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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."
JWZ
Bio: I used to be a hacker. Now I run a nightclub.
The real test for Mozilla, to me, has been on my family. As an IT professional, as many of us are, I get roped into supporting PC's and networks (sigh) for family members. One of the first things I do is install Mozilla for them, import their IE bookmarks and set up mozilla mail to use their hosts mail accounts. I also limit JavaScript, tighten security and configure the pop-up stuff. Together with the anti-spam features now in Mozilla Mail I find my family is truly happier with Mozilla than IE. Sure, from time-to-time I get complaints that website X wouldn't work with Mozilla but for the most part they are happy. To that end, kudos to the folks at Mozilla and I'm glad the OSS community his finding good homes for the folks from Netscape.
You never saw a fish on the wall with its mouth shut.
So - how is Mozilla Foundation's fundraising going? What is their endowment status at the moment?
sPh
Ok, if there are 1,000,000 people with this level of concern, 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), then the Moz Foundation would have 50,000,000 USD available to support development. That would be enough to keep a good team running for 5-10 years.
That's the problem with OSS. Nobody wants to pay for anything.
It's always promising to see a vindication of the open source model - and that is what this is.
Companies get what they want (the ability to cut development time and costs with prewritten code they can easily adapt).
Consumers get what they want (a web browser that works at no cost).
Hackers get what they want (a web browser they can hack, where their efforts will be recognised not cause a lawsuit).
Developers get what they want (income from doing something cool).
It's a win win solution, unlike closed development models. No one looses out at all, except the companies that exist to be the middle man. But even they don't loose out, as the shareholders can take their capital and deploy it where it is more worthwhile for the economy, which is the corner stone of capitalism. No more duplicated effort, creating the same product over and over, which by definition can never meet the requirements of all interested parties. Superb!
Beep beep.
I hope this isn't too far off topic
Mozilla is a prime example of the virtues of open source verses closed propriatary software (ex: IE). When Mozilla was way overdue, people called it dead. From a market share perspective maybe they were right. However because of taking the time to do it right, Mozilla is now the best (if not most popular) browser around. Because of this, those are innovative enough to come up with new features are going to choose Mozilla first to implement their ideas. Some of the guys from Netscape (the real innovators, not the ones who were just there for a paycheck) probably have a few good ideas left in them.
Blender And Linux Fan
While it is a problem - that AOL has decided to simply leech of Mozilla (however, I'm unsure about their state in regard to the various contract's with MS over using internet explorer - there's at least 3 contracts about that, that I know of) if you look at it, this can only mean more development of Mozilla & friend's, which is now far superiour than what netscape ever was, and can only get bigger and better (and more popular, considering the next IE's going to be bundled with Longhorn)
-Gwala
#!/bin/csh cat $0
There's also more volunteers than the early days, not just with coding and testing, but with user support too, such as the excellent Mozilla Firebird and Thunderbird Help sites.
But in reality to the end user, it does not matter how many people are developing it, it's the quality of the product that counts, and I think that with recent releases there's nothing that can beat Mozilla in all round usefulness. If you've not tried it for ages then it's worth a try now, features like type ahead find, tabbed browsing and of course pop-up blocking make it an excellent product and make using IE a painful process. The fact is on any platform IE looks like the third rate choice, if you don't like Mozilla then there's always Opera, although personally I hate the interface to it - but others will disagree, choice is good, and having a situation where more people try alternative browsers is good for making sure we don't get tied into a Windows (i.e. IE) only web.
I honestly haven't noticed any really significant improvements in my Mozilla experience in the last 6 months. As far as I'm concerned, Mozilla is done. Sure, it's nice to stomp some bugs and increase performance by ever-diminishing increments, but I think we've passed the point when the average user on a good computer even notices.
That's intended as a huge compliment to Mozilla.
I also think the remaining hackers are doing the right thing in trying to furhter modularize the code. These are the sorts of things that end-users (hopefully) don't notice, but they make the individual components more useable.
But I have to wonder whether Mozilla requires the huge programming push that it has needed two years ago. Is there ever a time when you just basically declare it done and leave it in the hands of some maintainers, like the 2.4 kernel?
What made Mozilla great is that it was a start from scratch, and it was (at least initially) architectured according to sane principles. Maybe the best thing Mozilla developers can do now is to leave it alone and work on Safari. The Konqueror code is where Mozilla was 2 years ago, except much smaller, more readable, and faster (not faster than Mozilla now, but certainly faster than Mozilla 2 years ago). I don't consider it blasphemy for a huge Mozilla fan like me to accept the fact that Mozilla is more-or-less done, and that volunteers who understand it well enough to contribute would make better use of their skills working on something like Konq rather that building angels in the Mozilla architecture (which no one but God can see). Or, go and write good open-source office software. There's a real need for improvement there... as there isn't in Mozilla.
50,000,000 USD available to support development. That would be enough to keep a good team running for 5-10 years.
if they are that mismanaged as to need from 10 to 5 million dollars a year for operating capital then they are horribly doomed.
50 mill should keep them operating for at LEAST 20 years. 30-50 years if the management had any brains and invested the funds correctly to also work for the company (40mill in a no risk bank CD that matures every year could keep them operating much longer... could keep them operating even longer with a savvy investor in house.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Apparently, he's thrown all away to become a club owner.
I haven't been following this closely, but there was a ton of buzz a year or so back about AOL switching to a Mozilla-based browser. IIRC CompuServe even tried it for a release or two. So have these plans gone away, or do they just plan to use Mozilla without contributing now?
"Switch to Netscape 7.1!"
As well there should be. I recently switched 'back' to an aging PPC Mac (a 5400/120, eeeek!) as a 'desktop' platform for the living room. The best web browser I have found for it, running MacOS 9.1 in 128 MB of RAM, is Netscape 7.03. The OSS developer crowd, taillight chasers that they always are, have abandoned such an 'ancient' platform. (one of the problems with 'scratching an itch' programmers is they tend to run bleeding-edge hot-dog hardware, not what regular people use). The unofficial 'Mozilla' build for MacOS is a slow, convoluted kludge compared to this official Netscape build of the Mozilla codebase. I don't know why. It just is. Possibly there are non-distributable MacOS bits and pieces that Netscape built with that can't be used in a 'free Open Source' build environment.
My point: There are TONS of people out there, likely the sort of people still using AOL products like AIM, for whom Netscape 7.x is viable and the correct browser choice. It's a hell of a lot nicer than IE 5.1 for Mac on this aging hardware...
I miss my Beige G3 but I'd rather have the money at this point.
A Good Intro to NetBS
>
> I'm sure the previous owners of Time-Warner don't trouble themselves with regret too hard.
Actually, a lot of them do.
AOL employees (regardless of where they were located) grew up with a west-coast dotcom culture: OMFG, I'm an options millionaire! Call my broker and sell me out the day the options vest, and I've got fuck-you money, meaning that if my boss gets on my case someday, I can say "fuck you!" and walk out the door!
Contrast that with the east-coast Time-Warner/media culture: "OMFG, we just got bought out by a bunch of n00bz. What is with these kids and that Steve Case guy, and where do they get off selling themselves out like that? Even if I wanted to, I can't really sell my shares, that'd be a demonstration of disloyalty, it's just not the right thing to do. I'll do better by keeping my stock until I retire. After 15 years of leveraging our media properties with the AOL brand, I'll be sitting pretty while those young whippersnappers are all broke. I'm a smart east-coast establishment type!"
So when East met West, and West walked out the door with $1M, and East held on to see the greatest destruction of shareholder value and the worst merger idea in financial history... yeah, there are a lot of Time-Warner drones who do regret it to this day.
(Fuck 'em, I says. Any fool could have seen the merger was a Bad Idea. The right thing to do was to sell both stocks before the deal even closed and put your capital somewhere less dysfunctional. But what do I know, I'm a West-Coast type, my loyalty is to my capital, and nothing else.)