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.

Comments

Feel free to pitch in

[FascDot Killed My Pr]

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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Re:Feel free to pitch in

[MattMann]

"pitch in" is good advice in general, but I've looked into working on Mozilla a number of times over the past couple of years and they don't make it easy.

the first couple of times I just downloaded the FAQ, tarballs, INSTALLING, whatever, and I'd plod along following the instructions and after wasting a few hours I discover: no motif, no build. jerkoffs, why didn't they mention that before? The only place that little message was "documented" was in a make error message.

so, things have moved a bit since then, but "fool me once..." ... now when I get the urge to work on it, I go and read ahead as much as possible, last time was last summer. Always, I get this queasy feeling that the people inside the project have carved out a little world for themselves that makes them happy, but an "outsider" is going to have to go through a maze of twisty turny passages to get there. This is a big project, and it's a big maze, so the fun of contributing seems way off in the distance ...

OK, I didn't want to shoot off my mouth without checking again. Here's today's report. It's brief because they managed to disconvince me again in a couple of sentences. From the hacking docs, and my quotes are paraphrasals, not literal.

1. Mozilla has "a great build system that has scaled to 100s of developers, so follow the rules and don't break it." OK? OK! I can follow rules.

2. "Confirm that your code works on all the different platforms before checking it in. Don't break the build!" OK? Nah uh! You guys don't have a build system, you have a makefile called from a shell script. Asking me to build on more than one platform is too much. I actually write code for multiple platforms and I think it's too much. What about all the people who don't? E-mail code to a pal and have them test it? Sheesh, that is primitive, not to mention I don't have any pals on Mozilla... yeah, I could hang around ... Look, build just the tiniest bit of support for it into the source repository, and organize a buddy system for me. If one person breaking something wastes 100*1 man-hours (mythical? :) then spend that time to make the build system deal. That way you won't have to excoriate me for breaking the build before I've even downloaded the source. You could say, happy things like, "come on in and contribute, we'll help you, we'll make it easy for you, we'll show you how"

ok, but forge ahead, Mann, perhaps it'll be ok. ...hmmm, I don't know about this, there are a lot of tools to upgrade. No, not their fault, gotta have tools, but certainly not something I want to contemplate if this isn't going to work out...

Oh look! the instructions for Linux (the largest open OS platform) Redhat (the largest distro) are labelled "out of date". So, I'm going to be on my own here... I think I'll check back in a few months, maybe after the release.

ya know, if it's three guys in a garage, sure, they can't keep it all going and porting is the sort of help they need. but 100s of engineers with a paid staff are telling me that this is a great system? They want me to help them, and contribute under a license that the FUD tells me is suspect to begin with? Fine, then roll out the red carpet for me by making it as easy to get started as the linux kernel. "make config ; make dep ; make bzImage ; make modules " Then, after I've played around a bit, if I have something interesting to say, give me a way to share it. But just 10 minutes of scrolling through their stuff on top of the time I've wasted in the past tells me that they love working on the "cool" parts of the code and don't pay much attention to infrastructure, infrastructure that is by definition huge and important because this is a crossplatform system with hundreds of engineers.

Don't get me wrong, I am not criticizing them. I'm not? No, I'm not. They are writing a lot of code and giving it away, how could I criticize that? I think it's great! I think they are great :) :) But if the shopkeeper wants to know why I came in and browsed around the shop and then walked out without buying anything...

It's not them it's me? Yep, probably that's it, the system is working fine. They successfully sent away somebody who shouldn't be working on it :)

Outmoded thinking

[Skyshadow]

There's no crime in making money off your efforts. Open source isn't about making a product exclusively by hobbyists, it's about making the best products possible via peer review. Paid OSS developers have actually come out with some pretty nifty stuff (look at what Red Hat's developers come up with, or look at the new UI toys from Caldera or Corel).

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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Re:Shaver and jwz are evil for open source movemen

[WhyteRabbyt]

>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.

Mozilla is now "Dogfood"

[Matts]

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.

Re:Mozilla is now "Dogfood"

[asa]

two quick comments:

Try a nightly build, M12 is a dinosaur.
If you feel like Mozilla is the property of AOL and so contributing to the project is contributing to AOL then I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding of what Mozilla is. Mozilla is the property of mozilla.org. AOL/Netscape will distribute a branded version of Mozila under the Netscape brand (and possibly others) but no one is asking you to work on that branded version. If you're interested in contributing to Mozilla but not AOL then look for peripheral projects that are using mozilla like some of the other web browsers or HTML editors that are utilizing pieces of the mozilla project. Maybe the MathML folks need some help in documentation. Maybe Adam Locke could use some help in his Active X wrapper. There are many places to contribute to the project and many good reasons (I believe) to do so. If you would like some of my reasons, here they are:

1. Mozilla will run on just about any platform and you can't say that for most other browsers.
2. Mozilla is open source so you can expect it to get better faster than conventional proprietary software.
3. Mozilla will be the leader in standards support which means that we'll all have an easier time developing for the web.
4. Mozilla is forcing others (including MS IE) to make standards support a key feature.
5. It's fun.

I hope that you don't decide to withhold your help because some large corporation is spending its money to help develop an open source project.

Asa

(posted with a 1/11/00 nightly build of Mozilla)