Many people unfamiliar with open source may dismiss the bulk of the community as a anti-microsoft, anti-capitalist student body. These people have not experienced the power of an open community first-hand. Finding free hours to do volunteer works is though, but many long-time contributors stay committed because of the encouragement, strong peer support, and learning the community has provided.

Here are some quotes from our contributors:

Ali Ebrahim 

The Mozilla community is wonderful, and is what makes spending time on Mozilla worthwhile for me. I know that without the Mozilla community on IRC and MozillaZine, I would never have gotten involved in Firefox QA.

Jesse Ruderman 

Some more things that encouranged me to continue contributing:

• Finding security holes and realizing I had a valuable skill.
• mpt's comments in Bugzilla about user interface design were interesting and taught me a lot.
• The bugathon (http://www.mozillazine.org/articles/article635.html).

Josh Aas 

Its funny to see my name on the tinderbox checkins after all of these years... Its not really a big deal, but I can't help feeling like it symbolizes how far I've come from the days when I thought tinderbox was just an annoying sidebar in Mozilla M14. I owe a lot to other Mozilla developers (and Camino developers in particular), but I especially need to thank Mike Pinkerton. He has spent a very generous amount of his time making me a better developer over the past year or two.

Daniel Wang 

Feedbacks: In fact, I remember I first got started because of the little feedbacks I got from Brant Langer Gurganus, Gerv, bz, and maybe others I've missed in bugzilla.mozilla.org. You guys may think of it as nothing, but knowing that someone does care means a lot to a new comer. Well, here I get a lot of feedbacks, in forms of private messages, blogs, blog comments, and ratings. It's fun seeing how one idea gets propagated and expanded.

Gervase Markham 

I didn't think I had the "31337 coding skillz" to get involved in a free software project, but I found a page on mozilla.org about getting involved in their QA organisation, so I did that. Being involved with QA let me get well acquainted with the product without being intimidated, and now I'm one of their more senior QA volunteers - I now maintain that "getting involved with QA" page :-). I am also beginning to get stuck into bug fixing of the code itself (I posted my first one-line patch this morning.)