Mozilla Project Turns 5

GreyWolf3000 writes "As this notice in tinderbox shows, Mozilla turns five years old today. A great testament to the ability of open software models debunking the myth that while the community can hack a kernel or compiler together, we can't build a large scale project designed for everyday folks to use. The trunk is feature frozen for the upcoming alpha release for 1.4. Can't wait to see what's in store next!" Read on for another odometer reading -- Mozilla's 200,000th bug report, perhaps just as auspicious a landmark.

zzxc writes "The 200,000th bug has been filed in Mozilla's bugzilla, MozillaZine reports. It was filed at 5:11pm EDT. (21:11GMT) The bug, which is already 'verified invalid,' is 'MailNews crashes after extremely long 'joke of the day' html spam mail.' This comes on the 5 year anniversery of the release of Netscape's source code, also reported by MozillaZine. Bug 100000 was opened on 9/16/01 after three years of development, while bug 200000 comes in less than 19 months from the previous milestone."

Comments

Failure?

[Musashi Miyamoto]

This project has proven several things about large scale open source projects:

- Open source doesnt necessarily mean "instant development". It took over a year before anything useful came of the project.

- Just because you release something as open source, doesnt mean that thousands will flock and provide free development. Though thousands did flock, as soon as they saw that the code wasnt nearly usable, they gave up immediately. But, now that there is a small core of developers working on it, it is a useful product.

- Now that it has made some progress, it is more difficult for a closed-source company to compete with it. It exists, and will be difficult to eliminate... There is no company to go out of business to cause Mozilla to disappear.

Community or company?

[m00nun1t]

"...debunking the myth that while the community can hack a kernel or compiler together, we can't build a large scale project designed for everyday folks to use..."
Not wanting to rain on their parade, as I agree that Mozilla is a great project, but isn't the only reason they have succeeded building a "large scale project" because of the significant backing of one company (Netscape/AOL)? While the community certainly had a very significant contribution, I think we might be giving it a little more credit than it is due.

Reasons Why 200,000 Bug Reports != 200,000 Bugs

[kirun]

Somebody always steps up to be the point-missing point-misser, so for their information, some reasons bug 200,000 isn't as bad as it sounds:

• Bugzilla carries bugs on the whole mozilla project, including issues with the webtools, etc.
• Sites which don't work in moz are still tracked by Bugzilla if it's the site's fault.
• Common bugs gain a large number of duplicate reports
• A lot of bug reports are RFEs rather than problems
• Bug reports are also used as trackers for groups of bugs
• Most of these bugs are fixed or closed, so they don't reflect current Moz quality
• A large number of bugs are small problems / single platform / hard to reproduce and most users never hit them