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.

Don't forget all the other work done by volunteers

[caitriona81]

There's more to Mozilla than coding - volunteers also do quality assurance [mozilla.org], documentation, and other things that aren't reflected in these numbers, but are just as important to the finished product.

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

[UbuntuDupe]

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."

of course they do, because they can

[192939495969798999]

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.

Think of patches like you would in boy scouts.

[tinkertim]

Just because the folks submitting patches aren't being paid by Mozilla, doesn't mean they aren't monetizing their accomplishments.

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, ... maybe 30% of them accepted as-is (or a bit less, this is off the top of my head).

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.
 

Only thing I wish...

[Rakishi]

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.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

And when you're the 100th person to add details to a bug, that has been open for... years.
What then?