The Mozilla Foundation is planning to use some of its millions of dollars in revenues to fund active members of its developer community, the organization said on Tuesday.
The foundation made $5.8 million in 2004 and is thought to have made tens of millions of dollars last year, predominantly from partnerships with search companies, such as Google and Yahoo. Though much of its money has gone toward increasing its headcount, some has been used to bulk up its reserve fund.
Mitchell Baker, the chief executive of the Mozilla Corporation, the commercial arm of the Mozilla Foundation, said Mozilla plans to put some of its excess revenues back into the community.
"The Mozilla Group — the foundation and the corporation — has a set of employees that provide a critical mass where things can happen, but it is only a piece of the project. There are vast numbers of things that happen outside our employee base," she said. "We have a commitment that while we have funds beyond our operating levels, some of it should to go to community members. We want to do that in a way that promotes the community."
Baker said she doesn't yet have a date for when this will happen but is currently working on a model for how the funds will be distributed and hopes Mozilla will be able to start pouring money into the community "soon". The Mozilla community will also be given a chance to comment on the model, according to Baker.
"There's not a model in the open source community that we can point to and copy," she said. "We have contributors spread around the world doing a range of different things and we need to work out what would make sense for them. We don't want to set up a model, have a big PR event about it, disperse the money and then find out it has no effect or gets to the wrong people."
Though a number of open source projects, such as JBoss and MySQL, have used their revenues to hire contributors, it is relatively unusual that money is put straight back into the community, according to Rishab Ghosh, the programme leader of an EU-funded open source research project at Dutch research institute MERIT.
"Mozilla is somewhat unusual among open source projects because it has a product with a very high end-user visibility, and the foundation earns revenues that are substantial. In most other open source projects, it is individual contributors (including companies) who earn revenues, and developers earn money through consultancy or employment. So it's great that the Mozilla Foundation is considering funding particular individuals," said Ghosh in an email.
Though Baker said she had been warned that distributing funds could "distort" its volunteer community, Ghosh claimed this risk could be mitigated by distributing funds according to measurable criteria.
"Such funding can be tricky unless it is based on objective criteria — luckily there are several metrics that are easily and publicly available, such as the number of lines of code contributed by a given person," he said.
Talkback
My understanding is that contributors to open source projects do so because they want to make a difference to the world.
Why not build on that altruistic behaviour?
Why not say "your contribution has been worth $x to Mozilla. Which organisation do you wish your money to be sent to?". The contributor could select a charity or, perhaps, a struggling open source project.
I strongly feel that paying for contributions will be disasterous to the volunteer ethos which binds these projects together.
As soon as money - even small amounts - is involved, some people will become interested in the project because of the money, not the love of the work.
These people will find the inevitable loopholes and inconsistencies in whatever payment scheme is created.
Others will lose out, and, once they find out, feel aggrieved.
The project as a whole might gain a slightly larger workforce, but time and energy will be spent by that workforce making sure that they're being treated fairly.
Allowing people to donate their "earnings" will make them feel doubly good about themselves. Watching others steal their money will just make them feel bad