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Firefox Developer on Recruitment Policy
wikinerd writes "A Firefox developer talks about the project's controversial invitation-only developer recruitment policy and explains why Firefox will never grow up."
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mirrordot copy of the Blake Ross blog entry
As much as I agree on granting commit access to anyone worthy of it .. I absolutely do not like the XFree86 way of "We take only patches" kind of elite bastards (Linus comes close to pissing me off, but he manages to show the other side as well on a few good days).
:)
Hopefully firefox will not go into that Elitist arena which blocks out young developers...
All that said, I had to work for 3 months almost full time to get commit access on what I work on . But we've had a guy who would steam roll the patch database with useless patches and report all kinds of pedantic bugs to pester us into giving commit access (and for his notice, that doesn't get you anywhere).
A single strategy doesn't work for all types
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
They say loudly that they are only willing to accept developers to the project that they have vetted themselves, no one need apply. And with this attitude in front of them, they drive away people who want to help but are unsure of their abilities.
Then they say that they want people to submit patches and pitch in to help develop the product. But how is anyone supposed to do that without being a member? Well, obviously you don't have to be on the team to work for the team. But who wants to work for someone that isn't going to treat them as part of the same team?
At this point, the Firefox team is pretty well entrenched and the product itself is doing fairly well (still can't parse Slash code for shit, but that's just a hurdle to be overcome soon). So for this particular project, a thorny attitude towards newbs is not going to hurt them very much.
However, the spirit of OSS (at least on the BSD side of the world) is one of openness and acceptance. Turning people away or accepting a new member only through invitation smacks of elitism. Unfortunately when you deal with human beings, you will inevitably end up dealing with some who think themselves elite and worthy of looking down upon others from the heights of their snoots.
Sure, don't invite me... FighterFax, my own personal fork, will be ready on thursday. :)
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
These anecdotes are funny, but what I wonder is... Are they different from any other development project?
Every development project I worked on, the developpers included some form of easter eggs or witty comments in the code. It's human nature to have fun, and it happens in OSS and at Microsoft.
I think perhaps the only differences are 1) FireFox code gets seen by the world, whereas non-OSS comments are hidden for the most part; and 2) Quality Control usually catches stuff like the 'cookie description' in time for public consumption.
Hey, it's great that FireFox was born in a fun environment, but I think it's just human nature to make 'work' as pleasant as possible. It's great in the case of FireFox that the 'community' gets to share in the fun.
is that ANYONE can contribute to a project.
Only if the developers think you're good enough of course.
I'm a perfectionist but I'm trying to cut back.
And we're meant to beleive a person whose server can't stand up to a /. 4 seconds after being posted. I bet this guy uses IE.
A Firefox developer --> actually, Blake Ross (yes, we've heard of him before, and writer of the Firefox guide book)
... developer recruitment philosophy" line is.
why Firefox will never grow up --> from the article, "Firefox is growing and maturing--there's no question about it. But as long as we're around, it'll never fully grow up. So sit back, relax, and await the delicious delicacies that The Ocho will have to offer."
Website has gone down, so not sure how inflamatory the "controversial
When Firefox developers won't fix important issues that would improve browser acceptance in areas like internet cafes, kiosks etc, you have to wonder. What company wants a browser that you can't lock down?
London's finest organic fairtrade coffee
People sometimes ask why we work on Firefox for free. It gets hard to keep a straight face at "work."
Give me another project that touches the lives of millions of people worldwide and still has public codenames like "The Ocho" which get published in the media. ("The Ocho" is the name of the fictitious ESPN 8 station in Dodgeball; kudos to Ben for the flash of v1.5 naming brilliance). The best part of Firefox is that even as it's skyrocketed to the top, it's never really grown out of its humble roots as a skunkworks project that was by and large coordinated on caffeine highs at Denny's. It has, in short, never quite grown up.
Of course, it never quite dawned on us in the beginning that everything we were doing would someday be so scrutinized by the public eye. When I added "Cookies are delicious delicacies" as the tongue-in-cheek description of site cookies in our Options window, I did so because describing something so complicated in such a small space was quite frankly the last thing I wanted to worry about after rewriting the cookie manager. I didn't realize it would be archived for posterity in online encyclopedias, computer science lectures, privacy policies (for Virgin no less), magazine articles, developer documents, and even in print in an O'Reilly book called Google: The Missing Manual. I didn't realize I had singlehandedly created a cult legend that others would scramble to recreate as soon as we finally removed it right before shipping 1.0. And most of all, I never realized that one day it would inspire someone to give birth to hemp cookies. Because I assure you that had I realized any of this, I would have tried to actually create something funny. And maybe even signed my name.
This is, of course, but one case study in a project that has never taken itself seriously. What most people seemed to miss about Asa's original Firefox (then called Phoenix) roadmap was that the seemingly arbitrary milestone chart was actually a roadmap. (It does say "the trip" at top, y'know.) And if you superimposed it on top of a real map--say, around the West coast--you found that it made for a pretty clean trip from Mountain View, California to "Phoenix," Arizona. It just so happened that Netscape was based in Mountain View. It just so happened that we called it "Phoenix" because it was reborn from the ashes of a certain product. It just so happened that that product was...well, you get the picture.
Certain entrepreneurs have even tried to capitalize on Firefox's energetic demeanor. People bothered by constantly broken builds had one of two recourses depending on who broke it: violence if was me or complete public embarrassment if it was hyatt. For the young Mozilla contributor, MozillaZine offers the stylish Mozilla bib, and for his prostitute mother (or father), the thong.
Speaking of families, certain buttons began to crop up around the web urging people to download Firefox (or Firebird, as it was called then) as part of the effort to save Seth's kids. More recently, little Timmy and Jimmy Spitzer were spotted as donators to our New York Times Ad campaign. And yet, Seth claims he has no kids! Why, Seth? Why are you so ashamed?
It would be nice to claim that the silliness ends where the work begins. But it infects every part of the project, right down to our bug tracking database. Mixed among those little showstopper things like "Firefox crashes on startup" or "Firefox emailed my addressbook and attached my hard drive" are the real important issues, like Vending machine prices raised by $0.05 (as Sebastian astutely points out, that's actually not a regression but inflation), or the fact that our drag and drop code is British, or that (perhaps most famously) our core UI technology kills babies and should therefore be removed. Then there are the "oops" moments that plague every major software project: our "RSS" button looks like it says "ASS", our download manager seems to be flipping our users off, and naturally, our alternate stylesheet icon looks like the all-too-common soybean sp
This is in some ways similar to how Apache Software Foundation projects work:
l #meritocracy
http://www.apache.org/foundation/how-it-works.htm
I think it's a pretty sensible way of doing things.
Compare this with the rather more beaurocratic Debian procedure for adding new maintainers:
http://www.debian.org/devel/join/newmaint
All three are certainly different projects, that require different kinds of talent and abilities, so it's likely that what works for one may not work for the others, but I think it's instructive to compare and contrast.
As far as openness, the 'meritocracy' system works fairly well if those on the inside are inclined to add others. Nothing prevents J Random Hacker from making patches or writing code. Do that successfully for a time, and you will be invited to participate.
http://www.welton.it/davidw/
Not sure if plugins are included in this apparently elitist policy - I can't RTFA because it's slashdotted naturally.
What's a press gang?
The Navy would roam the streets of port towns, looking for drunks whom they would essentially kidnap and force to serve on board a Navy vessle. This was all perfectly legal.
Oh OK, thanks. See, that's why I come to Slashdot, for the educational porn.
I understand your point, being that the developers should incorporate that into the original design, but there are more than one extensions that allow the program to be able to do this. I believe this is, in part, because they are trying to keep the basic/core of the brower small and minimized, and then allowing users to select, download, and install only the extra extensions and options that they want. Why include a dozen different options like different RSS readers, stock tickers, built-in weather conditions, GMail notifier, etc. which only a minority of people will use when it will just complicate things and make the download size larger.
Keeping the file size down will not only attract those who still use dial-up, but also those who use dial-up, in most cases, have slower computers who do not have the extra RAM to spare for the extra features they don't want.
The Extensions Mirror (at http://extensionsmirror.nl/) has over 400 extensions for Firefox 1.0 compared to the 184 that Mozilla Update hosts, as well as themes and also extensions for Thunderbird.
Every extension you could probably desire for Firefox are out there; you just need to know where to look.
With the (what seems to be) ease of creating, and the popularity of extensions for Firefox, is it really the developer's responsibility to create and implement all of the features and extras that are desired, or wouldn't it be more pertinent to have the main developers focusing on the core of the browser, its security, or other related aspects and leave the rest to the enthusiastic aspiring coders out there?
Firefox is open source, so anyone can contribute. And the open-source is fully of great talents, right?
Why then, after 5 (almost 6) years, is the outline property in CSS not supported? Why is there no one able to fully implement this? Yes, I know about -moz-outline, but it's -moz-outline because they don't trust their own code enough after 5 years.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6647
My pet peeve is how the developers won't fix autocomplete so it does not remember credit card numbers.
It's bug 188285. Have a look if you're interested.
Given that similar policies have gone(hint: "trusted friends" is really an euphemism for something else related to where Orkut came from) on in other places in that area of the States, why is this surprising? At least somebody accurately hits the nail on the head on this kind of issue - where else do you get such arrogance that results in good code being sacrificed for California style political games, where you win by excluding the most people while presenting the best facade to the public of what you do.
Sure, there is more than a shred of validity of checking code, but when you use politics instead of quality to determine what goes in, it's not a meritocracy anymore, it's not even about the code. At that point, things like the Xorg/XFree86 split and the various BSD splits happen. Not minor code forks, but major splits.
To preempt you nuts who think nothing can be forced, fine. You just mindlessly confuse theory and practice as being the same in any situation regardless of politics, especially if it deals with places too exclusionary for their own good.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Stupid Firefox developers..I'll go make my own fork, with hookers and gambling and casinos. In fact, forget about the fork!
What's so bad about the Drag-And-Drop code being British? Tea stains?
If the Orkut thing annoys anyone here on Slashdot, reply to this message and I'll arrange to give you an invite.
paparazzi
here
If growing up means becoming bloated, taking over the operating system, and opening itself up to every h@x0r known to netdom then I hope Firefox stays young and naive.
I can't be bothered to read all this pious waffle of the article past the first few sentences but I don't need to.
Firefox's biggest problem is it's attitude which is a hand-me-down from Mozilla. It's kind of well...puke enducing and silly and not neccessary. The article starts off full of vanity and nonsense like all of the FF blogs do.
It's largely thanks to the pious chip on the shoulder and lets kill M$ atmosphere that FF whips up that makes sure it is a browser I don't much use. Ok I am a Mac guy so IE vs FF doesn't mean fa to me, and FF is pretty crap on the Mac anyway but still I honestly think FF/Mozilla should just lay off the rhetoric and offer the goods if they want to but just shut up. And stop please stop trying to force it down people's throats. I can't speak for my Windows or Linux friends but FF on a Mac is an almost meaningless product and a poor 2nd browser.
I'm sure a lot of hard work goes into Mozilla and Firefox and all that stuff but whats happened over the last year or 2 that hard work and pride in one's work has turned into a ridiculous ego trip and vanity spree for the developers and that just undermines a lot of what they think they are trying to do.
There's two basic reasons why volunteering sucks, and unfortunately, volunteering for firefox is just as bad as regular volunteering.
1. You don't get paid, that's why its called volunteering.
2. Nobody respects you. This is the worst problem, it's simple really. If an organization doesn't value your help, working for them will be much harder than if you were getting paid.
Case in point: Try to fix phone lines for a local nonprofit. I end up standing around for 30 minutes to talk to a decision maker, only to be passed by someone with no apparent contribution. If I was on the clock, they would have respected my time if not only to avoid high fees.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
http://nxzilla.sourceforge.net/
it is only after a long journey that you know the strength of the horse.
All developers are cool, but some are cooler than others. They don't necessarily have to be bad, but cliques are cliques.
Seriously I wish there was a way to mark an article as "-1 Troll"
Ladies and gentlemen this is such an article IMHO.
Why does the link to his blog redirect to Wikipedia?
Oh I see. The Mozilla developers are supposed to learn lessons on openness from BSD? What kind of troll are you?
..Net? Open? could not get along with Theo De Raadt. These are the same BSD's that pride themselves on its elitist policy of only accepting patches from the core group.
Did you miss the OpenBSD forking because the rest of the previous BSD team
http://www.netbsd.org/People/core.html
I humbly submit that no one needs to learn anything from the BSD process. Next time, don't make such clueless statements. On Slashdot, people who know the history of Unix are a dime a dozen.
In fact, if you knew anything about the BSD approach, you would realize that the Firefox group seems to be approaching the exact same level of arrogance. I only hope we don't end up with three pointless forks..Open Firefox anyone? The pointless infighting and forking of BSD was the reason they were hasbeens instead of competition to Linux.
http://blakeross.com/index.php?p=19
http://blakeross.com/index.php?p=24
in the article
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blake_Ross?index.php
Who's work is that?
Why does yahoo do this
...but it seems that's all one can expect on /. now:- kneejerk reactions weighted by the moderator's own, particular prejudices.
I like FF as a browser, and support it, and promote it, in general.
I still think you made some pretty valid points though. Especially the f**king huge and conspicuous ego-tripping by FF crew.
Oh, they're setting the world to rights! No doubt about it!
This Describes exactly how to do that. http://tln.lib.mi.us/~amutch/pro/phoenix/kiosk.htm
"I don't code the things you use, I make the code your things use better."®
I thought the XFree userbase was more or less gutted when many of the Free Unix distros punted them en masse in favour of X.org?
In that the people who work on them tend to work on problems that stimulate their own intellectualy curiosity and not a prioritized list of things that would lead to better general acceptance. For example, one thing that generally pissed me off about Firefox was Profile Manager which required you to enter Profile Manager in order to switch profiles and then start Firefox seperately. Unlike NS7 which just brings up the start profile panel first and you pick whichever one you want. It's needlessly complex to do it the Firefox way. Also the idea that could share mailboxes with NS but if you did they really weren't usable for NS anymore is irritating especially if you're in the middle of migrating and you discover that something simple like clicking on an HTML tag in Thunderbird does nothing because it can't figure out what the default browser is anymore. And so on.
The list is endless. For example in AbiWord - in order to change the default document path you simply change the Open In line in the desktop icon but it is documented nowhere and you expect something obvious like a setting in the application or at least a text ini file. Duh!
And when you try to deploy a simple Open Source desktop machine at home you find that the basic things that most do are the hardest things of all to do and/or become expensive to do well to the point that maybe it's not cost effective anymore. I give you a few examples:
Print servers like an SMC7004AWBR that don't have port redirector software for the "SMC100" for Linus. In fact no drivers for most printers and you rely on "Good Enough" or close enough" Which sometimes works, sometimes not.
Drivers and usable software for digitizer tablets and scanners. Trust me, more people than you think use these devices on their at-home machines.
A cornucopia of different desktop environments that in reality offer few practical differences from one another. Gnome, KDE, etc. are all good but not really noticeably different or helpful for moving home/office users from Windows to Linux.
Though I really like the idea of Knoppix and similar Linux on a CD to just run the hell out of it and test it out first. I've been asking for something like this for Windows for years - to be used as a bootable stripped down Windows recovery CD that doesn't install anything.
The idea that any build level higher than 0.69 beta is good enough. It's not. We really need a bunch of different build streams for the 250 odd distros in use right now. Over at distrowatch you can point to all of them but a basic taxonomy is missing: I suggest the following: Desktop, server, server appliance/firewall, embedded, Boot CD, cluster, gamers, special hardware (eg S/390, PPC). And for desktop and server clearly delineate 1.0 from 1.0+ sometimes people just want something that works.
If it costs nearly as much as Windows most people will use Windows. Mandrake are you listening?????
Admit that Linux certified hardware is probably a failed effort. If I try to run a distro on my cheap greybox it may run, it may not. Seemingly if I spend a couple of hundred hours I can probably tweak every obscure problem until it does - - maybe. And 'works' is a pretty vague point anyway. I have a bunch CDRWs in Windows that all 'work' far below their rated speed.
Wine can suck and suck hard. All we want is to run the functions we run in Windows not necessarily the apps themselves which are bloated and too expensive anyhow, eliminating the benefits of running Linux to begin with. It's an unavoidable gambit and one that should be taken as last option. But if there is to be better emulation or sub-OS option it has to be low cost and not require any native MS code to run.
All of this is a roundabout way of saying that Firefox is a good example of fixing a problem that probably doesn't exist but is an interesting challenge nonetheless. FF/TB is really NS7.2 stripped down and a little faster. It was a tremendous development effort on the part of some very dedicated people to literall
He has never written more than 10 lines of code in his life but will tell you to "GO FIX IT!" if you find fault with any of the software in the holy panoply of modestly successful OSS offerings!
Offtopic, but great.
Unforuntunately for social junkies, there's more to the Firefox/Mozilla story than we will ever hear. I do not by any means represent the whole mozilla community, but I know my words represent some people (or at least one person). My description of events are biased, and may be very ill-informed at some points, but I know I'm a bit more informed than the general public, so I thought I'd share.[/disclaimer]
From day one, Firefox was l33t. For many, the developers that went off on their own were impatient and unwilling to follow the rules. During the time just before (and during) the breakup, there were many questionable checkins that did not go through proper channels. At mozilla, decisions are made by the community, or at least the part of the community that has seniority in that area of the code. When a bunch of people in a code area all have relatively the same seniority, drastic changes are often met with negativity. This was especially the case with UI and the related XUL stuff. Perhaps it also has something to do with Netscape, who used to have a stranglehold on the UI, but I'm rather unclear on that aspect.
When the Firefox people split off on their own, I personally was a bit relieved to get rid of the "too good for rules" people. It certainly created a divide in the community. The lean, l33t Firefox developers were on a power orgie, doing all the changes they, for so long, wanted to do. Most of them were awesome ideas, as everyone can see by what Firefox is today. Some of the stuff has even creeped back into mozilla, after it was matured enough in Firefox, that is.
Which brings us to another issue that divided the two sides -- the Firefox team, at least at the beggining, was more of a "Do a half job, commit it to CVS, then fix it up in stages" team. I do not know what they do present day. The mozilla team is a "make sure the patch does a specific task, is correct and complete before commiting", which requires a lot more time, a lot more reviews, and a much bigger delay before the public sees your 'kewl new change/fix'. There are many projects that follow either type of philosophy. Neither is incorrect (both philosophies can and do work), but a project obviously can't follow both philosophies.
As many slashdotters love to say, the great thing about open source is that if you don't like what the developers are doing, or you don't like the developers, or you don't like the atmosphere, etc, you can take the source and make your own branch. This is exactly what Firefox did, and good for them. The difference between them and a normal 'branch-and-do-your-own-thing' is that the l33t developers were also high up mozilla developers/PR/etc. This created a unique situation where the two projects had to stick together. Even to this day, the relationship between Mozilla and Firefox is an issue to avoid discussing in public with developers (because, out of politeness, they won't talk about it).
Ever since Firefox has become popular, I hear people occasionally say, "is this the last release of mozilla?" The answer is _NO_. Mozilla is the heart of Firefox. The people who are developing for mozilla are dedicated and have no plans of leaving. For some, bitterness about the invite-only and l33t feel of Firefox only invigorates them to do more for mozilla.
Also, I see a lot of posts on this thread saying "Maybe if Firefox wasn't soo l33t with its developers, blahblah bug would be fixed, or blahblah would be supported!" You couldn't be more wrong. 99% of the time, the proper place to add/fix 'blahblah' is in Mozilla, not Firefox. If anything, you should be blaming the bureaucracy of mozilla, not the l33t Firefox developers.
If you want to call the Firefox developers 'rebels', that might be a good term too. I think of them more as 'l33t immature, arrogant developers who got tired of the bureaucracy of mozilla'. We can all be immature and arrogant on occasion, so I try not to hold it against them.
I encourage any other Firefox/Mozilla developers to clarify and/or correct what I've said.
People sometimes ask why we work on Firefox for free. It gets hard to keep a straight face at work. Give me another project that touches the lives of millions of people worldwide and still has public codenames like The Ocho which get published in the media.
--------
I find it hard to keep my lunch down when I read such self-aggrandising bullshit.
Then they lock out other developers so they can't fucking choose a fucking codename just in case it dilutes their moment in the media spotlight.
So they seem arrogant both in word and deed.
[% slash_sig_val.text %]
It's like unplugging Galaga, wiping the all-time high scores list and starting all over:
Make a new account and start your karma at 0!
Debian as a whole isn't bureaucratic, but the new maintainer process sure is. Did you see that page about joining Debian? Between applicants, front desks, sponsors, committees and tests... yuck. Those guys even rejected Norm Walsh as a Debian maintainer.
I did.
--CmdrTaco
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
That kind of policy can ultimately, in the long run, only be a bad thing, and those who talk about the merits of a meritocracy should keep in mind that this is none. Quite the opposite: if it was a meritocracy, someone who'd contribute good code and prove to be interested in helping out and implementing/fixing things that matter to them would become a developer without any big deal being made.
In fact, I'd go so far as to say that if it really a meritocracy (or a project which really understood what free software is about), there wouldn't be such a clear distinction between developers and users, anyway. All that really can be observed HERE is a kind of "ivory tower" elitist attitude that will ultimately hinder rather than help; people seem to be afraid to actually have an open development process as soon as projects grow larger or get a larger (and, in particular, a larger non-geek) userbase, but I think Linus' success with Linux' development model shows that this is not a reasonable thing.
Ever wondered why Linux actually *is* more successful than the various BSDs, and why (for that matter) hundreds of Linux distros coexist in peace while the *BSD developers generally seem to be unable to even talk to each other? It's not just because the majority of people are more inclined to contribute to a project that not only is free but *stays* free; it's also because with Linux, when you scratch your itch, you have a good chance of it actually being picked up, used and included into their trees by others, ultimately even Linus, as long as you're willing to demonstrate you're actually willing to maintain your code for longer than a few weeks.
The Xfree86 vs. X.org schism is another good example: people used Xfree86 because there was no real alternative, but they weren't happy with it and with the fact that the developers cared so little for the users and instead chose to form an elitist club of their own, so when an alternative popped up, they started using that. Can you name a major Linux distro that still uses Xfree86 instead of X.org? There may be a few left, particularly those that are more conservative about these things (like Debian, although I haven't checked which implementation they use), but I think it's safe to say that the majority has already switched, and that this trend will only continue in the future unless the Xfree86 developers radically rethink their attitude.
As for Firefox (or Mozilla in general) again, I can't say I'm too surprised, though. They have had this attitude forever (if you ever reported a bug, you'll know what I mean; if you don't, check out bug 18574, for example), and I think it's reasonably safe to say that people are using Mozilla mostly because there's no real alternative (IE decidedly is not one, and it's windows-only, anyway; Opera is not free and has banner ads unless you pay for it, and Konqueror is integrated too much with KDE for some people's taste, not to mention that not running on windows means a good share of Mozilla users can't use it, anyway). As soon as a new, better browser project gains ground, Mozilla will find itself in the same situation that Xfree86 is in today. It may be less serious, since it's more easy to include two browsers with your distro than two X servers, but ultimately, it's adapt or die, and I think some Mozilla people (asa comes to mind, as do some others) will have to learn that the hard way.
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
Maybe it is about having fun...
If you limit the developers to people who actually like working together, and have simular ideas of how to behave and talk to other people, more can often be done than if you also invite all the socially dysfunct coders, who cannot take a rejection of patch as anything but a personal insult (or, for the true nutcase, some political game).
There are more than a couple of great coders out there with zero people skill. They can damage a project because, even though their own contributions are great, they lower the fun level and therefore productivity of everybody else.
Some of them make great solo projects...
If you look at the bug report you would see that the page you've linked to is written by the same person whose patch was rejected and also developed the extention as a work-around.
mcox.com - Useful Information re: IT, Running, Fitness, Finance, or Ann Arbor!
Why exactly is this controversial? Gentoo does exactly this. Just because you have an invitation-only developer recruitment policy doesn't mean that you won't accept patches from others. With Gentoo, we receive patches all the time that make it into the distribution. That doesn't make the patch submitter a developer, but at the same time we don't deny patches simply because the person is not a developer. After the person has shown their worth, they are recruited by a more senior developer on the project and trained in proper Gentoo development policy. Why would it be controversial at all to only allow people whom have shown compitence to have write access to your CVS tree? As I've said, we receive patches from people all the time. Some of them are even first time Linux users who know little to nothing about development, but if the patch is correct, we accept it without passing judgement on the person submitting the patch. I'm not sure where the idea comes from that only accepting good patches is elitist, but how would doing anything contrary make the slightest bit of sense.
1. Get Debian commit access to a common, internet accessible package.
2. Build a trojaned package
3. Wait for apt-get to do its magic
4. Root every Debian box short of internal networks
5. ???
6. Profit
I'd rather the maintainers of debian packages go through a proper review process, thank you.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
This speeds up firefox considerably.
http://www.hackaday.com/entry/1234000803024910/
1.Type "about:config" into the address bar and hit return. Scroll down and look for the following entries:
network.http.pipelining network.http.proxy.pipelining network.http.pipelining.maxrequests
Normally the browser will make one request to a web page at a time. When you enable pipelining it will make several at once, which really speeds up page loading.
2. Alter the entries as follows:
Set "network.http.pipelining" to "true"
Set "network.http.proxy.pipelining" to "true"
Set "network.http.pipelining.maxrequests" to some number like 30. This means it will make 30 requests at once.
3. Lastly right-click anywhere and select New-> Integer. Name it "nglayout.initialpaint.delay" and set its value to "0". This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it receives.
If you're using a broadband connection you'll load pages MUCH faster now!
I hereby move that the word "bureaucratic" be struck from /. usage because nobody can fscking spell it. Same for "ridiculous".
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
I have submitted "patches" in bugzilla that were well received, even though the code was fairly lousy. They have accepted the ideas, discussed them with me and others, and implemented some of them in _much_ better code.
I don't have commit privs. I have bugzilla and mailing lists. If the stuff I submitted were worthy, I could probably become a trusted committer. But right now, it's best for everyone that I'm not.
EVERYONE, including the project lead, pulls source from CVS, creates patches, uploads them to Bugzilla, has them reviewed by another (trusted) team member, and then approved by the person responsible for a branch. At that point, someone with CVS access is permitted to commit them to CVS.
If you do not have CVS commit access yourself, you follow the exact same procedure as someone who does right up to the point of doing the commit itself. After having done a few of these, you just have to have someone in the project vouch for you AND SIGN AN AGREEMENT and you can get CVS commit access.
This is not a barrier at all.
I move to amend. That the phrase "the word 'bureaucratic'" be struck out of the resolution and replaced with "all multisyllabic words".
Don't hurt me, I can't spell either.
Rutan's team at Scaled Composites is a small team who have built a spacecraft that may end up accomplishing much of what the Saturn V did. Also Windows NT was essentially designed by one guy (Dave Cutler) with a small staff of developers back in the late 80s, I think. I grant you that by now the Windows NT team probably is a behemoth but not in the beginning.
"sweet dreams are made of this..."
You don't seem to know what you're talking about.
For one thing, the *BSDs share a lot of code, and contributing isn't harder than contributing to Linux; in both cases, you just need to get your patch accepted by someone with the ability to include it.
Two of the significant reasons why Linux became more popular (after a certain threshold things tend to remain popular by default unless there is a significant reason for change) were both related to timing - the legally uncertain situation that BSD was in for a while, and the fact that Linux was initially much smaller (and less featureful) than BSD at that time, and thus made better use of the limited resources of the PCs of the time, making it more popular with home users, and gained features at a rate comfortable compared to the advances in affordable mid-range PCs.
There were also other details making it more popular in the early days, such as ignoring safety in favor of performance (ext2...), which generally appeals to home users.
One thing that a lot of open-source developers don't seem to realize is that the "corporate" world of IT is very different from the "tinkering in your garage" world. Companies expect reliable products with good support and documentation. Silly comments in the source code aren't a big deal (lots of commercial software has this) but comapnies want the security of knowing that when something breaks, they don't have to rely on what they perceive to be a bunch of 14-year-olds.
I work in big, bureaucratic environments where everything has to have full support, documentation, etc. to be released into production. We're just starting to look into the open-source world. There are some great projects as well as some really lousy ones. The last thing the CIO wants to hear is that the people who write a core piece of software decided to stop maintaining it and left you hanging. THe way to avoid this, of course, is to go with professional outfits that will be around for a while.
I think Firefox is great, but now we have to make sure the team sticks around to support it in a professional manner.
There is an option that goes in the input box tag, autocomplete="off". Unfortunately, as already mentioned, it is not widely used.
Blocking 16 digit fields, and any field named "cc" or "ccard", should be sufficient.
Someone mentioned asterisking out cc fields like we do with passwords. That's not really the problem, unless someone is looking over our shoulder.
And it's really, really difficult to type a 16 digit number with no errors without looking.
they have produced the best browser in the history of computing
I prefer Classic Mozilla. FireFox is too dumbed down for my taste. YMMV.
Da Blog
Tis obvious you've been around a while Dunbar... your uid is pretty low. Mine used to be a lot lower than it is now, but I confess to not knowing exactly what (other than the semi-bogus scoring bump for posts) was unlocked by getting good karma.
If you feel up to it (or anyone else does), load up the clue-by-four and swing away. I'd love to know what wonderous features I've been underutilizing since my karma reached the stratosphere (or in the old days, the cap at 50).
Thanks in advance for any info. I am genuinely curious. (in both senses)
-- Mal: "Well they tell you: never hit a man with a closed fist. But it is, on occasion, hilarious."
Don't interrupt me as i agree on granting commit access to anyone worthy of it. I hope you have some evidence to back you up on the wrong side of the structure and organisation of living creatures.
I don't care how strong the apple engineers' kung-fu is, there's just no way to cram the g5 into that elitist arena which blocks out young developers...
Take a look at the time.
A single strategy doesn't work for 3 months almost full time to get commit access to anyone worthy of it.