MISSION
: MOZILLA
MOZILLA
IS THE MOST SUCCESSFUL
OPEN SOURCE PROJECT ON THE WEB. THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE
ALL OVER THE WORLD,
MOSTLY VOLUNTEERS, HAVE TAKEN PART IN ITS DEVELOPMENT
SO FAR. SO HOW
DOES IT ALL WORK? HOW DO YOU COORDINATE A TEAM THAT BIG? OLIVER
LINDBERG SEARCHES FOR THE ANSWERS...
Hundreds
of programmers volunteer as part of
the process, while thousands of
people help to test the softwareThings
couldn't go much better for Mozilla at the moment, In less than
two months the web's best browser, Firefox, has been downloaded more
than seven million times, while email client Thunderbird is seriously
threatening the monopolistic position of Outlook Express. How can an
open source project become that successful, and how do you co-ordinate
work between contributors that are spread around the globe?
It all started off as mozilla.org, a loose and informal group of
hackers, established and mainly funded by Netscape in 1998, when the
source code for Netscape Communicator was released as open source.
Mozilla.org continued the development and management of the browser
until July 15, 2003,
when AOL, owner of Netscape and therefore also of
Mozilla, announced it was closing down its browser division, On the
same day, the Mozilla Foundation was launched, a not-for-profit
corporation based in Mountain View, California, and intended to support
and provide leadership for the Mozilla project.
The group is made up of 12 former Netscape and Mozilla employees, who
help to coordinate and delegate the team's administration and many
operations, The committee that runs the Mozilla Foundation is known as
mozilla.org staff and is composed of employees and volunteers (see
http://www.mozilla.org/about/stafflist.html),
many of them veterans with many
years of experience in the Mozilla project, About 40 engineers are
employed by companies like IBM, Sun Microsystems and Red Hat to work
for Mozilla. The mozilla.org staff generally don't see themselves as
the primary coders but as integrators, Unlike most software vendors
Mozilla offers a participatory environment, where anyone can involved,
so most of the code written by people out there or net, Hundreds of
programmers volunteer
as part of the open source process, while thousands of people help to
test the software or volunteer in other ways, There's also a European
division of Mozilla (http://www.mozilla-europe.org)
to promote Mozilla
products throughout the continent. A hundred people work for this
department alone. Because the project is so big, most communication
happens over the net, in newsgroups
WHY
DO YOU CONTRIBUTE TO
MOZILLA?
PETER VAN DER BERKEN
ROLE:
Member
of the Mozilla Europe Board of Directors, super-review module
owner of the XSLT module and co-owner of
the DOM modules
"I got into Mozilla because I
needed functionality that wasn't available in Internet Explorer for
MacOS so downloading Internet Explorer wouldn't have helped. Mozilla
has given me the opportunity of contribute to a large scale software
project and learn
a lot. Since I've never had a formal education in
programming, I've always felt like programming would be a simple hobby
for me. Mozilla has changed that, because of its open-source nature I
could just jump in and learn how a large scale software project evolves
how it's built.... It landed me a job with Netscape and made me realise
that I loved programming to the point that I didn't mind doing it full
time. And it's a fun project because it's used be so many users."
GERVASE MARKHAM
ROLE:
Mozilla.org staff member, responsible for the relicensing project and
trademarks
"I originally got involved
with the Mozilla project because I wanted to get involved with a free
software group, and I felt that access to the web should not be
controlled by a single company. The developing world, for example has
the right to web access without paying an unbearable software tax. As a
Christian with a deep concern for the poor and an ability to write
code, this is one way I can make this happen."
and mailing lists, the bug systems
or Mozilla's IRC channels. Funding comes from corporations (AOL has
promised $2 million over two years), individuals (almost 4000 people
donate around £5,500 per month ; 12,000 people have donated
more
than £160,000 to date) and through professional services for
enterprise customers (e.g. custom development and technical support)
and
merchandising, The amount of community support Firefox, Mozilla's most
prominent product, enjoys is simply amazing, The Spread Firefox
campaign (http://www.spreadfirefox.com)
is extremely successful and comes up with
ever-new means to promote the browser's release, Recently, over 10,000
people have donated money to the organisation's bid to buy a full-page
ad in the New York Times, celebrating the launch of Firefox a unique
move you're unlikely to see in response to a new IE release. Wherever
Mozilla's contributors are and whatever they do, they all share a
unique enthusiasm for their project. Most of them don't get paid at all
but they still dedicate a huge amount of time to the project. Brian
Ryner, a key Firefox contributor, explains: "We have a diverse
community, and everyone's motivation is different, so It's hard to
generalize, I think the reason we have so many volunteers, though, is
that people feel involved. If they find a problem, they can help fix
it, and get the immediate benefit of not having to deal with it any
more.
Tristan Nitot, president of Mozilla Europe, agrees: "Some people enjoy
working on a product used by millions of people, some others do it for
the pleasure of working on a huge project, or just for the pleasure of
developing and hang out with brilliant people and learn from
them," Personally, Tristan got involved because he wasn't happy with
Microsoft's development: "If we look at Redmond's [Microsoft] products,
we can see that since IE 5.5 (back in 1999), not much progress has been
done, IE 6.0 was released in 2001 with mostly cosmetic features, and
recently pop-up blocking, but limited to Windows XP users, Let's face
it: Microsoft abandoned the web five years ago, So I wondered what
could I do to change this? What can I do to get a faster, better, more
secure browser? This is how I decided to contribute to the Mozilla
project,"
The Benevolent Dictator
Mozilla operates as a meritocracy, this means the more code you
contribute, the more you'll be allowed to contribute, Each module in
Mozilla has an owner, generally somebody who knows the code well, is
involved in developing it and who can decide what should go into the
module and what not (for a list of module owners see http://www.mozilla.org/owners.html)
It can be difficult to make decision in such a huge, open source team
that's so spread apart but Mozilla uses a self-regulating system,
called a benevolent dictator. If a module owner doesn't do a very good
job and somebody on the net comes up with something better, both
programmers can work out their differences. If this doesn't work out,
the mozilla,org staff can make a final decision. Usually people tend to
cooperate, however. Ben Goodger, lead engineer for Firefox,
says: "As project leader, I guess the buck stops with me, but the
engineers working on this software are all pretty savvy and own their
components pretty well. If there's a disagreement between two people
and I don't see the obvious solution, I take a variety of opinions from
a number of people,"
The same is true for every part of Mozilla, For example, much of the
branding and artwork for Firefox has been done by people in the UK, the
US and Canada. Steven Garrity is the lead of the Mozilla Visual
Identity Team, "After assembling a team of designers to help work on
the logos, two co-workers and I set about coming up with the basic
concept," he remembers, "After lots of deliberation, we concluded that
there weren't many good visual elements that represent a web browser.
The globe was the best element we could find to represent the browser.
If I remember correctly, the idea to have the fox with a flaming tail
wrapped around the globe was a collective conclusion between the three
of us," The concept then got the okay from some of the key Firefox
developers, and the Mozilla Foundation approved the final logo (check
out http://www.tinyurl.com/6ylwm
and http://www.tinyurl.com/5bsoe
for a more detailed explanation of the process),
HOW FIREFOX WAS BUILT
BEN GOODGER
ROLE: Lead engineer for Firefox
and member of the Mozilla Foundation
"Firefox was built as an
offshoot of the Mozilla project - starting with the code that made up
the Mozilla application suite, stripping out the unnecessary items and
then rebuilding it with new ones with an emphasis on simplicity,
elegance and function. A large number of people contribute to the
development of Firefox wither directly by helping to improve the
browser or indirectly through their work on the Gecko rendering
technology which is shared by other Mozilla software. The Mozilla
foundation has a paid staff, of which some work on various pieces of
Firefox, the build and release automation that allows us to ship
software to the people and maintains the various tools that we use to
get our jobs done. Other companies such as IBM also employ people who
work on various aspects of Mozilla software.
Bug bounty
One of the most crucial aspects of Mozilla's success is security. To
make sure that bugs are found and fixed as fast as possible, the
project has come up with the Mozilla Quality Assurance
(QA), a network of countless volunteers from the internet
community and several mozilla,org employees (http://www.mozilla.org/quality),
Bugs are usually reported through bug report database Bugzilla (bugzilla.mozilla.org)
and then looked at by QA volunteers, Mozilla receives about 75 to 100
bugs and enhancement requests a day, Tristan Nitot explains the system:
"When code is checked in, the product is available for testing for some
time (this is what we call nightly builds), and people on the internet
can look at it and make sure it's safe, With our new Bug Bounty
program, we encourage people to look for security holes and report them
to us, For every security bug found, the person who discovered it is
given $500 (around £277), Then it's up to us to quickly ship
a new release or a patch for the product." The Mozilla team also makes
sure that no feature will be included in the software if there's a
security risk in its concept, Finally, there's a double review process
to ensure that only high quality code is added to Mozilla, The code to
be checked-in is reviewed twice, once by a peer and once by a peer
recognised super-reviewer, who's responsible for the overall
code quality and checks that Mozilla coding style and practices are
respected,
The Mozilla team has demonstrated that a huge open source project with
many dedicated contributors can be extremely successful indeed, In
fact, the more contributors it gets, the better it becomes. And it's so
much more satisfying than just being an anonymous consumer, You're part
of a community. Mozilla has changed the way people use the internet
forever. Once you've used Firefox, you'll never go back.
BRIAN
RYNER
ROLE:
Leading Firefox developer
"It's important to remember
that the Mozilla project has been around since 1998, and Firefox is a
relatively recent project. So we had a great foundation of code from
the Mozilla Suite to use for building Firefox. Our goal was to slim
down the browser to make it more usable, make it look better visually,
and add some innovative features along the way. There are only about 4
or 5 people in the core Firefox team. In general, companies
are interested in seeing Mozilla succeed and commit people and
financial resources towards it. In addition to the core developers, we
have hundreds of people who help by finding and fixing bugs. These
people often volunteer in their own time."