Community Participation Stats

Not sure if anyone else picked up this blog conversation between Asa and Sam Harrelson about online marketing and open source. IMO, Asa does a nice job discussing with Sam the size, vibrancy and contribution of Mozilla Community.

A few months in advance of Asa’s comments in that post, he and I ran a few MySQL queries against the Bugzilla database to get a sense of how much work had been contributed by volunteers leading up to the release of Firefox 2.

What we did?

We looked for those developers who had submitted 50 or more patches to the source code for the six months before Fx2. Why the lower bound of 50? Initially, I was trying to find a list of the key contributors to our software whom I could email to see how or if Mozilla could provide any resources.[1] We needed to draw a line somewhere, so when we first began, we searched for long-standing and key contributors to the project. Initially, we could reach out to them to see if we could help, and then move to those who may have fallen under our lower bound of 50.

Asa and I then cross-referenced those results with a list of Mozilla employees and contractors in order to remove the people who were getting paid to work on Mozilla full-time.

Finally, we added up all the volunteer-submitted patches and divided that number into the total number of patches from the query.

Here is what we found:

• 27% of the patches to Firefox and Gecko and other key projects were submitted by key volunteers. [2]
• Those patches represent 24% of changes made to the source code. [3]

What we learned and what we will consider next time we run the analysis…

1) No lower bound. Next time: let’s look at all patches submitted to the code in Bugzilla for Firefox, even if a volunteer only submitted one patch. This will give a better sense of total community participation and I suspect the percentage of community participation will go up.

2) This analysis did not include data gathered from queries to CVS. To start, we will probably stick to queries on Bugzilla data rather than other databases. But, as we do this analysis more regularly, perhaps we’ll expand to include queries on the version control system.

3) The analysis focused on Gecko, Firefox, Thunderbird, Mozilla Application Suite, NSS, Toolkit and “Other Apps”.

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[1] To be clear, we did this query for all the main Mozilla products tracked in Bugzilla, not just Firefox.

[2] Remember, we had a lower bound of 50 patches or more per developer. Admittedly, this was probably high. Next time, we’ll go lower.

[3] This number may not be all that informative because we took the aggregate byte size of just volunteer patches and divided that into the sum of the byte size of all patches submitted to the source.

Sun’s Corporate Responsibility Report Includes Open Source

Sun released its first ever corporate social responsibility (CSR) report this January. (You may read or download it here.) It is clear from the front page of their CSR website that Sun is making a strong effort to be a leading corporate citizen by working toward “economic, environmental and social sustainability.” Their website states, “Sun’s corporate social responsibility strategy can be defined in three words: Innovate, Act, and Share.”

It makes a special effort to describe the benefits of open source. Starting on page twenty-six, Sun describes what it is doing to “Share” and its efforts to make a lot of its software open. They use the open sourcing of key Java implementations under the GNU General Public License 2 (GPLv2) as an example of their philosophy “that sharing and building communities through inclusion and open systems makes innovation and participation possible.”

I was excited to see that Sun considers “Sharing” and open source a pillar in the foundation of their efforts to be a more responsible corporate citizen. Please take a look and tell me what you think. I’d love to read what the Mozilla community thinks of the CSR report that Sun has released.