Firefox Culture

Over the years, I have worked with open source software and have been fascinated by the cultural elements that run in parallel with the technical aspects. Open source software fosters a strong sense of community and a culture of freely shared innovation. Mozilla Firefox, which just celebrated its first birthday, is a great example of this phenomenon. A community of enthusiastic people got together to develop the Firefox browser, and with a focused, but grassroots Spread Firefox campaign, they have reached 100 million downloads and are getting close to 10% of the worldwide browser market. In addition to the many user contributions to the primary Firefox product, user innovations are encouraged through the use of user developed extensions and themes that are freely shared with other users.