Peter Lairo wrote:
> Either, there is something fishy about the legal
> structure of this project, or mozilla.org doesn't do enough to attract
> new contributers.
I wanted to make a couple more comments about legal structure:
Mozilla is clearly a corporate-initiated and corporate-sponsored open
source project. In this respect the Mozilla project is similar to other
corporate-initiated open source projects sponsored by Sun
(OpenOffice.org and Netbeans), IBM (Jikes), HP (Cooltown and e-Speak),
Lutris Technologies (Enhydra), Digital Creations/Zope, Inc. (Zope), and
so on.
In this respect the Mozilla project is fundamentally different from
projects like GCC, the Linux kernel, Apache, GNOME, and so on which
started out as volunteer-initiated and volunteer-run projects and only
later attracted corporate support and participation.
Many of the major volunteer-initiated projects (not all) have associated
nonprofit organizations: the FSF, Apache Software Foundation, the GNOME
Foundation, etc. Most corporate-initiated projects do not have
associated nonprofit organizations; there is no "legal structure" other
than that provided by the corporations themselves. Mozilla is fairly
typical of corporate-initiated projects in this respect.
As for doing more to attract contributors, there's always more we could
do. But there's a lot of stuff that's already been done to attract
contributors, and a lot of contributors in fact have been attracted.
Thus I think it's misleading when people single the Mozilla project out
as particularly lacking in this regard.
Frank
--
Frank Hecker
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
