It will be fascinating to see how well this works. Mozilla has created a for-profit subsidiary that will work on improving Mozilla’s Thunderbird mail client.
The danger, it seems to me, is that once you’ve got $3 million burning a hole in your pocket, there’s a serious danger that the characteristics that make the free software model viable in the first place—lack of bureaucracy, community enthusiasm, relentless focus on users—will be undermined. The paid employees can begin to see themselves as “running” the project, as opposed to facilitating the collaborative efforts of community members. In a traditional open source project, the only things that get done are the things that somebody is passionate enough to do themselves. On the other hand, in a traditional for-profit company, the product gets the features the CEO thinks the product should have, whether or not anyone else wants those features. Trying to mix the two approaches could be poisonous in an effort in which the bulk of the manpower is still provided by volunteers.
Still, it’s a worthy experiment. And the guy they picked to run it seems like a smart guy who may have the combination of good judgment and humility to pull it off. With the Mozilla Foundation sitting on tens of millions of dollars, they can certainly afford to experiment. Free software is a new enough phenomenon that there’s still a lot to be learned about when and how it can be combined with more traditional top-down management styles.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.