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Chief Lizard Wrangler axed
Kalak writes: "MozillaQuest is reporting that Mitchell Baker was laid off by Netscape back on August 23. True to form, there are also discussions on this on bug #96747." She spoke at OSCON and I was pretty impressed. She seemed legitimately committed to the mozilla project being a successful open source project. Not sure how this bodes for Moz itself, but it sure is unfortunate.
Please don't slashdot our Bugzilla server! Please! We need it, and currently it's dying.
Gerv
This question was raised in the posting, but it begs a deeper question. Are OSS Projects dependant on their founder?. The imediate reaction is no, expecially in this case where she was not the founder. The closes to a single indevidual founder we could get for Mozilla would be Jamie Zawinski and the project continued on without him, but how many OSS projects are organized as a cult on personality? Is this a failing of social order of OSS, or is it just a failing of leadership and administration?
Large scale projects like Mozilla, and Apache could probably withstand a complete changing of the guard, but how many smaller prjects could handle such a change and still continue to produce quality software?
Does anyone have a mechanism to quantify the critical mass of an OSS project?
--CTH
--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
Please excuse my thoughts of a potential conspiracy theory here. Given the significance of AOL (Netscape) developers to the Mozilla project and the lay off of a (significant?) number of employees, including lead developers, to Mozilla, it seems to me AOL is attempting to kill Mozilla. Why else would AOL make such a move? I mean, what other result would come from this by not continuing support of Mozilla? (eh, 'mozilla is available for download' is not significant support imo).
The motive? Who knows. Recently, though, AOL and Microsoft were engaged in intense negotiations regarding the inclusion of AOL in Windows XP.
"There ought to be limits to freedom"