| > Getting a large enough group of contributors is hard. Not really. This is a thought-terminating cliche in the form of a just-so explanation. The group of volunteer contributors who were underpinning Mozilla's success at its peak was quite large and healthy, complete with its own governance model. But then Mozilla Foundation essentially handed the keys over to the Firefox subproject, which in turn made a bunch of questionable hiring decisions, including people that deeply affected the project at an organizational level. The really perverse thing is that a very similar thing had already happened once before—with Netscape. It was those very circumstances that led to Mozilla's original governance model as an insurance policy against any one corporate group accumulating too much power after getting it into their heads that they were the real reason for the project's upward trajectory and the only thing they needed to do to really get things on track was wrest full control of the golden goose. Mozilla's "failure" began when every random yahoo who managed to get through the company's hiring process was ipso facto part of a privileged class and anyone not on payroll became second-tier consideration at best (or more realistically, seen as a nuisance). This "failing", of course, is the kind of failure that grew revenue to half a billion per year even as Firefox was getting thrashed, so whether you consider that a failure or success will come down to principles. If your idea of success is tied to the organization's charter, its openness and approachability, enabling people to shape the future of the Web even when not on the payroll under a browser vendor, and its "market" adoption and the tractability of developing an independent browser engine, then Mozilla is a failure. If, on the other hand, you're predisposed to seeing high revenue as a success, then Mozilla has been winning up to the point when it will inevitably fail due to unsustainability and its approach of salting the earth around it, pulling up the metaphorical ladder, etc. > For Linux this works since it was built over decades and contributors come from variety of backgrounds (students who want to learn, hardware companies who want to have support of their hardware, users who want it to be fast, companies which want to make it sort of a product (distributors etc.) That's a pretty accurate description of Mozilla for a large part of its history pre-FirefoxOS. Mozilla was incredibly effective even before the number of people getting paychecks from anything called "Mozilla" had reached the low hundreds. |
How hard it is, we can see even within Mozilla related products: Since Mozilla stopped the Mozilla Suite (SeaMonkey) hasn't seen much uptake, and Thunderbird is mostly stagnating as well.