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.

Comments

Integrity

[vees]

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.

--

I told Festa it was bogus, but it still ran

[roca]

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

Wow, was Apple right?

[iElucidate]

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! :-)

More Mozilla FUD...

[chazR]

1. Rumour #1: Mozilla is late
2. Debunk #1: No it's not. Where did you get the shipping date from? It's done when it's done. Until then, run the stable (milestone) builds. You might be impressed. I am.
3. Rumour #2: It'll never ship. Too much feature creep, too late.
4. Debunk #2: And what new features are you talking about? There a some interesting things going on in the sidelines (MathML, for example) but the core of Mozilla is now pretty much feature-complete, and has been for a while
5. Rumour #3:They're trying to turn it into an operating system.
6. Debunk #3: No. It's a platform A significant part of a net user's 'screen time' is spent doing web/email/usenet/irc. Mozilla is meant to be the place where you spend that time. It can do all of those things well *now*.
7. Rumour #4: It's too flexible. It tries to do to much. It's too easy for people to hang things off it.
8. Debunk... Nope. Yes. It is very flexible. It is very extendable. But it's also very modular.

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.

Hey, it could happen.

[Wakko Warner]

I mean, Mozilla already does everything but fellate the user, and they're working on that.

- A.P.
--

"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad

Whoop... Emacs has a new successor

[Amokscience]

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)

It's not news that the news isn't news

[werdna]

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.

Can't do jack.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

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.