This helps not only in the area of security, but the quality of all feature and bug fixing work.
There is a long trailing edge of part-time contributors. 884 Contributors provided over 17,000 patches for features and bug fixes during 2004. The part-time contributors help to grind off the rough edges and improve quality. These are things that a commercial software company would not find it economical to do.
Firefox 1.0 is now shipping in 35 languages. The translation of Firefox into all these languages is entirely a volunteer effort. In some cases the translators in these countries become national heroes that bring the web to their people. Mozilla Technology has been translated for use in over 100 languages. The scope of this effort is far beyond anything that could be provided by a single commercial vendor.
There are about 10,000 testers of our ‘nightly development releases’ that help continually assess quality and keep the development effort on track as incremental changes are made to the browser.
There is a passionate community of browser users and promoters at http://www.spreadfirefox.com/ that helps spread the word about Firefox and amazingly raised $250,000 for the Firefox 1.0 marketing effort which included a two page ad in the New York Times. There is a large community of system administrators and mirror sites that provide the hosting and bandwidth needed to distribute over 66 million downloads.
There is a very active community of extension developers that are providing hundreds of small innovative ideas for the next generation of browser features, and are building on top of the Mozilla and Firefox platform.
That is just the start of a long list that describes a very active and passionate community that helps to develop, test, extend, and promote Firefox.
None of this incredible volunteering occurs around proprietary products—nor should it. And this will be the ace up open source’s sleeve. Last month I wrote that the interface is the software—to go further down the tangent of unqualified punditry, I’d say that Firefox’s widespread success demonstrates another rule: The Community is the Product.
