Mozilla's Crowdsourcing Mystique

"Mystique" is a good word, since they have this mystique about being this egalitarian, community driven organization, but in reality, Mozilla is a fairly badly run open source project. The 40% number in the article counts localizers, doc writers, and other ancillaries, so it seems high, but the vast majority of core code changes are done by Mozilla Corp. employees.

The project is really quite insular. Straightforward bug fixes may go in smoothly sometimes, but try to get any feedback on feature suggestions, and you'll often find deaf ears, even if you're willing to do the implementation. Or may submit a patch to bugzilla for a bugfix, and it'll just get ignored. But then a year later someone at MoCo runs into the same bug doing Firefox work, comes up with roughly the same patch, and it hits the tree within a day.

There's also significant components where nobody in the organization actually understands how they work, so if you submit a patch to say, XPConnect, it won't ever go in because nobody feels confident enough to review it.

WebKit is actually more vibrant in terms of non-Apple code contributions than Mozilla.