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So why not just to use MPL/LGPL and simplify the situation?

How will the new Mozilla license scheme affect developers who want to use Mozilla code in creating and distributing proprietary applications?

Not at all; developers creating and distributing proprietary software incorporating Mozilla code will be able to continue to use that code under MPL or NPL terms and conditions, exactly as they have been doing all along.

The important point here is that Netscape thinks that you can indeed use their code to make proprietary applications. If your lawyer tells you that you can't, you should have him communicate his reasons to Netscape. I'm sure that they would appreciate the feedback.

I think that Netscape is being a good deal more generous than I would be with my code. As always, if you don't like the license, don't use the code, and don't release your code under a license you don't like.

Getting off topic now: By the way, for the folks who point to a BSD license as a cure-all, I have a question: is it true that BSD licensed code may be re-released under the GPL, just as it may be re-released under a closed-source license?

Old Mozilla

Under our reading of the GPL, it will not be possible to incorporate code covered by the GPL into the Communicator source code base. It is also not possible to use GPLed code and NPLed code together in a Larger Work. This is different for LGPL code. It is possible to create a larger work using LGPLed code that can then be used in conjunction with NPLed code through an API.

New Mozilla

After the NPL and MPL were created, the Free Software Foundation stated that the NPL and MPL were "incompatible" with the GPL. "Incompatibility" in this context means that (in the opinion of the FSF) developers who combined code licensed under the NPL (or MPL) with code licensed under the GPL and distributed the resulting work could not do such distribution without violating the terms of the GPL. Given that the LGPL contains similar language to the GPL, if the MPL were in fact incompatible in this way with the GPL, it would arguably be incompatible with the LGPL as well.

Old Mozilla

Under our reading of the GPL, it will not be possible to incorporate code covered by the GPL into the Communicator source code base. It is also not possible to use GPLed code and NPLed code together in a Larger Work. This is different for LGPL code. It is possible to create a larger work using LGPLed code that can then be used in conjunction with NPLed code through an API.

New Mozilla

After the NPL and MPL were created, the Free Software Foundation stated that the NPL and MPL were "incompatible" with the GPL. "Incompatibility" in this context means that (in the opinion of the FSF) developers who combined code licensed under the NPL (or MPL) with code licensed under the GPL and distributed the resulting work could not do such distribution without violating the terms of the GPL. Given that the LGPL contains similar language to the GPL, if the MPL were in fact incompatible in this way with the GPL, it would arguably be incompatible with the LGPL as well.

Well, it wouldn't hurt to see if it could be filed as an Evangelism "Bug" :)

sean

You can make Mozilla claim it's Internet Explorer. See this page.

You want to put something like this in your user.js file:
user_pref("general.useragent.override", "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows 98; Win 9x 4.90; COM+ 1.0.2204)"

Often, the sites work even if you don't have Internet Exploder. The sad thing is that you'll show up as IE in the logs.

How times have changed.

A year ago I would have called Slashdot biased in favour of GNOME. With the GNOME Foundation being announced, and that idiot Miguel being a walking vapourware producer for Eazel, everyone ignored the KDE as they released KDE 2.0, which took KDE ever further in front of GNOME.

And then, the biggest turning point: Konqueror. Easily the best open-source browser around, and it wasn't massivly overhyped. Now KDE is still growing, and GNOME is struggling to pull together a 2.0 release, let alone making GNOME 1.0 to GNOME 2.0 the revolutionary step KDE 1.0 to 2.0 was.

Now, ever Slashdot, the GNOME whore, has now started to turn pro-KDE. And now the gnomes that use GNOME are whining.

Sorry, the tech bubble burst. Now the true open-source project is pulling far out in the lead, not the one sucking the corporate tit.

GNOME is dying. Jump ship now.

I agree completely - but since Bugzilla is licensed under MPL 1.1, you don't mind sharing your improvements with the rest of us? We could really use a bug-tracking system where I work, and Bugzilla is just fine - except for the god-awful UI. I *know* it's HTML and I know my way around HTML just fine, but seeing how this is Open Source I'd rather start from where you have gotten than from where plain Bugzilla starts off. If it's too tailored to your (previous) company, so be it - but I really like the idea of starting at a higher level, and maybe getting inspired by seeing several solutions to the same problem.

The whole idea of OSS software, is that nothing will happen without people. More and more people are working on Mozilla now, but a year or so ago there was a lack of contributors (apart from Netscape).

Just don't sit there whining - if you indeed want it to succeed - do something about it!

A great place to start: is here

Lemme see:

Full open source projects:

OpenOffice

Netbeans

Tomcat (The source was gifted from Sun)

NFS (gifted to the Linux community)

They also have source that free for research and internal use at:

http://www.sun.com/software/communitysource/index. html

They also have given financial and programming support to:

Gnome

Mozilla

And I'm just scratching the surface! And for the record, Lutris was perfectly able to create a fully open source, J2EE branded server. The catch 22 was that they couldn't open source Sun's code so they would have to write their own. Did they? No.

Geez, you people could at least TRY to understand the issue before shooting off at the mouth.

Disclaimer: This post does not meet established Slashdot doctrine. Go ahead, mod me down. I dare you. Be a censor just like the news media. The truth? You can't handle the truth!

From the release page: We make binary versions of of Mozilla available for testing purposes only!.
Or, if you wish, from the frontpage: We provide binaries for testing and feedback.

:)

Whether this dist or that chooses to include a snapshot of the cvs in their release, is not really up to Mozilla, is it?

From the release page: We make binary versions of of Mozilla available for testing purposes only!.
Or, if you wish, from the frontpage: We provide binaries for testing and feedback.

:)

Whether this dist or that chooses to include a snapshot of the cvs in their release, is not really up to Mozilla, is it?

from my report to mozillazine.org:

The recent posting to slashdot about Bugzilla's 100,000th report begs the question, "what other numbers can you give me?" Here are a few of the numbers I pulled out of the database last night. These numbers are all a little rough but should help make the picture a little more clear. About 18.7% of the reports in Bugzilla are still open (UNCONFIRMED, NEW, ASSIGNED, and REOPENED) issues. About 32.8% of the reports have the FIXED Resolution. About 45.4% of the reports in the system are WORKSFORME, INVALID or DUPLICATE. To break that last number down a little more, 26.3% of the database is Resolved as DUPLICATE, 12% WORKSFORME and 7.5% INVALID. About 5.5% of reports in the system are reported against something other than the Mozilla application suite.

So just in case anyone missed it in the fine print, Bugzilla has 100,000+ reports but the Mozilla community has already resolved about 82,000 of those reports. It's probably also useful to know that there are over 32,000 Buzilla user accounts. You can find more on the Mozilla QA and testing community at my O'Reilly OSS Convention presentation (you'll want to use a browser that supports the latest web standards.)

You *can* do this in Bugzilla, but you need to enable the contributed Bugzilla Mail Interface in contrib/. That contributed package is in some need of maintenance, however.
Check here or here for details.

You *can* do this in Bugzilla, but you need to enable the contributed Bugzilla Mail Interface in contrib/. That contributed package is in some need of maintenance, however.
Check here or here for details.

I maintain the Bugzilla Helper, which most people use to file their first few bugs. Any comments on how to make the process easier are welcome. :-)

Gerv

Yep, there's one called Mozilla ;-)

Have you tried the Bugzilla Helper? It really helps newbies write a quality bug report; I highly recommend adapting it to your needs at your site if you wish to run a local Bugzilla where you work. However, it's a bit of a maintenance problem right now; I'd love to see this page automated and cached to allow a user-friendly front-end to bug reporting which tracks the database as it changes, rather than requiring manual updates.

Here you go this is a link to the uncached version. Enjoy.

Which is one reason why I believe it's extremely important that mozilla mail have support for GPG/PGP for version 1.0. There are patches waiting, but the powers that be don't rate it as important enough to get in before 1.0. If 1.0 comes out without GPG/PGP, it'll be that much harder to get email encryption mainstream. Go vote for bug: http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=22687

http://www.mozilla.org/unix/customizing.html has good information (and most of it isn't UNIX-specific).

we have to keep checking the access_log to figure out what interesting tricks people are using these days

Which is easy to do. All you have to do to find new tricks is extract the User-Agent field | sort | uniq, and "MSIE 666, really Mozilla" will out like a sore thumb in any "which IE versions are people using?" query.

In my mind, one of the things that makes an opensource project stand out as "open" is that anyone can come in (even if they cannot code a line of C/C++) and help test the product. And when/if they find a bug (and it will be when in the case of many opensource projects) they can access a public bug database, enter the bug report, and have full access to what happens with that bug. In addition, anyone can come in and help to confirm that bugs really do exist or verify that they were really fixed.

Several opensource projects that I know of actually pay developers to test the product and handle bug related tasks. Other projects will accept bug reports, but only to a black-hole email address where what is submitted may end up on a to-do list much later.

However, to have an opensource project that is truly open, anyone must be able to come in and assist with these tasks. I started with opensource software with Mozilla where I downloaded a build, thought it was pretty nifty, and then browsed http://www.mozilla.org/quality/help to find out what I could do to help. I started confirming bugs and was welcomed into the community not by lists of rules and procedures, but by giving the privs to confirm bugs and to edit all aspects of all bugs. I am very sure that if I had not been greeted in this way, I would not be in my second year working on Mozilla where I have gone from confirming a couple of bugs to being a component owner and a qa contact for 3 componets.

It's your codebase too should you decide to jump in and write some code. If you have performance insightss that you think warrant action please post them to Mozilla's performance newsgroup

--Asa

That's bug 97829, "simple in a form causes submit", marked as invalid. You can vote for the bug even though it's currently marked invalid. (I'm currently voting for two 'wontfix' bugs and one 'invalid' bug in addition to a bunch of open bugs.)

That's bug 97829, "simple in a form causes submit", marked as invalid. You can vote for the bug even though it's currently marked invalid. (I'm currently voting for two 'wontfix' bugs and one 'invalid' bug in addition to a bunch of open bugs.)

IE generally submits all forms on Enter, including sometimes when you are trying to type in a textarea :P I haven't got this installed yet, but it would be really interesting if they went with IE's convention.

One nightly Mozilla build actually did have this bug -- hitting enter in a textarea would submit the form. See the last few comments in bug 22526, "Enter in text input submits form only if there is exactly one text input".

Just can't wait for it to finish downloading so that I can test it out. .9.3 has a fairly significant memory leak that bites you on the ass after time; it gets me somewhat quickly the way I browse - opening most links as new windows. Other than that, it is for the most part rocking.

Menu item spacing is larger for Bookmarks Menu. Vote for this bug.

(there goes my option of opening in a new window)

That's bug 55696.

Gerv

I've been happily using Omniweb under MacOS X for some time, and there is a very nice near-equivalent feature you guys should know about. Hidden in OmniWeb -> Preferences -> Javascript, there is the following dialog:

Scripts are allowed to open new Windows:

* Always
* Only in response to a link being clicked
* never

The second choice of course, is the preferred choice. I'm glad that I'll be able to use Mozilla soon for the sites where Omniweb's javascript doesn't work, as the SMP bug under MacOS X now has an uncommitted patch! Too bad Omniweb will still look better for now ;)

Much props to the Mozilla crew. Keep it coming

Person who wrote this article: can you be a bit more derogatory with your one line summation?

from the fast-as-a-speeding-snail dept.

Have you even used the thing? What sort of XT system with 64K of RAM do you run it on?

It works. I've used Mozilla solidly for nearly a year now.

(Plus regarding disabling popups, that was around since 0.8, although I hear it now has an interface other than a text editor. I'll install the latest milestone once I post this comment and close Mozilla.)

Are they planning on keeping this awful behavoir?

Best way to find out is file a bug and see :-) If you don't like it, and it makes it into Netscape 6.whatever'snext, then if you haven't filed a bug you've only got yourself to blame.

Gerv

The bug for getting a spell checker into Mozilla is bug 56301. If you can help out with the effort, that would be fantastic, as the bug is somewhat stalled at the moment.

It used to be that you could install Netscape's spellchecker, but that is no longer supported.

PS Gerv: This message isn't directed at you, but primarily at the parent post to your post.

The bug for getting a spell checker into Mozilla is bug 56301. If you can help out with the effort, that would be fantastic, as the bug is somewhat stalled at the moment.

It used to be that you could install Netscape's spellchecker, but that is no longer supported.

PS Gerv: This message isn't directed at you, but primarily at the parent post to your post.

Changeable user agents is bug 46029. Feel free to vote for the bug if that issue is important to you.

Changeable user agents is bug 46029. Feel free to vote for the bug if that issue is important to you.

In Windows NT/2000, users can set in the mouse preferences for the mouse to automagically move to the default button in dialog boxes and alerts. However, Mozilla doesn't currently cooperate with this.

The bug has keyword "helpwanted", so if you know how to accomplish this functionality, please speak up :). Or, if you aren't inclined to programming, you can also vote for the bug (of course, you'll need a free Bugzilla account to vote).

In Windows NT/2000, users can set in the mouse preferences for the mouse to automagically move to the default button in dialog boxes and alerts. However, Mozilla doesn't currently cooperate with this.

The bug has keyword "helpwanted", so if you know how to accomplish this functionality, please speak up :). Or, if you aren't inclined to programming, you can also vote for the bug (of course, you'll need a free Bugzilla account to vote).

In Windows NT/2000, users can set in the mouse preferences for the mouse to automagically move to the default button in dialog boxes and alerts. However, Mozilla doesn't currently cooperate with this.

The bug has keyword "helpwanted", so if you know how to accomplish this functionality, please speak up :). Or, if you aren't inclined to programming, you can also vote for the bug (of course, you'll need a free Bugzilla account to vote).

In Windows NT/2000, users can set in the mouse preferences for the mouse to automagically move to the default button in dialog boxes and alerts. However, Mozilla doesn't currently cooperate with this.

The bug has keyword "helpwanted", so if you know how to accomplish this functionality, please speak up :). Or, if you aren't inclined to programming, you can also vote for the bug (of course, you'll need a free Bugzilla account to vote).

UI for controlling popups is bug 75371. Feel free to vote for the bug, if that issue is important to you.

UI for controlling popups is bug 75371. Feel free to vote for the bug, if that issue is important to you.

We'd be very interested to hear of pages Konqueror gets right, and Mozilla gets wrong. Please file bugs in Bugzilla here, and then quote the bug numbers. We'll get right on it.

Gerv

Ok folks, here is a really cool feature: The Ability to manage, on a site by site basis, which sites can give you popups and which can't. A very effective way to manage pop up ads. Here's how:

Btw, this is all from: Configurable Security Policies

While this post seems to be less flamebait than it is uninformed, I must admit that the statement that we will see no more advances in web technology is ludicrous. Besides that statement, XML is definitely not simply a web technology. Several major applications, such as jabber, rely on XML to operate. Granted most websites will probably never use XML, but then it was never intended to replace HTML. As for the lack of CSS3 and XSL support, if you would be so quick to complain, why not get to work on Mozilla and do something about it?

Two weeks ago, Rob Ginda and Mitch Stoltz added a weaker version of what you're asking for. Instead of only allowing pop-ups for click/enter, it blocks pop-ups for onload, inline scripts (run before onload), onunload, and timer events. This is effective against most existing pop-ups, but will stop being effective when aggressive advertisers realize they can use onfocus or onmouseover instead of onload (if they think enough people are using Mozilla and enable this pref).

To block pop-ups in onload and onunload events, add this line to your prefs.js file (or to a user.js file in the same directory):

user_pref("dom.disable_open_during_load", true);

Even more off-topic:
Does anyone know how to make Mozilla lie about what User-Agent it is? My bank software rejects Mozilla, claiming it's not compatible. I'm pretty sure it is, and I want to try to make Mozilla claim to be IE on that domain.

The pref is called "general.useragent.override". See http://mozilla.org/unix/customizing.html for an example and instructions on how to set the pref if you're not familiar with prefs.js and user.js. (Note that even though the URL contains "unix", most of the prefs there work equally well on all platforms Mozilla runs on.)

Adding something to the preferences panel to allow changing the useragent without editing a text file is bug 46029.

Even more off-topic:
Does anyone know how to make Mozilla lie about what User-Agent it is? My bank software rejects Mozilla, claiming it's not compatible. I'm pretty sure it is, and I want to try to make Mozilla claim to be IE on that domain.

The pref is called "general.useragent.override". See http://mozilla.org/unix/customizing.html for an example and instructions on how to set the pref if you're not familiar with prefs.js and user.js. (Note that even though the URL contains "unix", most of the prefs there work equally well on all platforms Mozilla runs on.)

Adding something to the preferences panel to allow changing the useragent without editing a text file is bug 46029.

Disabling pop-ups entirely is irritating as many genuinly useful sites use pop-ups when a link is clicked.

Most pop-up ads come from one of the usual banner-ad sites, not the actual website, so this feature works pretty well.

Here's my user.js file - you may find it useful. I allow pop-ups by default, except for the listed sites.

// Stop animated gifs after one iteration.
user_pref("image.animation_mode", "once");

// Stop windows from popping up when they finish loading pages.
user_pref("mozilla.widget.raise-on-setfocus", false);

// Block these sites from opening their own windows
user_pref("capability.policy.strict.sites", "http://www.car-truck.com http://www.cnn.com http://www.dictionary.com http://media.admonitor.net http://popup.zmedia.com http://ad.doubleclick.net http://www.netsol.com http://rd.yahoo.com");
user_pref("capability.policy.strict.Window.open", "noAccess");