Let's dispose first of the rather mundane David and Goliath story that has been the focus of most recent news coverage of the Mozilla Foundation. "We're not out to hurt Microsoft," Brendan Eich says, "so much as to help the Web."
Eich's words might sound like mere braggadocio if not for the startling success of the first consumer product released by the foundation, a nonprofit descendant of Netscape Communications Corp. that he serves as chief software architect.
Mozilla's free Firefox 1.0 Web browser, unveiled Nov. 9 to ecstatic reviews, has been downloaded since then by more than 6 million users; counting earlier test versions, it may already be running on more than 30 million computers.
It may also be responsible for the first recorded decline in market share experienced by Microsoft Corp.'s Explorer browser in at least five years.
Firefox's advantages over Explorer make its rapid acceptance unsurprising. Among other virtues, it's faster, more resistant to viruses and spyware and full of useful features that Microsoft, complacent in its near-monopoly, has never provided for Explorer. (Firefox is available at www.mozilla.org.)
Even more interesting, Firefox is the product of an informal group of fewer than 20 programmers, many of them volunteers from around the world working for free, assisted by thousands of technology aficionados who have contributed ideas, identified bugs and tested interim versions on their computers over the years. Their emotional investment in the project resembles that of Apple Macintosh fans: Programmers have already developed Firefox versions in 24 languages, including Slovenian, Chinese and Asturian.
Firefox could be the most successful general-purpose program ever created by the "open source" process, in which the programming code of a project or system is publicly available for enhancement or extension by programmers at large.
For all that the term "open source" may conjure an image of thousands of programmers hacking away in isolation, Firefox -- which Mozilla will soon supplement with an e-mail program, Thunderbird -- also shows that a successful open-source project can't be merely a public free-for-all.
To be successful, it must be carefully managed, although not as firmly as a corporate effort aimed at creating a proprietary product. "There have to be one or two minds in charge," says Eich.
