It is very unusual to see main steam IT press do really insightful reports on Open Source success stories, however this article from Wired has me thinking that perhaps that situation is changing. In the story, they detail some of the reasons why people are swapping to Firefox, the people that had the idea for Firefox, the thoughts behind the decision to create it, and the astounding success that Firefox is having in changing the course of the Internet at large. (Mostly because now that Microsoft has serious competition in the browser market, it will not be able to disregard the W3c standards in favour of their own proprietary versions due to be included in their Longhorn release in 2006/2007.)
It’s a fascinating read, full of interesting details. Did you know for example, that one of Firefox’s top programmers now works at Apple working on their Safari web browser? And a more recent hiring has seen another of their top programmers now working for Google (paid to spend half his time working on Firefox). With Firefox 1.0 downloads now exceeding 20 million in less then 80 days since it’s release, it’s good to get an idea of the people behind Firefox, including the couple of dozen programmers paid for by IBM and Sun. The thing that stands out to me most from reading this, is that having a university degree will eventually get you a good job, but showing you have talent and vision when working on a well known OSS application will apparently bring you to the attention of those employers more quickly. Besides, getting a degree in computer science only proves that you know the rules, it doesn’t prove you have either vision or talent. The Firefox explosion.
