I have to credit Darren Neimke’s Live Portal Page for helping me find this – an interview with Mike Shaver, Chief Evangelist of Mozilla, talking about all kinds of things having to do with managing an Open Source Project. There are a lot of really great insights from a guy on the forefront of the open source movement. Here’s a few of my favorite quotes:

Scaling through the community, not just technically but in terms of organizational resilience, is really important to us.

One of the best ways to motivate the developer community at large is to go get yourself 130 million users.

That conservatism helps us in a lot of core technical ways. It keeps us from getting ahead of our users.

Most generally, people get involved with Mozilla initially by scratching an itch of theirs. So we’ll see people come into the project, on the technical side certainly, with a patch or investigation leading to a patch for something that they care about. And sometimes, that’s where the level of involvement ends; people can pop in and out, they only have that one itch to scratch, and it’s scratched now, so they can go back to doing whatever it was that bumped them into that problem. But some people do really “get the bug” and stick with the project.

You often have to trade off an old capability in order to get a new capability, or to fit into a new model.

But generally, when you look at technical tasks, when you look at things around how the software’s produced, or reviewed, or determined to be released, I struggle to think of anything where employment is a requirement.