Firefox spreading
Here's an amazing, inspiring story. It's about a website which was built to grow the global community for a particular piece of open-source technology. Although in existence for just three months, the site has signed up 50,000 members and recently, in the space of 10 days, it raised $250,000 from 10,000 individuals around the world to place a full page ad in the New York Times extolling the virtues of its "product", the Firefox browser. The site, Spread Firefox, has a new goal now: to raise $500,000 before 1 January. This money will then be donated to grassroots organizations that embrace open source methodologies.
Can the open-source movement harvest and disperse such enormous sums? Certainly. The success of the Howard Dean campaign for the Democratic White House nomination earlier this year showed that the technology is available and if you have the right message the people will use it to respond. By the way, if you are actively involved with open-source technologies and would like to receive a grant from Spread Firefox, they'd like to hear from you. Note: Firefox has been downloaded more than 11 million times.
