Life After Netscape For Mozilla Developers

An anonymous reader submits "MozillaZine has an article up on life after Netscape for Mozilla developers formerly employed there. Several developers are now employed by the non-profit Mozilla Foundation in full or part-time positions, others have been hired by IBM and Daniel Glazman was contracted by Lindows to write web publishing application Nvu. Another group of developers have joined together to form Mozilla Consulting to work on customized Mozilla enhancements. The amount of interest by non-Netscape companies in Mozilla is surely a positive sign for the future of the project."

Comments

Article summary

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Netscape paid Mozilla developers
2. AOL/Netscape pulls out of Mozilla program
3. Mozilla developers get rehired by different companies

Seriously, there's very little "life after Netscape" in the article aside from "X works for Y now".

a lot will depend on results

[Fux the Penguin]

While it is good that these people have jobs and can continue to work on Mozilla I think it is a little early to claim that industrial support is well under way. It is certainly very positive that some companies are willing to put their money where their mouth is but I think a lot will depend on the return of this current investment. If nvu doesn't materialize or if other key mozilla components do not deliver on their promises (e.g. calendar is so far mostly vapor ware in terms of interoperability), I think mozilla adoption by industry will not become much better.

Certainly there are some great opportunities: - There is an enormous trend in the public sector (especially outside the US) to adopt open source. Mozilla is part of this trend for non MS platforms. - Internet explorer does not seem to have evolved in the past few years and is unlikely to do so in the coming few years: market share can be gained. - Apple seems to be moving away from MS products, this will stimulate adoption of alternative browsers by both users and developers. Alternative heere does not necessarily mean Mozilla but other than IE.

Re:a lot will depend on results

[NeoSkandranon]

...and they each sent 50 USD to the Mozilla Foundation (not a lot of money for someone in the Western world; just 25 cups of Starbucks coffee)

Or a week of groceries for a college student. Or two-three tanks for gas for a commuting worker. Or a phone bill. Or...

You get the idea. It's not alot of money, but it's not an amount alot of those 1 mil people probably have to kick around.

I hope it does well

[uradu]

Mozilla with XUL is indeed a nice distributed platform, a much richer way of writing "thin" clients than *HTML. You can actually write distributed apps that feel so much like a native local app that most users wouldn't even notice--except for performance, of course. A lot of porkiness and memory leakiness still needs to be removed, and some usability loose ends need to be tied up before everything is peachy. Right now (even with the latest builds I believe) keeping multiple copies of Mozilla up for days eventually eats an incredible amount of memory. Closing them brings the system down with furious swapping activity.

Slow down...

[Orien]

The amount of interest by non-Netscape companies in Mozilla is surely a positive sign for the future of the project.

I know we are all anxious to see the project have a long-term future, especially with the recent changes, but that is jumping the gun just a bit. There is a big difference in companies having interest in Mozilla employees than having interest in Mozilla. Just because IBM hired Daniel Glazman doesn't mean they have any interest in Mozilla, they just know he is qualified in specific development areas that they want to focus on.

Re:Litmus Test

[afidel]

If the site isn't conforming to the specifications that Mozilla claims to support, then yes it is fine. But more often than not Mozilla failing to work is due to some crappy server side client dection script that doesn't know what to do with Mozilla and so it just sends the equivilant of, "go away, we don't want your kind around here." My normal response is "fine, then I will take my business where I am apreciated". I got both of my banks (credit card and checking accounts) to support Mozilla by kindly asking a few times to have it added. Since many, many web developers use Mozilla because of its great standards compliance and it's lack of crashing it's often not hard if you ask the right people in the right way =)

Developers are people also

[jhines]

Given that people with common intests form communities, it isn't unreasonable for this community to be interested in what happens to the people of that community.

That I've never met them in person, doesn't stop me from being concerned about them.

SVG still needs to be done

[ishmalius]

I consider SVG to be the "next big thing" in HTML. It only seems to be stalled for lack of critical mass. People aren't using SVG since no browser supports it natively. No browser supports it natively since people don't use it yet.

But it is SO tantalizingly close in Mozilla, that it is painful to see it so far away. Checking the progress of SVG in Mozilla, it seems to be stagnating. It really needs some General Patton to force-march it toward a release.