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."

Comments

They set themselves up in a Catch-22

[Dancin_Santa]

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.

Re:They set themselves up in a Catch-22

[Dancin_Santa]

The problem is not the process. It is in the way they present the issue. Any project needs to have a central management team that takes patch submissions and vets them before it goes into the main source.

However, the way they present it is that if you want to contribute, well, tough. You gotta be part of the team, and this is an invitation-only club. So someone comes along and says, "Hey, I'd like to have feature X work. How can I contribute?" And the website says "Fuck off, you're not wanted here." So he says, "Well, screw it. It probably wasn't a good idea in the first place." And then the project loses out on what might be a good feature.

They say "Members only" and "Please help us" simultaneously. Mixed signals, to say the least.

If it requires an article of that length to be written clarifying what really ought to be a straightforward issue, then the people who presented the it are at fault for clouding the issue.

Re:They set themselves up in a Catch-22

[91degrees]

Seems to me, if you're unsure of your abilities, you should start on a smaller project with less visibility than FireFox

There's no reason not to try. Your fixes will either work or they won't. If they don't, you've bitten off more than you can chew, so you abandon them. Wasted a bit of time, but you know your limits. If they do work then you've pushed yourself, improved yourself and proven to yourself that you're that good. And helped the project along.

Clarifications

[ggvaidya]

A Firefox developer --> actually, Blake Ross (yes, we've heard of him before, and writer of the Firefox guide book)

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 ... developer recruitment philosophy" line is.

Re:That's why open source is great!

[Lumpy]

oh come on.

I know what point you are making but all that ends up being is a pissing contest and nothing real will get done.

if a developer is such a prick that refuses to submit a bugfix or patch to one of the top people of a project that have that access then his attitude and code really needs to go elsewhere.

Come on, is writing a Open source app a community development effort or is it a "you will not give me god access??? fine I'll go and fork the project!"

90% of all forks die without anyone knowing they existed, look on sourceforge, for every app that exists there are at least 60 forks that either never made it past their initial CVS commit or NEVER even had a CVS commit.

There is a reason to fork, Xfree86 was a reason to fork. But just because someone will not be granted CVS commit access is certianly not a reason.

Also, what is wrong with putting your patches on your own pages??

I use kernel patches that are not part of the main kernel tree, hell Linus would not accept the pretty boot screen for the linux kernel for years so many of us used one of the several projects that had their own patches.

Look what happened, a superior way of making the boot screen not horibly-scary to 90% of the world was born and accepted into the kernel.

People that control a project, espically a HUGE project need to say NO automatically to everything first. Because for every talented and good patch submitted, there are 30-50 piles of crap, blatent trojan attempts, and a couple of outright wrong submissions sent.

I understand your point, and I agree with you. But most fporks are not for a real reason, that is why they die without a whimper except for the pissing contest on the origional mailing list.