On the contrary, new businesses are cropping up to provide organisations ranging from museums to software companies to the US Department of Defense with Mozilla-based applications -- for a fee.
"Business is pretty crazy right now," said Pete Collins, who last year founded the Mozdev Group in anticipation of demand for private Mozilla development work. "With the popularity of Firefox and the economy rebounding, we've been swamped. We don't even advertise -- clients find us and provide us with work."
The Mozdev Group is still a small shop -- seven employees scattered around the globe, including two new hires. In response to demand, Collins intends to hire two more workers in January, and hourly rates, which range between US$75 and US$100 per hour depending on volume, are going up.
The rise of Mozdev Group and businesses like it is but a small part of a broader corporate interest in open-source software. High-tech stalwarts such as IBM and open-source originals like Red Hat have long embraced the open-source model, selling services and pitching platforms for use with software whose underlying source code is made available online for free and licensed use.
Pete Collins
founder, Mozdev Group
Open-source software businesses have lured even Microsoft veterans into the fold.
The demand for Mozilla development work comes as the Mozilla Foundation's recent Firefox 1.0 release enjoys good reviews and brisk downloads. Mozilla, which then-AOL Time Warner spun off as an independent foundation last year, oversees the volunteer, open-source development of the Firefox browser, the Thunderbird e-mail reader and other software.
Firefox's success ends a long drought for Mozilla, which had racked up a six-year record of extensive delays and suffered from a badly reviewed Netscape release based on its code.
Developers' enthusiasm for Mozilla also fulfills, at least in part, an original goal of the open-source group, which was to establish Mozilla technologies as a platform for application development. To the degree that Mozilla continues to progress in that direction, it succeeds in countering one of archrival Microsoft's most formidable advantages: a far-flung army of independent software developers building software keyed to the Windows operating system and the Internet Explorer browser.
"They've created an easily extensible architecture," Ross Rubin, an analyst with the NPD Group, said of the Mozilla effort. "Once you've done that, all you need is an installed base, and theirs is growing .... Plus (Mozilla) is cross-platform, so it has the opportunity to attract a broader base of developers."
Mozdev Group is the corporate offshoot of MozDev.org, a hosting service where developers can use programming tools for their work on Mozilla-based applications. What MozDev.org developers do for free, Collins and his employees now do for pay.
Clients include the Brooklyn Museum, which ordered an information kiosk; Linspire, which commissioned a suite of software tools; and the US Defense Department, whose order Collins declined to describe, citing confidentiality agreements.
Independent Mozilla-based development is made easier by the terms of the Mozilla Public License (MPL), which, unlike other more restrictive open-source licenses, does not require developers to turn their Mozilla-based applications back over to the open-source effort.
Linspire, for example, is choosing to give back an automatic Web-based spell-checker the Mozdev Group created for the Linspire Internet Suite. Turning over that tool to the open-source development "trunk" means it will get free maintenance, Collins said. But Linspire may opt to hang onto other tools it paid for.
"The MPL lets them do that," Collins said. "That is attractive to clients. But the majority of them do contribute their code back. They're more interested in the solution than having this proprietary system locked up. And if they check it back in they have the QA (quality assurance), and they don't have to maintain it as much. So it's to their advantage."
The Mozdev Group isn't the only one squeezing dimes out of the free, open-source browser project.
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