Over 27% of Firefox Patches Come from Volunteers 107
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 (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:making money (Score:3, Interesting)
Oh, wait... that's a sponsored toolbar. Oh my.
Re:I'm surprised it's not higher (Score:5, Interesting)
This is not true.
Every single change in the Mozilla code base is proposed/discussed in a Bugzilla [mozilla.org] 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 [mozilla.org] to be accepted and eventually committed, even if they come from Mozilla Corporation paid staff.
So, "they just commit" applies to nobody.
How do I offer a bounty? (Score:5, Interesting)
Is there a centralised system for offering this sort of incentive to volunteers?