MozillaZine Celebrates 5th Anniversary

An anonymous reader writes "MozillaZine, the Mozilla news and advocacy site, is five years old today. They've got a fifth anniversary section, containing a message from their founder, a chronology (which makes a pretty good Mozilla timeline generally), some trivia (who's bright idea was Music to Code By?!) and an acknowledgements page. I think it's amazing that a free site like this has provided such a great service to the open-source community for half a decade. Cheers!"

Comments

I hope for their sake..

[CooCooCaChoo]

They're not singing that awful song, "Every walking the dinosaur" ;-)

5 years, small number of donations and it has become the corner stone of the Mozilla advocacy and users groups. 2 years, $40billion in the bank and Microsoft is still trying to creat that "community atmosphere". Maybe we should bottle some "community atmosphere" from Mozilla and sell it to Microsoft ;-)

Re:I hope for their sake..

[The Almighty Dave]

Maybe we should wish in one hand and shit in the other, then see which one fills up faster.

Microsoft is a corporation. they are not trying to create "community atmosphere", they are trying to sell a product. If projecting the illusion of "community atmosphere" will help them market that product, then they will try to create that illusion. They care about profits, nothing more, nothing less.

Re:I hope for their sake..

[SunPin]

Every few months, I've given Mozilla a try just to keep the faith. This summer, 1.5 Beta found a permanent spot on my drive as the undisputed default browser/mail application. I just happened to avoid the sobig disaster because of it.

Firebird looks slick but it's not ready for primetime quite yet. I like Thunderbird as well and I look forward to seeing it fully developed.

The Mozilla Organization is a terrific example of open source producing something much better and even more innovative than commercial competitors.

Internet Explorer cannot hold a candle to Mozilla 1.4/1.5. As people that were sitting on the fence decide to get involved (like myself), IE will have no reason to return even in 2008. It's completely over for IE.

Mozilla is a victory for open source software. It's not a "me too" project that seeks to replicate IE to spite M$. More projects can/will learn from the Mozilla example. Microsoft is running out of time to open its software. Eventually, the OSS options will be better and widely known to the public.

Re:I hope for their sake..

[whereiswaldo]

Internet Explorer cannot hold a candle to Mozilla 1.4/1.5.

I totally agree. But you know, Microsoft could have added Mozilla's features into IE with no significant technical problems. Why they haven't added advanced features into IE, in part, is because of their corporate agenda. This goes especially for ad blocking. Microsoft is the ad agency's friend. Mozilla is the user's friend. Microsoft pretend's to be the user's friend, but the veneer is wearing off.

Re:I hope for their sake..

[Anonymous Coward]

> I just happened to avoid the sobig disaster because of it.

Really? Mozilla seemed to have no problems letting me doubleclick on PIF files.

BTW, you are pretty poor karma whore, by slashdot standards. Work harder.

Simple, you cannot sell or purchase

[PotatoHead]

people that actually give a shit. Everybody knows Microsoft is here to make their cash pile larger at any cost.

The Mozilla folks are here to make sure we have a good browser that runs on what we choose to run it on.

Re:Mozillazine deserves kudos...

[dimator]

Most geeks also understand the importance of the Mozilla project... but what I'm deeply worried about is the fact that the Mozilla project doesn't make anyone any money. Sure, you can point to Netscape, but does the number of people using Netscape put enough ad revenue (or any other revenue) into the hands of AOL?

Does AOL really intend on being Mozilla's major financer for much longer, especially since they recently solidified a deal keeping the IE renderer a core part of their client software, all but making Mozilla irrelevant? Sure, Mozilla could and would survive without AOL's dime, everything is open now. But if you take away the Netscape engineers working on the project, how many people would really pick up the slack? We think milestones are few-and-far-between now, imagine if there's a handful of developers, all across the world, not getting paid to work on it.

I hope my fears are unfounded, but in today's business world's uncertainty, I don't find it hard to imagine AOL pulling the plug completely on the project, and renting out the mostly-empty offices in Mountain View to the highest payer. Sad.

Community atmosphere...

[CooCooCaChoo]

is part of their grand plan. A while back Microsoft told an audience of MVP's that they would like to create the same sort of community development atmosphere as found in opensource projects. Later on they talked about expanding it to end users.

The fact remains, Microsoft cannot create that atmosphere because leadership has to come from the top. If the top acts in the "dog eat dog" manor, then what will their ISV's and end users do?

Ultimately, the ball is in Microsofts court. In terms of helping their bottom line, it is a great way of making themselves look good. If the plan did work then the feel good factor about Microsoft would increase, especially in the "decision making" area of businesses who can be easily blinded by PR stunts.