Slashdot Mirror

(from the 1999 Free Software Award Nominee page)

• 1.Tom Adelstein
• 2.Eric Allman
• 3.Lennart Augustsson
• 4.Stig Bakken
• 5.Donald Becker
• 6.Brian Behlendorf
• 7.Tim Berners-Lee -- inventor of the World Wide Web
• 8.Jim Blandy
• 9.Craig Burley
• 10.Thomas Bushnell
• 11.Shane Caraveo
• 12.James Clark
• 13.Alan Cox -- major Linux kernel hacker
• 14.Miguel de Icaza
• 15.DJ Delorie -- DJGPP
• 16.Theo De Raadt -- founder of the OpenBSD project
• 17.Matthias Ettrich
• 18.Paul Eggert
• 19.Ralf S. Engelschall
• 20.Fred Fish
• 21.Olivier Fourdan
• 22.Fractint Team
• 23.John Gilmore
• 24.Andi Gutmans
• 25.Chuck Hagenbuch
• 26.Carsten Haitzler
• 27.Charles Hannum
• 28.Shawn Hargreaves -- Allegro game programming library
• 29.Geoff Harrison
• 30.Mike Heins
• 31.Joey Hess
• 32.Earl Hood
• 33.Jordan K. Hubbard
• 34.Dan Ingalls
• 35.Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen
• 36.Kyle Jones
• 37.Bill Joy -- Sun, vi editor
• 38.Alexandre Julliard
• 39.Mike Karels
• 40.Jeremy Katz
• 41.Spencer Kimball
• 42.Donald E. Knuth -- author of Art of Computer Programming
• 43.Werner Koch
• 44.Alfredo Kenji Kojima
• 45.Jeffrey A. Law
• 46.Patrick Lenz
• 47.Marc Lehmann
• 48.Rasmus Lerdorf
• 49.Mark Linton
• 50.Paul Mackerras
• 51.Peter Mattias
• 52.Doug McEachern
• 53.Caolan McNamara
• 54.Kirk McKusick
• 55.Bram Moolenaar
• 56.Tobias Oetiker
• 57.Tim O'Reilly -- O'Reilly books
• 58.John Ousterhout
• 59.Dave Rand
• 60.Brian Paul
• 61.Nicholas Petreley
• 62.Bernhard Rosenkraenzer
• 63.Alessandro Rubini
• 64.Dr Douglas Schmidt
• 65.Keith Sklower
• 66.W. Richard Stevens -- Unix Network Programming
• 67.Darryl Strauss, Zeev Suraski
• 68.Danny ter Haar
• 69.Andrew Tridgell
• 70.Jorrit Tyberghein
• 71.Bert Tyler
• 72.Guido van Rossum -- Python programming language
• 73.Miquels van Smoorenburg
• 74.Wietse Venema
• 75.Paul Vixie -- cron daemon
• 76.Patrick Volkerding
• 77.Tim Wegner
• 78.Jim Winstead
• 79.Jamie Zawinski
• 80.Phil Zimmerman.

Granted, some of these have been covered already, but maybe a handful at the most. I must confess to maybe knowing who 10% of these people are. I would sure like to know something about the rest of them. Just imagine all the cool stuff each of these people has to offer--why in the world are we looking to interview inflamatory, damaging people like JP?

Just trying to help :-) I figure 80 some odd suggestions should keep you busy for a while.

And yes, they can tell if it's encrypted, because encryption, or at least good encryption, does obey a certain statistical pattern

It is easy to munch some large corpus to gather statistics, then use a markov-chain system to output "pseudo-English". One fun program that does this is JWZ's DadaDodo, but there are more sofisticated versions too. It is not difficult to feed an encrypted message into this system instead of the normal random-number source, to generate an "English" message with the same entropy as the original (encrypted) one. (after all, the cyphertext is supposed to approximate random noise). Then the receiver can reconstruct the cyphertext, provided s/he had access to the same corpus that was used to generate the statistics.

Of course, it is still easy to tell that the output is not genuine English - if you are a human. If the sender uses the most sophisticated models of English known, however, it will not be possible to automatically differentiate this messages from normal unencrypted email. (Of course, some care has to be taken to keep the corpus secret, etc, etc...).

I have in fact read about PGP hacks that does this. The reason they are not used more often is probably because, as other posters has pointed out, there is currently no harrasment of crypto-users.

(I submitted the patch way back on Nov.8th 1999 to XMame & didn't get credit, but it was trivial...so no fuss. Read the man page for XScreensaver and look at the text covering vroot.h. This is easy to do with other programs because -- duh -- the source is available.)

(I submitted the patch way back on Nov.8th 1999 to XMame & didn't get credit, but it was trivial...so no fuss. Read the man page for XScreensaver and look at the text covering vroot.h. This is easy to do with other programs because -- duh -- the source is available.)

Last I checked, xmame didn't support drawing on the root window. Pity, since I think it would be very cool to have some of these video games as my screensavers via xscreensaver

Does anyone know if this has changed, or how hard it would be to get a "-root" option to xmame?

It as fun for about a day, at which point my mail server started getting flooded with mail for every username across the board. Most popular was unsubscribe@unsubscribe.com, but fuckyou@unsubscribe.com was pretty high on the list as well.

One spammer even decided to set his Reply-to: address to one that had the @unsubscribe.com domain.

Eventually, I decided that the best thing I could do was to remove the MX and A records, thus saving me the trouble of having to deal with bogus email, and saving everyone who has decent mail filters set up (ie, reject from unknown hosts) some extra spam.

It is nothing but an eclave of newcomer dot-commie yuppies who work 80 hours a week in trivial and worthless web crap. They make tons of money, which somehow is only enough to pay for a crummy studio appartment and an SUV. They drive around recklessly, endangering the lives of cyclists like me. There is no fucking culture here, just an endless expanse of strip malls, office buildings, or yuppie stores. Meanwhile, those who work in other jobs, say, janitors, have to work 2 jobs, become vegetarians, and live with more than one family to the house just to make ends meet. Avoid this place like the plague. It is, in the words of JWZ, Hell on Earth.

I'm not really interested in listening to find out...

I'm not really interested in listening to find out...

when will Mesa get the aquarium screensaver?

I think the rationale behind assigning copyright to the FSF up front is to prevent another xemacs situation. The copyright for xemacs is so fragmented, the probability approaches zero that the fork can ever be joined. Preemptive copyright assignation (nifty term, eh?) would keep that from happening again.

Nice theory; too bad it has nothing to do with reality.

All of the work that went into Lucid Emacs had copyright assigned to the FSF. Let me say that again, since people seem to selectively forget it: every version of Lucid Emacs, from 19.0 through 19.10, had FSF copyright notices, and had all the appropriate paperwork signed and delivered to RMS. That did not prevent the fork. The fork happened for reasons that will hopefully be made clear to anyone who chooses to read the archive of the debate at the time rather than relying on rumor and half-remembered fragments.

It may be that the fact that today's XEmacs has many different copyrights in it makes a merge with FSFmacs be less likely, by virtue of the fact that RMS absolutely demands copyright assignment. However, the copyrights had nothing to do with the Lemacs/FSFmacs split, and the reasons for that split still exist as well: so the copyright issue is surely lost in the noise. Even if the XEmacs folks assigned RMS their copyrights tomorrow, a merger would still never happen, for all the same reasons as were true in 1992.

I think the rationale behind assigning copyright to the FSF up front is to prevent another xemacs situation. The copyright for xemacs is so fragmented, the probability approaches zero that the fork can ever be joined. Preemptive copyright assignation (nifty term, eh?) would keep that from happening again. If you care. Some people don't. I, personally, don't care much either.

If there's a cautionary tale here, it is that you can't take a dying project, sprinkle it with the magic pixie dust of ``open source,'' and have everything magically work out. Software is hard. The issues aren't that simple.

Jamie was talking about Mozilla, but I think his point applies even more to Windows. Open source isn't a magic bullet that will suddenly make quality code out of the mess that is win32. The whole design is broken, from the fat32 filesystem, through the layers of legacy interface, to the thousands of haphazardly organized system calls.

I'll be sticking with Unix, thank you. It sucks, but at least it doesn't suck that much...

It seems to me that the design of MySQL follows what Richard Gabriel calls the "New Jersey approach". He writes: The design must cover as many important situations as is practical. All reasonably expected cases should be covered. Completeness can be sacrificed in favor of any other quality. In fact, completeness must sacrificed whenever implementation simplicity is jeopardized. Consistency can be sacrificed to achieve completeness if simplicity is retained; especially worthless is consistency of interface.

Read the whole thing: http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better. html

OK, so I'm biting an amusing troll...

Mozilla was the original name of the Netscape web browser before Netscape became a household name. It was chosen to be a "Mosaic Killer" - hence, Mozilla. Netscape's HTTP header still calls the browser Mozilla.

The full story, and other amusing Netscape trivia, can be found on jwz's site.

When will I hear your song on my local radio station?

With VA/Linux stock so low, and Microsoft with so much money in the bank, things could get interesting if Microsoft decided to purchase VA/Linux. Can you imagine the knee-jerk reaction of "the Linux community" if Microsoft "ate" VA/Linux? If anything, it'd be interesting to get ESR's reaction on "how does it feel to be working for Microsoft?" a la asking Jamie Zawinski "how does it feel to be working for AOL?" when AOL bought Netscape. Why do I think that RMS would just sit in the corner and smile, as the posterchild Linux integrator is turned to dust because of greedy businessmen? What a fascinating passion play the Linux business world has become!

Yes, actually. And that should be "Right". Just because you don't understand what it means, or you think it's obvious doesn't mean it can't be profound, or important.

For a deeper understanding of this, read about The New Jersey approach. That's why Unix is more popular than Lisp machines, nowadays; sometimes "The Right Way To Do It" is too expensive...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

If it's April 1st, it must be Quittin' Day...

--

My user ID is an order of magnitude lower than yours. It would have been lower, but I was boycotting usernames along with JWZ and many others (anyone remember those days anymore, or did everyone finally leave for Advogato?)

Though I'm a hard core Linux advocate, even I'm beginning to tire of the extreme Linux bias here. I'd like to see something that hasn't already been hashed over two dozen times since Chips and Dips. That is part of the reason I did the Buddying up to BSD series on Linux.com. Some of us really need to get our heads out of the sand. If Microsoft had pulled this XFS thing we woulda been screaming vaporware the whole time, but mention Linux and Open Source and we roll right over.

You don't understand 'tolerance.' Tolerance is a live-and-let-live attitude. If it were a matter of 'oh, I don't like my neighbor's nice new car, I wish it were gone,' it would be a matter of simple resentment. If I don't like my neighbor's sexual practices or hobbies or skin color, that's intolerance. But that's not the problem.

The problem is an inflationary economy, and the effect on a market when a good sector of the consuming side of the market has a lot more income than another, the local economy will server the former far more than the latter. Food prices skyrocket. Rents and housing go up. Police serve the class in favor over the class that isn't - someone who would have be a functional part of the community 7 years ago is now an 'eyesore' today and hassled by cops. The proliferation of SUVs is a huge problem in a city with a parking crunch, and often present a menace to pedestrians and bicyclists.

There have been a lot of evictions of poorer residents in order to be able to rent at ridiculously higher rates to new ones (fortunately there is some rent and eviction control, but increasingly landlords are weakening it and making loopholes.) New residents in SOMA, where I live, will move near a nightclub, then complain about the noise, move a lot of political money around, and have the night club closed. (Ask jwz, himself a silicon implant 'gone native,' about this sometime.)

People are defending an already rare lifestyle, and they are also protecting some of the little character that exists in an increasingly homogenous, franchised country. San Francisco is - or will have been - one of the last urban places with a true sense of place. (Check out jwz's rant on Silicon Valley to see what many people here are trying to prevent.) You are confusing 'tolerance' with 'acquiesence.'

1. Create a file that contains all ASCII characters
2. Everytime you need to "type" anything, just cut and paste from the file with your mouse.

OTOH, you gotta give props to RMS for his work founding the FSF and his contributions to it. How far along would be be w/o GCC?

Of course, GNU/Linux is a stretch -- I've never heard someone say they use Adobe/MacOS or Lotus-OS/2...

For the same reason that Unix and C and X-Windows and MS-Windows are popular. Because worse is better.

My primary consolation in watching you people handwave over this nonsense is that it's never going to amount to anything anyhow: file/folder is locked in, there's no room for you the way you're behaving.

I followed the incredibly interesting link from this article regarding the "Really Bad Attitude" newsgroups that Netscape had setup, and that Microsoft subpeonaed (at http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/rbarip.html).

I noticed this quote :

In hindsight, complying with the company's Document Retention Policy (which at Netscape was basically, ``shred anything within 90 days unless you can't get your job done without it'') might have been a good idea.

How many major companies actually have a policy ilke this for electronic information? Most backups are tape/DLTs which last eternity, and is the only purpose of this policy to prevent liability with stuff lying around?

This sounds like it worked with paper-based archiving systems, where space simply doesn't exist to archive forever, and non-essential documents are destroyed, but none of the people I've done work for have had a similar policy at all.

So the question is ... how many companies out there do this to avoid liability, or is there a different reason for it?

I found xmodmap a horrible pain in the ass. Then, I got xkeycaps. It's a graphical front-end to xmodmap, and now I've got my keyboard hacked to do everything I want (except I still can't type oe ligature, anyone know if that can be done under x?). It takes a little fiddling to get used to, but then it's great.

JWZ's thoughts on garbage collections.

JWZ's thoughts on garbage collections.

The guy who doesn't like ALT= tags on his website? Hmmm..

Can something this big & cruft-ridden succesfully go from closed-source to open source?

One of the biggest things an open source project needs to grow is dedicated coders. jwz, in the infamous mozilla resignation letter, complains "The truth is that, by virtue of the fact that the contributors to the Mozilla project included about a hundred full-time Netscape developers, and about thirty part-time outsiders, the project still belonged wholly to Netscape -- because only those who write the code truly control the project."

Now seriously -- If you look long enough in the win2k code base, you'll probably find code from DOS 1.0, more than 2 decades old. Who can get excited about that?

Read the details here.
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"But, Mulder, the new millennium doesn't begin until January 2001."

Read the details here.
--
"But, Mulder, the new millennium doesn't begin until January 2001."

That said, this is neither unconstitutional nor an invasion of privacy. This is subpoenaed information. A court can subpoena anything a plantiff or defendant requests, if the plantiff or defendant convinces the court that it is germane to the case.

Attentive followers of national politics may recall that Monica Lewinsky's hard drive was subpoenaed, and delivered to a data recovery specialist. Or, alternatively, note that the contents of the really.bad.attitude mailing list at Netscape were subpoenaed by Microsoft. Now, this was all private on an "employee's home computer, but it was evidence in a civil case, and so it was open to subpoena.

That said, this is neither unconstitutional nor an invasion of privacy. This is subpoenaed information. A court can subpoena anything a plantiff or defendant requests, if the plantiff or defendant convinces the court that it is germane to the case.

Attentive followers of national politics may recall that Monica Lewinsky's hard drive was subpoenaed, and delivered to a data recovery specialist. Or, alternatively, note that the contents of the really.bad.attitude mailing list at Netscape were subpoenaed by Microsoft. Now, this was all private on an "employee's home computer, but it was evidence in a civil case, and so it was open to subpoena.

<!-- Greetings, Lynx users. There is a reason this page doesn't use ALT tags on the images. The reason is that the bozos responsible for both MSIE and Netscape Confusicator 4.0 decided that they would display the ALT tags of images every time you move the mouse over them -- even if the images are loaded, and even if they are not links. The ALT attribute to the IMG tag is supposed to be used *instead of* the image, not *in addition to* the image.

This looks absolutely terrible, so I don't use ALT tags any more in self-defense.

If they wanted to implemented tooltips, they should have used the TITLE attribute to the A tag. That's in the HTML 1.2 spec and everything.

I had to decide between making this page look good for the vast majority of viewers, or making it be readable by the miniscule minority of you stuck in the 70s. Those of you in the retro contingent lost. Sorry. -->

Smoking: a completely legal activity, being increasingly regulated. Even to the extent that in some communities, restrictions on smoking on ones own property have been considered. And of course we all know what rights private property owners have if that private property happens to be a store, restaurant, etc.

Restrictions on smoking are based on employee safety laws, the idea that if you are an employer, you cannot require an employee to work in an environment known to be health-threatening. And believe it or not, second-hand smoke is known to be toxic. If it makes you feel better, it's easy to put an anarchist spin on this: ``your right to poison yourself ends where my lungs begin.''

California Labor Code 6404.5, Smoking in the Workplace.

Government control over the uses to which private property may be used. The acceptance of so-called "zoning laws" opened the door. Now you can be prohibited from filling in that mud-puddle if Canadian Geese fly over it once a year. Wet-lands, don't ja know.

Uh, yeah, sure. That probably sounded better when Rush Limbaugh said it, didn't it?

Borgificatio n continues as usual . You will be assimilated.

As I've pointed out elsewhere, Gtk+/GNOME had to dump X resources because they simply could not do what what needed.

Nonsense.

For one there's no reasonable way to shoe-horn in a WRITABLE X resource mechanism.

GNOME could have dictated, as a matter of policy:

• System-wide Gnome resources shall live in /usr/lib/X11/app-defaults/app-name;
• User-specific Gnome resources shall live in $HOME/.gnome/resources/app-name.

Blammo, now you know where the file is, and now you can write a preferences editor that can overwrite that file. But you're still using the traditional programatic API for applications to consult their resources; and you've still left open the option for sophisticated users to use the more advanced features of the resource database, like using wildcards or screen- or display-specific settings.

Don't believe it can work? Well I've got something better than words, I've got working code that does exactly this. Download xscreensaver and run xscreensaver-demo. Note that you can edit all the parameters of the application. Note that it saves them to disk, specifically to a file called $HOME/.xscreensaver. This file contains resources! The xscreensaver daemon examines its resources with XrmGetResource() just like X programs have always done.

Using the X resource manager does not preclude having sophisticated, user-friendly customization UIs. And doing so leaves many options open for more sophisticated users.

For another, the heirechical nature of Gtk+/GNOME's resources are just a little bit more flexible than anything that X resources can muster.

I don't believe this. Please give an example. I especially don't believe this since using the X resource manager doesn't even mean that you have to use Xrm's file format. (I'll bet Gtk could just use that file format, but that's not a requirement.) I don't use Xrm's format in the .xscreensaver file, but I still merge it in to the in-memory resource database in the proper way anyhow.

This all, not to mention the ability to replace the plain-text nature of the Gtk+ configuration file mechansim and replace it with a real, binary-capable database without a change to the API.

Last time I looked, Gnome used the DOS/Windows INI-file format, but split into one file per app. That doesn't look particularly binary-capable to me. But anyway, what large binary data do you expect to store in these resource files by value rather than reference? (I.e., you want to store pathnames, not bitmaps.) For small binary data, just base64 it or something, like you'd have to do today anyway.

As an example, here's a piece of code that stores a user preference to a resource file for later use:

• gnome_config_set_string("features","lots");

There's a line to open the config database / associate the program with a root path, and there's one to close it, and that's it.

That very API could be easily implemented on top of the traditional X resource manager.

Because I just don't see it. Except for the default font sizes, those look damned near identical to me.

Huh... I guess that means these two examples are also pretty similar except for the font size:

Exhibit A
Exhibit B

Don't you wish you'd thought of that before you cranked out all those images? ;)

No X gui which shuns Xt is an acceptable X gui.

Period. I want my X resources, my command line parsing, and a standard framework of gui mechanisms.

I totally agree with this.

For what it's worth, I have a kludge for making use of Xrm with GTK, but it's pretty fragile. Had GTK been built on top of Xt, then all the usual resource mechanisms would have worked automatically, and one would have been able to reuse the enormous body of Xt-aware code that is out there already. Among other things it would have been a lot easier to port Motif apps to GTK than it is today, because most of the implementation of any Motif or Athena application really consists of Xt calls.

If you want to see my evil kludge for using Xrm resources and command-line processing (but not Xt Widgets) from inside a GTK program, have a look at main() in driver/demo-Gtk.c in the xscreensaver distribution.

You remind me of JWZ in some strange way....

What do you think that QT & GTK are missing to be a true replacement of Motif?

Well, for one, both QT and GTK lack the butt-ugliness of Motif. Secondly, they lack the quality that they're not as akin to bashing your head against the wall when programming with them. Thirdly, they're not archaic. That's about all I can think of.. :^)

There are many fair criticisms that can be made of Motif (and I've made all of them,) I programmed Motif for years, and I've got more reason to hate it than most people.

But I've never, ever understood the ``Motif is ugly and GTK is beautiful'' argument, because they look the same to me. Seriously! Can someone explain to me why one of these is ugly and the other is beautiful:

• Exhibit A
  Exhibit B

Because I just don't see it. Except for the default font sizes, those look damned near identical to me.

I'd also be interested to hear in what way Motif is ``archaic'' while GTK is not.

And thirdly, I've found writing in GTK to be almost as much as a head-bashing experience as programming in Motif. The APIs are just as crazy, they're just different. One thing that GTK has going for it is that it's slightly less buggy. But it's also a hell of a lot slower.

What do you think that QT & GTK are missing to be a true replacement of Motif?

Well, for one, both QT and GTK lack the butt-ugliness of Motif. Secondly, they lack the quality that they're not as akin to bashing your head against the wall when programming with them. Thirdly, they're not archaic. That's about all I can think of.. :^)

There are many fair criticisms that can be made of Motif (and I've made all of them,) I programmed Motif for years, and I've got more reason to hate it than most people.

But I've never, ever understood the ``Motif is ugly and GTK is beautiful'' argument, because they look the same to me. Seriously! Can someone explain to me why one of these is ugly and the other is beautiful:

• Exhibit A
  Exhibit B

Because I just don't see it. Except for the default font sizes, those look damned near identical to me.

I'd also be interested to hear in what way Motif is ``archaic'' while GTK is not.

And thirdly, I've found writing in GTK to be almost as much as a head-bashing experience as programming in Motif. The APIs are just as crazy, they're just different. One thing that GTK has going for it is that it's slightly less buggy. But it's also a hell of a lot slower.

If you have ever used a SGI Indy running Irix paired with that amazingly *ahem* interesting 4DWM desktop windowing environment the dynamic resizing of icons should be familiar to you.

I used to have access to one back in the mid 90's... whoa... that sounds cool.

I know when I took people by the lab to see it they would immediately go "COOL!!!" when they saw the scrolly thingie make the folder icons look bigger then smaller then bigger then... you get the i dea.

It's no wonder SGI's never caught on... it must have been the amazing easy to install no issues approach to software they have always used. I know I am not alone in feeling this way.

http://www.mp3.com/fudge/

Dammit! I knew I should have used a longer markov chain. dadadodo
--
My opinions may have changed, but not the fact that I am right.

• At the beginning of 1999 the Mozilla project decided to take a bold move and ditch most of the old Netscape Communicator code and rewrite the rendering engine from scratch making standards compliance number one priority.
• The project suffered some setbacks, including the leaving of a key employee Jamie Zawinski. The press often made the Mozilla project sound like it was going nowhere but despite the negative press AOL/Netscape continues to fund the development and we're nearly approaching beta.
• The project is the only one in the list that works on Multiple platforms. This is an open source product many Windows users will use as well as Linux, Mac, FreeBSD, etc. Writing a cross platform program can be difficul but Mozilla has done well
• Mozilla is often the project that companies look to judge the success of open source. We have to show these companies that Mozilla is a success by raising the profile of the project

I am sure there is a lot to learn from those old systems.
(Why some of the VMS guys inflicted Windows NT on us is a different thing :)

That we seem to have lost some features as well and did not progress only, shines through in the hacks and rants of great hackers like Richard Stallmann and Jamie Zawinski. Take this quote

Back before the current dark ages began, I hacked on Lisp Machines. (..)
Have you ever wondered why we're stuck with crap like Unix and MS-DOS? Read Richard Gabriel's Worse is Better paper for a great explanation of why mediocrity has better survival characteristics than perfection

from Jamie's page and this quote from Richard

Yes, with string-based interpreters you can represent programs as strings, and you can interpret them as strings, but you can't parse their syntax very easily as strings. In LISP, programs are represented as data in a way that expresses their structure, and allows you to easily do things to the programs that are based on understanding them.

from a recent RMS interview. Both refer to the LISP machines of MIT, which seem to have operated on a higher level program representation than mere strings.

I interpret these rants that todays machines are stronger but dumber in a sense as well.

Question is if one could combine the strengths of both worlds. The higher level representation found in LISP machines and the performance of our present C compiled systems.

Like I tried to explain above, my feeling is that this could be achieved by shifting the primary representation to something closer to the intermediate structures that arise during compilation. It would have indeed similarities to a configuration management system. Adding a line to a text source would, after check-in, result in an immediate update of an persistent parse tree of the program database core.

OpenVMS compilers and the linker can be invoked to operate on CMS objects without having to pre-fetch anything first.

Do you have any reference where I can read more about CMS? (I would be happy also to have some nice review on the strengths of the LISP machines)

If we were to implement something like this for ourselves I'd say the first thing to do is to find a lightweight, fast and efficient implementation of an object repository. Does anyone know of such?

Sounds to me like what OODBs are promising. The one I had to try so far (POET 3 under Win32 and Solaris) was horrible. No idea how they perform today, as they seem to be two major revisions farther.

Hmm. Actually, it does not seem to me that the reason why he is leaving is clear - at least, not from the article mentioned or from any of the comments that I've been able to read. JWZ left because he thought that Mozilla had been more a failure than a success (source: his web site) and did not have fun anymore working for a big corporation. At least, that's what I understood from what he said on the subject.

In some sense, the critiques that applied to Mozilla on April, 1st 99 (when jwz left) still more or less apply today: the product is not in a deliverable state. I mean, it's an alpha release, with various degrees of stability depending on the environment you're running it on, and that's definitely not a deliverable. Not yet, at least.

I don't contribute to the project by lack of time (insert your favorite excuse here) and because I'm not a good enough coder to participate in such a big project, where the code base is so huge and complex.

But I have a hard time understanding why Mozilla takes so long to take off when something like Linux or Free BSD, whose source code size is probably bigger than Mozilla's (correct me if I'm wrong), are still very active. It's definitely not the lack of people, or the lack of skills, but I'd like to understand where it comes from.

Complexity/messiness of the source? Communication problems? Lack of support from Netscape (that was one of JWZ's rants)? Or something else?

In short: what I get from this is that Open Source is not the solution to all of our problems. Sometimes, it doesn't work very well. At least, not as well as it could. And Mozilla seems to be an example of that, unfortunately.

Cheers,