There’s quite a buzz in the Mozilla community about an organization restructuring. This restructuring comes with the third modification of Mozilla’s roadmap.

Mozilla: Mozilla Development Roadmap. We have come a long way. We have achieved a Mozilla 1.0 milestone that satisfies the criteria put forth in the Mozilla 1.0 manifesto, giving the community and the wider world a high-quality release, and a stable branch for conservative development and derivative product releases. See the Mozilla Hall of Fame for a list of Mozilla-based projects and products that benefited from 1.0.

This is but a small section of the rich discussion of the Mozilla restructuring available at the site, which contains some exciting announcements. Among them:

* Phoenix is going to become Mozilla’s major browser development effort
* Thunderbird—a mail client similar to Phoenix’s agile application design—is going to become Mozilla’s major mail client development effort
* Aside from the migration towards these applications, much of the development effort will now focus on making Mozilla do what it does with a more streamlined codebase
* Advanced-user featuresets will be built as modular plugins—this is particularly good news if you’ve ever tried navigating the drop-down menus in Mozilla and got overwhelmed with too many options

…and there’s more interesting activities that aren’t explicitly constrained to the application end-user.

I’ve had a growing interest in Mozilla over the past year or so as I’ve encountered more educational experience in programming and project management but little ‘real world’ work experience. What’s cool about the project is that everything is out in the open for everyone to see. If you want to learn how to hack Mozilla, you can. If you’re interested in seeing the latest bugs in Phoenix, you can. If you want to discuss issues with the developers directly, you can. If you want to peruse code, you can. Even their development timeline is available. The Mozilla project offers, for the wannabe hacker, an opportunity to see real development efforts in action and, for the project manager, the opportunity to see what works and what doesn’t.

What’s more exciting, though, is that the Mozilla project seems to be undergoing a turning point similar to the one that Linux underwent a couple of years ago: the popularization and user-orientation of the project. Not only has the Mozilla project created a viable, standards-based choice for cross platform development (such as the much anticipated OpenMind project), but is now creating applications that are meaningful for the end user. My favorite of these is, of course, the Phoenix web browser. (Haven’t made Phoenix your primary web browser yet? Here’s a good list of reasons why you should.)

As Mark Pilgrim put it recently, In the future, there will be so much open source software available, programmers will be judged by how much they know about it and how well they can glue it together to build solutions. Looks like this year is going to be a pretty exciting jumpstart into that future.