Why pay for staff?
Many thanks to those who took the time to comment on our anniversary message. It’s extremely gratifying to hear first hand from people who appreciate the Mozilla project. Looking back at the message, one thing that pops out at me is the single line about our development team. This really is a key element of our success, so I thought I’d add some detail.
The Mozilla project has been managed by a virtual organization known as “mozilla.org staff” since the founding of the project. There’s much that could be said about mozilla.org staff, but I’ll leave that for another time. Over the years mozilla.org staff have given a good deal of though about how best to create an independent Mozilla Foundation. One big question was whether the Foundation should have employees, and if so, how many? The Apache Software Foundation doesn’t, or at least didn’t for many years. The GNOME Foundation and Python Software Foundations don’t; the Open Source Applications Foundation does. And if the Mozilla Foundation ought to have employees, how many should we start with?
We thought about a minimal model, with only 1 or 2 employees. This would certainly have been easier financially. We eventually started out with 11 employees. Mozilla Foundation personnel are divided among: (i) those focused on the project wide resources (technical leadership, infrastructure, tools, website management, builds, releases, QA); (ii) those focused on the codebase itself — Firefox, Thunderbird, Gecko, the DOM, JavaScript; and (iii) a few, like me, focused on all the other things the project and the Mozilla Foundation need to be successful — relationships with commercial contributors and other structured entities like Mozilla Europe, legal structure, trademarks, finances, etc.
It’s a small group for the scope of the project, but it’s a big group for a non-profit, open source project to support. While the minimal solution was attractive for its low-stress nature, we decided that the project was unlikely to reach its potential without a core group of 10 or so. Here’s why.
- The World Wide Web is not finished. It’s changing all the time. New content types develop, new technologies develop, and new possibilities emerge. The browser is the means by which all this content is made available to the general population. If the browser doesn