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CNET And MozOffice: Mountains And Molehills?
roca writes: "Check out this new CNET article, then check out
the thread that spawned it. Some random person in a Mozilla newsgroup said "hey, wouldn't it be cool to build Office-like functionality on top of Mozilla", and CNET decided this means a MozOffice project is happening (WRONG), and that millions of people need to know about this. Naturally, many readers believe them and are now flaming away because "Mozilla hasn't shipped a browser and now they're doing THIS!" What can a free software project do about this? Close the mailing lists or newsgroups to the media? Flame/sue the people who screw up? What?"
Well, it looks like James Russel has set up a site devoted to this idea on which he outlines why he thinks such a confluence would be a good idea, but he honestly notes: "This site is a placeholder that I hope to turn into an organizational centerpiece for what I think has the potential to be the most powerful side of Mozilla yet." And why shouldn't it be? Can't a modular framework grow far enough to cobble some words together? So long as it stays modular, that is. Even if a pipedream, it's an interesting that will no doubt inspire further inquiry.
Forget the fact that if the one who submitted this article actually read it, they would realize that at least 1 web site has been created to deal with the topic.
The real question here is why has it now become popular to complain about Mozilla???
Here is my theory...everyone who is complaining either knows what is really going on or doesn't. Those that Don't are not seeing much because they probably don't keep track of the project...they are the ppl that say "me too".
The rest of those complaining know exactly what is going on and waht to take some of the fame for themselves...why???
Mozilla Tinderbox
Check out this link...here is where the builds and descriptions of bug fixes get placed. Anyone who has been watching tinderbox knows that there has been alot of bug fixes in the past few weeks...plus, the tree in now closed for M17.
This means a new Milestone release is pending...now, why are they complaining that Netscape hasn't done anything???
Mozilla Milestones
Well, there you have it. M17 is overdue, the page mentions that it is unlikely that M17 will be released within 2 weeks of 6/28. Now the question is why is there so much fuss about Netscape PRODUCING SOMETHING??? Could it be because the next step is a push to Beta2 for Netscape???
That's right. Within a month of the release of M17, Netscape 6 Beta2 will be released.
Now, read of this what you may, but it sounds to me like a few people want to take the limelight for Netscape releasing Beta2...
Just my $.02 worth, I could be wrong.
When I got interviewed by Wired Magazine and others for an article or two about a little web thing I was doing, Leander and all the reporters were sure to get me on the phone to repeat my comments to them, even if what I was saying to them was exactly what I had written on the website. A bunch of the smaller outlets did what C|Net did this time around and just copied my more conversational comments from my website, put quotations around it and made an article from it. I thought that was a little sketchy even while this was going on, but I was still happy for the coverage.
I suppose there's two points of view here. You could consider a web page or mailing list like a press conference, roundtable or demonstration where anyone who attends can write about it, but also you could hope that the reporters would put a little more effort into their stories and actually try to get original quotes when people like the Mozilla planners are so easy to contact via e-mail and telephone.
Or maybe in the tech news obsession to scoop the next guy, they're losing what professionalism is left. I sure hope not.
Not to point fingers, but Slashdot hasn't been exactly innocent of this lately, either.
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Rob Carlson
I think the guy who submitted this overreacted a bit. The fact of the matter is, it seems that there is at least one person out there who believes that the Mozilla project will give him the tools to build an office suite, and I have no doubt that he is at least going to take the first steps of this project.
Should it have made cnet? Why the hell not? All too often, it has been demonstrated that net-only publications are operating under an entirely new paradigm of journalistic responsibilities. This story wouldn't have made the New York Times (or the Hometown Gazette-Newsletter) but numerous times have we seen similarly insubstantiated articles on, say, slashdot.
While it is a fact that idle speculation on mailing lists should not be used as the basis for news articles, let's not make an example of this situation. There are much better ones to focus on.
yours,
john
How can they put an office suite into Mozilla when they haven't yet got Quake and Space Invaders in there yet?
134340: I am not a number. I am a free planet!
I'm one of the guys he quotes in the article.
Yesterday, he emailed me for more quotes. I told him a few of the quotes and then basically told him that "MozOffice" was just an idea and was not newsworthy. Here's exactly what I said in my email to him yesterday (LONG before this article went up):
> I do think the ideas in my post have merit, but
> please don't convey the impression that this is
> something Mozilla will or might do. Mozilla is
> open source, and probably every day someone
> comes up with some half-baked idea for something
> cool they could do with it. I don't think that's
> news.
So this CNET story didn't go up out of plain ignorance. At best, it's negligence, at worst, it's naked deception.
Rob
A few years ago Apple released a framework called OpenDoc that allowed you to take a bunch of components and latch them together to make custom tools suited to your needs. It was much better than bloatware because you could choose the objects you needed and the OpenDoc wrappers would make it all work together through a common component architecture and custom APIs. This was an incredibly ambitious project, unfortunately killed because all of Apple's big software suppliers (read: M$, Adobe, Quark) hated the idea that all of their products would be obsolete.
:-)
Doing this on Linux has a lot of advantages, but it would be a huge amount of work, as most of the system isn't even remotely there. I encoruage people interested, though, to check out the old OpenDoc whitepapers and documentation.
After all, what was Apple's first OpenDoc application? CyberDog the web browser, of course!
Even the sniveling dribble and clueless clacking of a script kiddie druling on his keyboard . . . wait for it . .
This is the price you pay when you open things up for public scrutiny. Mozilla has been the only browser on this peecee (PIII 450 128RAM) for about a week now (I'm typing this in nightly build number 2000 07 23 20) and I respect everyone involved in building the lizard. Do I care if the finished lizard morphs into the next killer app? no. As long as they ship at least one version, and can demonstrate that the project has legs, I'll be contributing all that I can.
To quote someone who put it well:
"You can gain, or loose, a lot of customers fast on the net".
This flame war of the day is just an illustration of that.
Because of the philosophy of mozilla (It's a platform, not a browser), you can do *anything* with it. At the moment, you'd be brave to build an office suite on it(unless you have about a terabyte of RAM). But you could. All the bits are there.
Whenever I use mozilla as 'just a browser', I feel guilty. It already does so much that it's astonishing.
I offer a free beer to the first person who sends me a solution to the Tower of Hanoi problem to me written in XUL. For the first person to write a C compiler in XUL, I'll buy their first session with a psychiatrist. They'll need it.
- A.P.
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"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Homepage Programmers Guide
Class Reference
And, finally, a petition to add OpenDoc functionality to Java.
Enjoy!
But seriously, one would think that after a couple of years people would understand that 98% of the 'information' you see on the Net is rumour, innuendo, falsehood, deliberately misleading or aggrandizing.
I think it behooves reporters to consider the Net to be a source for story ideas, but that nothing can beat picking up the phone, making a call, and asking for confirmation before printing a story.
--
www.kitchengeek.com -- Nosh for
So when will I have built in cvs capabilities, a RAD IDE, and built in GIMP-clone module to go along with the nifty browser, instant messager, email, word processor, html editor, news client, spreadsheet all-in-one package?
We just need to put a team in place, scrap all the current StarOffice code, and go at it!
(ok people, I'm being sarcastic)
Fsck cluebie moderators. I'll say what I want, offtopic or not. And fsck having to qualify every bloody statement just
"Any chance of getting adding to /. preferences the ability to screen out stories posted by a given editor?"
Try your Preferences.
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The real Raunchola isn't cool enough to have any imposters
Bring it on Suck, bring it on CNET, bring it on Web Standards Project (actually no, the WaSP can go die, they are the ones who have made the stupiest statements about Mozilla, the little Microsoft knob-gobblers), bring it on, cause when Mozilla ships, you'll be left with a few old articles noone cares about and Mozilla will gain market share from all the inevitable "wow, mozilla actually shipped - and it's good!" stories.
In the meantime, I reiterate, the web standards project is the lamest industry group ever and need to prioritize beyond their current "hey maybe if we make totally inappropriate attacks on Mozilla, Microsoft will listen to us and buy us more plane tickets to Seattle".
sig:
sig:
See the "..for smart people" banners Wired runs here? Look elsewhere guys.
Why are people flipping out about mozilla? It's not like you paid money for it. The developers working on it are doing so because they enjoy it and think it's a good thing for the future of free computing. Bagging on them for being ambitious is ignorant. If you want a trimmed down browser, then you go, take the Gecko engine, pop it onto a canvas, and get something like Galeon.
I could see this if it was an upgrade to something you paid money for. It isn't. You should be thanking the developers for even trying! If it's not happening fast enough for you, go see how you can help Moz, Galeon, or any of the other alternatives out there. Otherwise, sit down, shut up, use Internet Explorer like a good lemming, and stew, because bitching about things isn't helping. Maybe bitch at RedHat if you bought it for not having a stable, argueably critical, component of their operating system present. Or, hell, contribute to Mozilla!
Kudos to the developers on Moz for trying; Shame on anyone complaining.
..don't panic
I don't want to release lousy code.
Right now I'm working on a game that, when it's playable, will be released under the GPL. I even have a sourceforge page ready for it (so I can learn how to use the sourceforge utilities once it's complete). Why am I not releasing the code right now? A few reasons:
- The code's incomplete. By which I mean that you can't tell what my design is by the code. Which means that, if I were to release now, I might get patches from people that, while probably being very high quality, do not mesh at all with how I wanted the game to evolve. This'll be a problem anyway, but once the design is clear, it'll at least be a little easier to tell what kinds of additions need to be made to the code.
- No documentation. I don't mean API documentation, I've been javadoc-style commenting my code since I started. I just don't have any design documentation online. It's all on paper in a three-ring binder. I simply design better when I can draw diagrams and such on paper.
- It's not playable! Right now you've got the title screen, and a dialog where you can select plugins. Everything else is infrastructure. I imagine someone who might want to contribute to the project would like to have something at least marginally playable - the contributor would otherwise have to work for quite some time before any results were visible.
- I might not finish. Don't get me wrong, I fully intend to do this, but it might take me a while. I've seen open-source game projects start up with an announcement akin to "Hey everyone, I've got a great game I want to make, with a website! All we need are some artists and coders, come and sign up!" -- and they're never heard from again. I don't want to end up like that. It'll be a disappointment not only to myself, but also to any other developers, and anyone who was interested in the game.
So yes, I think there are good reasons to keep a project to yourself until it's ready to be given to the world. You just have to know when to let go-Denor
Look, its like this. News stories always have errors -- sometimes minor, sometimes fundamental. News is written by generalists who gather information on very tight deadlines. Their job is to capture the gist of stuff and get it "out there" before their competition.
They try, but they never get it right.
Take this from a guy who's given a zillion interviews -- I don't even cringe anymore -- I just wonder WHAT they'll get wrong.
So, here's the deal -- the news guys got it wrong. Tell them the truth, and move on. Get over it.
There's nothing you can do about the media -- they're consitutionally bullet-proof so long as they didn't know it was a lie. And that's the way it should be. You WANT THEM to rush with what feels like a scoop. YOU NEED THEM to do that.
Just don't give them shit when they mess up. They're only doing their job.
Accually, I've talked to the maintainer of said website, and suppositivly, the reporter accually did contact him with questions regarding the mozoffice suite. The only problem is that while James Russel spoke in speculative terms and stated that the product hasn't even had an ounce of code yet, especially as StarOffice hasn't even been released yet. While the article simply kinda forgot to mention that part.
What can a free software project do about this? Close the mailing lists or newsgroups to the media? Flame/sue the people who screw up? What?
First: You can't stop anybody from creating a "bag on the side of your project" to attempt adding some functionality as a patch. (i.e. embedding Microsoft Office functionality in your project's product)
The best you can do (if you have that much centralized control) is not accept their patches into your project's mainline and not warp your design to provide hooks to support them (unless such hooks look like a good way to support something else specific or as a general support hook).
Second: It's the media. Unless they've libeled you all you can do is ridicule them for their errors (and the people who believed them for paying attention to such a ludicruous story).
If a media outlet does such stuff often enough, it eventually lowers their credibility as a source, placing them at a competitive disadvantage. But eventually is a long time. For now the best you can hope for meanwhile is the equivalent of a page-9 retraction of their page-1 feature - which won't stop the flames at you.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way