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.

Re:making money

[lessthanjakejohn]

The Search bar in the corner

Re:making money

[linvir]

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.

Mozilla makes $50 million a year

[gtoomey]

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 [netscape.com]

Life cycle of changes

[Giorgio Maone]

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 [noscript.net].

Re:Don't forget all the other work done by volunte

[AaronLawrence]

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.