Firefox fortune hunters

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marketplace--a trend reflected in the open-source ecosystem as a whole.

"These people are in demand," said Walt Scacchi, a research scientist at the University of California at Irvine's Institute for Software Research who studies the open-source world. "As Mozilla is moving into a wider public audience, software developers who are identified as core contributors are likely to have market opportunities that conventional software developers would not have. If you've contributed to a software system used by millions of people, you've demonstrated something that most software developers have not done."

"If you've contributed to a software system used by millions of people, you've demonstrated something that most software developers have not done."

--Walt Scacchi, researcher, University of California

Those core contributors can expect between 5 percent and 15 percent more in salary compensation than the average software developer, Scacchi said.

Mozilla Foundation representatives declined to be interviewed, but issued a statement stressing the not-for-profit nature of the foundation and its work.

"As to commercial opportunities in general, a number of us at the Mozilla Foundation have heard a range of discussion about how one might make money out of open source in general and Mozilla Firefox in particular," said Mitchell Baker, president of the Mozilla Foundation. "The focus of the Mozilla Foundation, as a nonprofit organization, is on our product, providing a good user experience and fulfilling our core mission of promoting choice and innovation on the Net."

Official statements aside, are people getting involved in Mozilla and other open-source projects to get rich? Not quite, Scacchi said.

"Free and open-source developers get involved primarily for the opportunity to learn about emerging or advanced tools, techniques or methods associated with those projects," he said. "But the consequence is that people who can demonstrate their expertise become the most valued people. So financial capital may follow social capital, rather than the other way around. If you do good and people recognize that, that translates into increasing the value for your personal brand."

"I think the open-source nature of Mozilla is its chief competitive advantage."

--Bart Decrem, CEO, MozSource

Despite IE's overwhelming lead, Mozilla backers say their applications and services will appeal to developers by virtue of being nonproprietary. Microsoft's browser comes preloaded on nearly all computers and enjoys better than 90 percent market share, according to most estimates.

"I think the open-source nature of Mozilla is its chief competitive advantage," Decrem said. "Firefox, Thunderbird and other Mozilla technologies provide a terrific platform for third-party endeavors such as ours. The millions of Firefox users are among the most active on the Web, and Mozilla offers a wide-open platform that's welcoming to all comers."

Like the open-source community it springs from, the Mozilla-based development economy is international.

Mozdev Group's seven employees, for example, telecommute from Slovenia, the Slovak Republic, the United Kingdom and Canada. A minority of the company, including Collins, is located in the United States.

Scacchi stressed the importance of the international component in open-source work-for-profit, especially for engineers in developing high-tech economies who want to build a resume that will attract the interest of established companies.

Perhaps more than the average Mozilla engineer, Collins is watching Firefox's apparent success with the satisfaction of someone who followed a gut instinct to bet on a horse with long odds.

"The more Firefox grows, the bigger the market," said Collins, who described his original investment in Mozdev Group as a gamble. "Then companies will see that they can start solving problems with these technologies, which means more clients, and more of that market we can hopefully service."

[nrlz]

failed to mention one more

This article failed to mention the most direct way in which Firefox is making money. Firefox bundles certain search engines with its search bar and Firefox has business relationships with those companies and gets commissions from them. For example, the eBay search bar generates money for Firefox everytime someone searches eBay using the search bar.

IE's real market share much lower

All the calculation of IE vs. Firefox market share has missed one critical factor: the actual amount of usage of a browser in daily surfing. Most early Firefox lovers like me are more technically prone and keep up with emerging tech trend. These people use browser far more than average folks with IE. For example, my mother-in-law has IE in her computer and surfs web one a day average. My wife and I both have Firefox and we are on and off the net five or six times each every day by average. If consider this factor into calculation of market share, IE may have much lower market share already.

[Ubber geek]

IE in her computer

<a class="jive-link-external" href="http://www.analogstereo.com/kia_shuma_owners_manual.htm" target="_newWindow">http://www.analogstereo.com/kia_shuma_owners_manual.htm</a>

[McDutchie]

Above message is patently false

The parent message is misinformation. The only instance of a money-making referral in Firefox that has been shown so far was in the German translation of FireFox 1.0 in which the ebay search engine was linked through a third-party dataminer. This was a blunder on Mozilla Europe's part which has since been corrected. No other versions or languages of Mozilla or Firefox are known to contain any such thing - and since these programs are open-source and popular, it would be discovered in no time if they did.

[nrlz]

Re: Above message is patently false

The eBay plugin was not a "blunder". It was a referral program to generate money for the Mozilla Foundation.
<a class="jive-link-external" href="http://www.heise.de/english/newsticker/news/53518" target="_newWindow">http://www.heise.de/english/newsticker/news/53518</a>

Even Mitchell Baker (Firefox developer) plainly states, "[w]e provide access to search services from a range of sources including Google, Yahoo, Amazon, eBay and others you can see in Firefox. We expect to see some funds come to the Foundation as a result of our integrated search."
<a class="jive-link-external" href="http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/mitchell/archives/2004/11/firefox_10_now_1.html" target="_newWindow">http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/mitchell/archives/2004/11/firefox_10_now_1.html</a>

And yes, Firefox is open source and it was precisely the fact that it was open source, which allowed this information to be found in no time. (Found within 7 days since the eBay plugin was changed to the referral link.)