Agreed. Maybe there should be a link on mozilla.org to the article

There's no fair way to measure that. If I write a 10 line patch while watching TV one night, and then a Netscape employee spends an hour reading it, applying it to her tree and then testing it, gets r/sr= and checks it in to the next version of Mozilla, what %age work did I do ?

If we count lines of code that was 100% me, if we look at time spent it was 95% Netscape, it we measure comments in Bugzilla it might be an 80:20 split. Statistics are only useful if you understand WHY as well as WHAT and HOW MANY.

As a guestimate I would say that at least 90% of the resources plowed into Mozilla are coming from AOL/Time Warner/Netscape/Pepsi or whatever that corporation is these days. Don't underestimate the value of the other commercial interests and volunteers though, they are essential to the Mozilla project.

I don't know the precise reasons for the "special" Netscape rules, maybe someone more responsible can enlighten you. I do know that mcom.com internal machines (like sweetlou) are for internal Netscape use only. If you see one mentioned where it seems Mozilla.org would be more appropriate then politely ask for the patch/ data/ whatever to be moved somewhere public.

"There must be some way of gauging what proportion of the development effort comes from salaried Netscape employees vs. all other contributors."

I'm sure there are a million ways to build data about netscape vs. not-netscape contributions and there are even more ways to interpret that data. I'm not sure what this would get us so I'm not going to even try.

"I noticed special procedures for NS people on the page describing smoketest procedures -- what is that about?"

In addition to paying developers to work on Mozilla, Netscape also pays QA engineers to test Mozilla. One area of Mozilla testing that Netscape participates in is smoketesting. The Netscape paid QA engineers test daily Netscape builds which are basically daily Mozilla builds plus some Netscape specific bits like spellchecker (available to Netscape employees on a server called sweetlou). The smoketesting document is shared between Netscape and non-Netscape smoketesters. There are a few items (marked with white backgrounds) that are either specific to the Netscape daily builds or are tests that are only available to Netscape employees.

--Asa