Quarter of Firefox patches submitted by volunteers

Volunteer coders submitted 24 per cent of the changes made to the source code of Firefox, according to research carried out by Mozilla.

Seth Bindernagel, who runs Mozilla's community giving program, ran a set of queries against the organisation's Bugzilla database that tracks bugs and flaws in Firefox and other Mozilla applications to find out how much work on fixing problems with the browser had been carried by volunteers.

He looked at volunteer developers who submitted 50 or more patches to the source code in the six months leading up to the release of Firefox 2. Bindernagel found that 27 per cent of the patches to Firefox and Gecko and other key projects were submitted by these key volunteers and those patches represented 24 per cent of changes made to the source code.

Bindernagel said that he hoped to re-run the test looking at anyone has even submitted a single patch to the source code to get a better idea of volunteer participation.

"This will give a better sense of total community participation and I suspect the percentage of community participation will go up," said Bindernagel.

Meanwhile, Google is running another Summer of Code this year to support open source projects.

Now in its third year, the scheme brings thousands of student developers together to work on around 100 open source projects, such as Firefox, over a three month period.

Writing on his blog, Leslie Hawthorn of Open Source Team at Google said that the company was "forward to helping new contributors join the community and write more code."

The company will start accepting applications to the project in March.

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