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

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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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)