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Mike Shaver Leaving Netscape
Rumours have been floating around for the past week or so that Mike Shaver is leaving Netscape/AOL After e-mailing with Mike yesterday, and reading the recent posting on Mozillazine, I'm sad to confirm it's true. However, while he won't be working on Mozilla as his full time job anymore, he will still be involved with the project, going so far as to say: "Though Mozilla will no longer be my full-time job, I will continue to participate in the community as much as
possible, and my new employer is very supportive of that." In any case, we'll miss you.
Mozilla doesn't require AOL's support to become a reality. It requires developers.
Stop crying in your beer and start coding (or documenting, or testing, or ANYTHING).
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If you can find someone to pay you to do something you love or if, like JWZ, you can convince your employer that the OSS philosophy is a good way to go, then more power to you.
Besides, you should be applauding Shaver -- once again, he's working on Mozilla in a volunteer way.
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Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
>Open source and payed developer doesn't work. The only true open source is VOLUNTEERSOURCE.
This is such utter nonsense that its probably not worth responding to, but I feel compelled to, anyway...
Can you just remind me, dear Coward, whether or not Mr Stallman draws his unemplyment checks and codes on the side? Or is he on a salary from FSF? (or rather was he, since I seem to recall him saying he had no time to write code anymore) I could be wrong, but I guess I have to say I think its the latter. Doesnt Alan Cox work for Red Hat? Dont VA Research pay salaries for Rasterman and Mandrake? Wasn't Larry Wall working for JPL when patch, Perl et.c were first written?
You see, Mr Coward, it doesnt actually matter where the money comes from (unless its arms sales, which I personally disapprove of, but is generally minimal as a source of Open Source development funding.)
What matters is the work; what matters is the code, and the license. What matters is what they gave. Mr C., I'd put my money on both these gentlemen ('Shaver and jwz') having contributed more to Open Source last week than you've done in your life.
So what if they got stock options. You think only rock stars and film stars are allowed to make money? Gee, imagine someone having a comfortable life because they did good things for the world at large.
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So, who becomes resident talking head now? Shaver has done quite well for mozilla both within the open source community (he's done some kick ass fud damage control here on slashdot) and to the world at large. And look at his checkin logs from bonsai (which is apparently down for maintenence at the moment). Happy to see that he'll still be involved with mozilla.
You say that the browser war has been won by MS, but the fact is that the browser war is not over and is never likely to be.
;D
The simple truth is that in the software world no matter how much of a lead you may have, that doesn't mean that it's easy to keep. Netscape could take another year to release their next browser, and when it arrives it'll appear on every magazine cover CD, for every platform under the sun and people will try it. If the browser is good then people will use it and the fact that Netscape didn't have a decent product for years and years will mean less and less.
Anyway, perhaps it's a good thing that IE is dominating, with Microsoft broken into three bits and IE opensourced then Netscape-AOL-Time-Warner will be the big conglomerate boogie-man
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
I just submitted this to slash, but I doubt it'll get posted as a main article...
Mozilla is now unoffically dogfood status according to the latest status report. The evaluation of whether it's dogfood or not is if at least 50% of mozilla.org are using mozilla for at least 50% of their browsing time. After that, bugs start getting fixed faster as people are really using the product (and pressuring their peers to make it better).
For those that haven't tried a nightly build - do so. It's incredibly unintrusive (just installs in your $HOME directory - and can be deleted just as easily), real stable, and is great as an every day browser.
Matt. Want XML + Apache + Stylesheets? Get AxKit.
Open source and payed developer doesn't work. The only true open source is VOLUNTEERSOURCE.
This is not quite true. I'm giving Red Hat as an example simply because that's the environment I'm familiar with; I'm quite sure the same holds true of most other paid open source developers:
Virtually all people who get hired have been working on open source projects (as volunteers) before.
I was quite glad I could stop studying and devote ALL of my time to Linux (instead of just my free time) when I got the offer.
Just because we're paid doesn't mean it's just a job for us.
Those people work at nights.
You'd be surprised at seeing how busy the Red Hat offices are at nights or in the weekends.
And no, nights and weekends are not paid overtime. We just want to get it right.
Those people come from different countries.
So who claimed all Red Hat employees are from the same contry?
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his new employer is Microsoft.
Based on my read of the article, he is only leaving AOL/NetScape.
- Sam Ruby
Mozilla just flew over you and posted this comment. I have it flying quite happily for hours at a time here. Has great HTML support, great Javascript/DHTML support, full Java support. It's lacking a few things that can't be put in (like some plugins and SSL), but overall it's looking pretty darn fine. And the widgets (gtk) are a whole lot nicer than Communicator's too. :)
Matt. Want XML + Apache + Stylesheets? Get AxKit.
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,
If you think I'm not a good open source evangelist, I can't really disagree; I must not have evangelized to you very well at all, though I was certainly trying harder to make Mozilla look good than to make myself look good. (That's the easier task, of course: Mozilla's a lot more lovable than I am.)
As for nights and nationality, people familiar with the project know what hours I work, and from where.
I'm honoured to be grouped with Jamie, though -- he's a fine evangelist indeed. (Even when he makes me cry.)
..He'll probably be the next person to disappear into the shadowy halls of Transmeta.. :)
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-- mind over pixel