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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."
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".
JWZ
Bio: I used to be a hacker. Now I run a nightclub.
Coming soon...
... etc - ad nauseum.
Life after Worldcom
Life after Boo.com
Life after SCO
Given that ever single developer I know has changed job at least once in the last 3 years this is one nepotistic story!
A little planning goes a long way...
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.
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.
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.
To donate to Mozilla Foundation:
http://www.mozilla.org/foundation/donate.html
sPh
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 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.
SCO.com uses Linux
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.
16 developers currently work for McDonalds
3 developers work at Arbys
1 developer works for TGIF
30 developers are currently living in Mom's basement/guest room/crashing on the couch.
5 developers are living under the River St bridge, 3 in boxes, 2 in old station wagons.
3 developers "left the reservation" and are currently living in a commune.
1 developer is a mid level Amway rep
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.
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.
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?
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.
>
> 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.)