Slashdot Mirror

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Couldn't Bugzilla be used for this?

The feature is not "gone". It never went. You can enable it using a JS pref (as is said above). The UI is currently going through major upheaval as we head towards Netscape feature freeze date on the 16th of May, when all the Netscape engineers working on the project will stop checking in features (as they have a perfect right to do).

The current Mozilla builds are nightlies, downloaded by a few people for testing. If you download one, you'll find green and purple lines surrounding half the UI elements. Why? Debugging. Ugly? Yeah. A Slashdot story? No. Just more evidence of UI changes.

My point: this is _not_ a big deal. No-one has said this feature is going away from the code available from mozilla.org. Any feature that is destabilising the build could be deactivated. Tooltips are currently not working either, when they were last week. No fuss about that...

Gerv
(Declared interest: mozilla.org external QA volunteer) Please help: Get involved with Mozilla QA

Is it just me, or have these stats left out some fairly large projects suck as Jakarta and Mozilla?

Admittedly I didn't look through everything, but I don't see Jakarta mentioned under the apache author page, nor do I see mozilla under jwz or Netscape's author pages. Am I blind, or are they? :)

And if they did miss these two, (Mozilla alone is a somewhat massive sum of source code) what else are they leaving out?

It isn't very pretty, though. I don't know how the setup is, but we use it where I work (large public university), and it works. Our version is a little dated, so there may be some improvements.

I hear that Bugzilla is nice, though I haven't tried it myself.

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As a professional IT consultant working for one of the top names in the software industry I am working on a detailed report into the "open source" phenomenon (thanks to various people for pointing out that it is not freeware per se) as started by Linus Torvalds with his Linux operating system some six years ago. I browse this forum for insights into the Linux user and developer communities.

Allow me to correct you a bit further. "Open Source" is essentially a marketing program (on practical grounds rather then idealogical) for "free software". Richard Stallman started the free software movement when he started the GNU Project in 1984 with the aim of creating a freely-distributable reimplementation of Unix.

Linus Torvalds significantly popularized free software with Linux (which he started in 1991). Linus provided the last missing piece of the hitherto incomplete GNU system -- the kernel. It's a critical component, but bear in mind that without the prior work of the GNU project, Linux wouldn't be where it is today.

The "Open Source" movement was created in response to Netscape's announcement in January 1998 that they would release the source code to their browser. The relabeling has been very effective, as can be seen in events of the past two years. Netscape's source code release has been viewed by some as less successful, but Mozilla is alive and well, and has made very significant progress since the original source code release. Jury's still out on this one; my personal belief is that Netscape will be making a comeback in the browser marked based on the Mozilla efforts.

Anyway, my question is, is there a fully-featured open source RDBMS out there? Your help is appreciated.

You might want to check out PostgreSQL. It's an object-oriented RDBMS with SQL support as well as transactional integrity. It used to be considered only suitable for academic use, but much work has been done in the last 5 years, and from what I've heard it's one of the most solid free databases out there...

Hello. &nbsp.If you are looking for Java support for Mozilla, visit this page.

You can also check out the Mozilla home page for additional information and the rationale for the decision to only specify a Java interface for Mozilla.

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Well, Java is a proprietary and Mozilla is fully open source and Sun is a bit antsy about opensourcing Java. I've heard about some projects to reverse engineer Java, but mozilla is a corp. entity and they tend to get a bit antsy with legal issues...so... :(

Not an issue. Mozilla will (and does on Win32) support OJI, an API for hooking up JVMs; any free (or open source, ick) JVM could be modified to use plug right in. A JVM does not have to have source available for it to use OJI.

In fact, it would be to Sun's advantage for their JVM to support OJI on all platforms, as the presence of Mozilla on those same platform would give it an immediate application.

The Preview Release 1 of Netscape 6 (which does use GTK) is full of bugs and mostly unusable (I was unable to post a software announcement to Freshmeat due to problems with forms, that renders it unusable)

Mozilla and Netscape are different things. Mozilla was Netscape, gone under heavy development, and now Mozilla is part of Netscape, but Mozilla will continue to be released independently.

And the Motif trouble is not only on GNU/Linux, but every Unix. Until Netscape higher or equal to 6.0 is released and becomes standard, and all platforms replace old Netscapes for the new one (the 3.0 to 4.x change took a lot of time), it will still be around.

Motif should be dead, we all would like it to be dead, but still has lots of strings attached, it the zombie will still be smelling funny around for some time.

Editor: Morphon XML editor [java]

Browser: Mozilla

I probably shouldn't be contributing to this tangent, but just to set the record state, Mozilla is not moving to a GTK interface. In fact, it's moving away from it.

Mozilla uses a brand-new, cross-platform toolkit (important buzzwords: XPFE and XUL) that's rendered and scripted, more or less, by the same machinery that renders and scripts web page content.

Granted, under Linux, GTK is currently used to actually draw pixels on the screen, but it's used, more or less, the same way other toolkits use Xlib. Dialog boxes, scrollbars, and geometry management are all implemented in cross-platform toolkit code, and GTK just draw lines, rectangles, and pixmaps, really. For the most part, it just gets in the way, since GTK has different ideas than XPFE about geometry management, styles, and even which widgets should get which events.

Say, maybe this is on-topic! In an ideal world, there.is.only.xul, and GTK, Qt, and Motif are all obsolete. You pick a XUL rendering engine of your choice, tweak your style sheets and pixmaps as needed, and hack away at the totally scriptable GUIs boasted by all your K-RAD XUL APPS. <BL1NK>3l33t h4x0rs 43v3r!!!</BL1NK>

Well, this is why Mozilla is open source - file a bug (there is a type that is used for feature requests) at BugZilla! This is what open source is all about! I mean, it only takes a couple of minutes to do...

Check out Greg's Bridge Page!

Hmmm. XML based configuration of menus and other stuff; support for ECMA script; support for an object embedding and linking model... Stir in Reiser FS (to handle data storage at the file system level instead of the file level)...

I can see this assemblage of stuff morphing into a VB like application platform.

I can see this assemblage of stuff morphing into Mozilla. :-) Seriously, I dunno about the file system stuff, but the rest of it sounds a lot like XPToolkit combined with XPCOM. Some people would argue that we really didn't need two or three different groups persuing the same kind of architecture, but I'm just as happy to see that multiple groups have caught on to the same basic idea, which is a pretty good one. Well, except for the javascript part; I still can't think very pleasant thoughts about that...

Hmmm. XML based configuration of menus and other stuff; support for ECMA script; support for an object embedding and linking model... Stir in Reiser FS (to handle data storage at the file system level instead of the file level)...

I can see this assemblage of stuff morphing into a VB like application platform.

I can see this assemblage of stuff morphing into Mozilla. :-) Seriously, I dunno about the file system stuff, but the rest of it sounds a lot like XPToolkit combined with XPCOM. Some people would argue that we really didn't need two or three different groups persuing the same kind of architecture, but I'm just as happy to see that multiple groups have caught on to the same basic idea, which is a pretty good one. Well, except for the javascript part; I still can't think very pleasant thoughts about that...

Maybe true, but at least they've been able to stay more-or-less on schedule with development.

In fact, the best parts of Netscape 6 have nothing to do with openness. The most important part of the browser is not its unique blue interface. It's AOL's obvious attempt to tie in the browser to a bunch of for-profit proprietary services.

Huh? This guy apparently never heard of NGLayout (which, unfortunately, AOL's marketing people keep calling gecko).

But open-source advocates should face the facts: Put up some goods or your establishment will be ripped apart, too.

This is so obviously a troll that I am beginning to think we should apply /. moderation to ZDNet.
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Maybe true, but at least they've been able to stay more-or-less on schedule with development.

In fact, the best parts of Netscape 6 have nothing to do with openness. The most important part of the browser is not its unique blue interface. It's AOL's obvious attempt to tie in the browser to a bunch of for-profit proprietary services.

Huh? This guy apparently never heard of NGLayout (which, unfortunately, AOL's marketing people keep calling gecko).

But open-source advocates should face the facts: Put up some goods or your establishment will be ripped apart, too.

This is so obviously a troll that I am beginning to think we should apply /. moderation to ZDNet.
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Maybe true, but at least they've been able to stay more-or-less on schedule with development.

In fact, the best parts of Netscape 6 have nothing to do with openness. The most important part of the browser is not its unique blue interface. It's AOL's obvious attempt to tie in the browser to a bunch of for-profit proprietary services.

Huh? This guy apparently never heard of NGLayout (which, unfortunately, AOL's marketing people keep calling gecko).

But open-source advocates should face the facts: Put up some goods or your establishment will be ripped apart, too.

This is so obviously a troll that I am beginning to think we should apply /. moderation to ZDNet.
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Q: Are there any good case studies of large corporations opening up proprietary in-house source code?

Mozilla, surely :-)

RMS said:
any being no matter how powerful can still be wrong

So, if you postulate a God (who would be the most powerful being in the Universe, rather by definition) and then say he's wrong, who is he wrong compared to? Surely such a being would be right by definition, particularly if they were omniscient.

Gerv

Mozilla isn't GPL'd. Mozilla has its own license.

> AOL/Time Warner has owned dmoz from the beginning.
Not quite true, when ODP started (just under 2 years ago) it was totally independent. After around 9 months, it was then sold to Netscape as it fitted in with their 'open software' system. AOL then brought Netscape in July last year.
For those of you who must know, dmoz stands for directory.mozilla.org - and, yes, you can reach dmoz.org via the full URL of directory.mozilla.org URL.
ODP is an TLA for 'Open Directory Project'.

Richy C.
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Why don't they want to split it up into several vertical lines: NT+development tools, 98+Office+EI, CE+extra's?

I wouldn't break up Microsoft along the lines you suggested, because I don't think that fragmentation of the OS among competing companies would be a good thing. Besides, Win9x/ME is near the end of its life cycle, and is well on its way to integration_with/ replacement_by the NT/2000 codebase in a future Windows release codenamed Whistler.

It would be nice to see the detachment of IE from the rest of the OS, but at this point it is so entangled that it might just be better to leave it with the OS company. After all, Netscape lost the browser war (at least on the Windows platform) a couple years ago, and adoption of Mozilla doesn't seem to depend much on IE's status anymore.

As for development tools, that's tough to say. Leaving them with the OS company could prove advantageous for developers, because the tools would have an easier time staying in sync with OS advancements. On the other hand, it might give further incentive to more fully open APIs and such if the devtools were in another company. I'm leaning toward the former.

If a breakup is to occur, then the Office suite should definitely be split away from the OS company. This app company could also take some server products like SQL Server. Other server products, like Systems Management Server, make better sense staying with the OS company. No more BackOffice, I guess.

Microsoft has brought about the demise of OS/2, WordPerfect, and Netscape, among others. This damage can't be undone, but perhaps measures can be taken to prevent future bogosities. I fear that whatever the government's final solution, it will not be both adequate and fair. Microsoft may escape serious punishment, or it may get really screwed. In the latter case, I guess what goes around comes around.

Actually, Be is porting Opera for their internet appliance. The BeOS port of Mozilla has been broken for a while now due to a bug in the R4.5 compiler. With the release of BeOS R5 and a fixed compiler, the team has begun to make some progress again. Check their website for details.

The licenses are more or less the same with the exception that the NPL gives Netscape special rights with respect to modifications of the initial Netscape code (MozillaClasic that is). If you change the code in a existing file then Netscape had additional rights (under the NPL). However if you attribute new code then it falls under the MPL and Netscape does not have special rights

I believe the initial reasoning was that they wanted to be able to shared code between the client (Navigator/Communicator) and their server products without having to open source their server software as well. However taking into consideration that in the end the client was *almost* completely rewritten I think there should be little or no consequence of the NPL. I maybe wrong of course as there is still 5% of the old NS4/5 code in Mozilla.

All of these are much better documented in the NPL FAQ at mozilla.org : http://www.mozilla.org/MPL/FAQ.html

From the same FAQ: The main reason they did not choose the GPL is because Netscape (and others) will want to include proprietary code with a finished product (Flash/AIM/cryptographic modules) and under the GPL this was not possible. So the MPL/NPL combines terms from the GPL and the LGPL.

Actually, yes they are already in beta. The first beta was forked to make Netscape 6 PR1, the second beta is upcoming.

Actually, no they aren't. See Mozilla.org's plans for beta, which are very distinct from Netscape's. The "beta1" stuff in bugzilla referred to the Netscape beta. Mozilla does not have a beta yet and it's not clear whether they will call any release a "beta" as such, due to confusion about what the word actually means.

Stuart.

It would help the Mozilla team find the cause of the bug (they can't reproduce it on their setup) if you could add additional information about the setup of your machine (i.e. what graphics cards you have installed, etc) - also mention that you're using M15 rather than a nightly build.

The link for the bug is http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_ bug.cgi?id=36239 please register a bugzilla account and add your comments.
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Make use of your spare CPU time!

My biggest gripe about Mozilla is that the source to the latest milestone's hasn't been available anywhere.

If you go to the source download page the latested tagged version of the source is M13, no 14, and no 15...

Still apart from that its a good browser, thats only going to get better.

Steve

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And you can use it on an operating system that doesn't have to be rebooted every 38 seconds, has a hideous registry system, and the most horrible GUI on the face of the earth!

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Impressions:
[1] Downloading the program is fast. Getting a browser, mail and news in under 6M (1254 files), is impressive.

[2] click Mozilla.exe --> open browser == 11 seconds. Cool.

[3] Moving my mouse along the pull down menus, considerable lag when I hover over bookmarks (prolly from the 985 bookmarks:).

[4] Pulled down QA and loded the smoke tests. all OK.

[5] Loaded the aphrodite skin. The GO button is a few pixels to low on the tool bar but, It all works well.

[6] Loaded the Sullivan skin. The back ground color looks like something changed. M15 has a darker grey than the background on the buttons.

[7] Loaded xml.com Alert: "the connection was refused when attempting to contact adforce.imgis.com". There's a dialog for every time an image doesn't load. had to press OK 8 times.

[8] Fast...ohmygod fast. Loaded the Jargon file v4.2.0 Jargon.html file from my local drive (2.16M) and saw it on the screen in less than 2 seconds!

[9] Clean interface, standards compliant, and ohmygod fast.

[10] My best regards to the entire Mozilla team and to all that help them with this wonderfull platform. Your quality work shows in all that you do. To those of you who have been waiting for a working browser before you start your mozilla development project . . .come and get it! !
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4. Middle-click on a link does not yet open a new window. I use that extensively in NS 4.x. Where is it?

Works for me. And I remember looking at the bug list, and that they had fixed that "bug".

2. When pressing BACK, it ALWAYS reloads the previous page from the network. That's ridiculous, and slow. Yes, I do have cache turned on and a directory set.

They're working on it right now. Sounds like this bug.

As for the rest of your problems, some of them I've seen bug reports on, but some I haven't. But hte best thing for anyone with problems to do is to go to bugzilla.mozilla.org and report the bug there. Complaining on Slashdot will get you nothing, even if it does feel good to vent.

Oh, and I"ve been using "Mozilla" (Netscape 5 Beta) as my main browser ever since N5 was released. That version was the first one that had fewer crashes than Netscape 4.7, so I finally switched over.

4. Middle-click on a link does not yet open a new window. I use that extensively in NS 4.x. Where is it?

Works for me. And I remember looking at the bug list, and that they had fixed that "bug".

2. When pressing BACK, it ALWAYS reloads the previous page from the network. That's ridiculous, and slow. Yes, I do have cache turned on and a directory set.

They're working on it right now. Sounds like this bug.

As for the rest of your problems, some of them I've seen bug reports on, but some I haven't. But hte best thing for anyone with problems to do is to go to bugzilla.mozilla.org and report the bug there. Complaining on Slashdot will get you nothing, even if it does feel good to vent.

Oh, and I"ve been using "Mozilla" (Netscape 5 Beta) as my main browser ever since N5 was released. That version was the first one that had fewer crashes than Netscape 4.7, so I finally switched over.

> why don't they make the GUI skinnable?

I believe what you're after is ChromeZone.

Mozilla is much more than just skinnable. Read up on XUL for more information.

Unfortunately the bug I'm waiting on seems to be lost in the wilderness, with nobody really knowing how to fix it. The problem is NTLM authentication, some proprietary means which Microsoft's Proxy Server uses to identify clients. I gather that Netscape never supported this, nor does Mozilla (does anything other than IE?), so I can't test it out with my neat work net connection.

Great to see that despite antitrust trials and whatnot, Microsoft can still spanner Mozilla's works for myself and anyone else in the same situation.

Oh well, downloading M15 to at least view a few local pages (hey I found one bug that way, which was fixed in a couple of hours, big kudos to the Mozilla team..)

Maybe you could convince one of those responsible for that page to help ?

As for separating design/content, I'd use CSS. It downloads quickly, doesn't require much server recources, and in my expirience it renders much faster than table-formating (./ is hopless here ...) It also degrades gracefully.

Now with mozilla/Netscape 6 soon to be released, css will be pretty much uniformely supported, including layers++. It works with lynx(degrades gracefully), emacs, iexplorer and soon netscape (already works for simply formatting pages, but the fancy stuff is a nightmare in current netscape... and you thought microsoft didn't adhere to standards...)

I'd write a "try-out" page, for making the design, looking something like:

inclue your style-sheet(s) in the header
<h1 class="banner">Welcome to bar-page</h1>
<p class="normal">
One little paragraph right here...
</p>
(...)

And then use a "wysiwyg"-stylesheet editor for formatting it, and the go back, and replace the content through php, or something similar (I guess the choice of a true database vs. just text-files depends on size of the web-site, and who/how it will be updated). I have used dreamveawer(from macromedia - win/mac only) a bit - it is very good, and at least the previous version pretty much preserved whatever type of indenting/formating you used on you stylesheets/html-source, and that is something few wysiwyg tools do, in my not-so-far-reaching experience.

And just to repeat the important stuff: CSS rul3z!
You really have to try the speed-thing to see it for yourself: Make one page with table-formatting and a ton of font-tags, and one that just embeds a style-sheet. Download-size drops, and rendering go relative (as in approaching speed-o-light :). And it's cutting-edge too! AND your page will be much easier to genereate/manipulate with scripts/php/whatever, once you do that. Better searching/easier to implement searching, easier to maintain, cooler, faster, improves your sex-life, saves disk-space, ... oh I'm rambeling, sorry...

...Or I'll beat you. No kidding.

Seriously, check out Mozilla's approach with XUL and I18N. They separate out the text using entity substitution, and the rest using CSS. And that's a very basic, moderately unsafe way to go about things. A more intelligent way would be to have one XML doctype for your basic document, an XML doctype for your content (of which you would have n instances for each of your n languages), and XHTML for your formatted result. You would also have two XSLT transformations: one to merge in the I18N, and another to merge in the HTML design.

The next release of Apache Cocoon is expected to be very efficient in terms of XML/XSLT processing, but I don't know how it racks up in comparison to hardcoded PHP.

Say due to some "bug" in the software, you get locked out of your mission critical system. How do you get back in?

You send a tech to let you back in through a well known and documented procedure that allows full access from the console, a feature you knew about and chose not to disable.

The fact that backdoors can be useful does not excuse one being placed silently in a piece of software that is then marketed as secure. You may approve of having a remote back door; you may believe that the risk is sufficiently small to justify the potential cost savings. That's great. But that is a decision for each customer to make, and not every customer will agree.

Separately, it's my opinion that a common remote backdoor, no matter how well hidden, will turn round and bite you on the arse eventually. This software is too well deployed; too many people are auditing it and probing it. If an engineer puts 100 hours of work into hiding it, it only takes 100 people 1 hour of searching to equal that effort. How before someone makes that discovery? And how long after that before it is widely reported anywhere other than IRC?

Dave
(posted with Mozilla 2000041316)

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okay. granted, and I don't know if cdsa would help out mozilla, either.

but looking at the faq here it says that all the code isn't there. I guess that is only the actual encryption and not anything else?

Regarding:
Look at mozilla, they needed crypto, so they're using psm from sun (available from iplanet). PSM is closed source.

This is not at all accurate. Both the PSM application and the NSS libraries are available in source form from Mozilla.org. For more information, please see:
The Mozilla open source projects page
Please also see the FAQ and the newsgroup (referenced on that page).

Also, PSM is not "from Sun" (not that it really matters). It was written by Netscape engineers on my team. We are distributing binary versions for use with Netscape 4.7 and Mozilla from the iPlanet site. You'll notice that PSM is bundled with Netscape 6.

I encourage everyone interested in open source crypto to visit that web site above. It's the best way to keep up to date on what we're doing.