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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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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
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.
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?
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Not sure if plugins are included in this apparently elitist policy - I can't RTFA because it's slashdotted naturally.
Well Tex, code ain't big enough for the ten thousand of us.
Openness, huh?
I always thought open source meant the source was free to be used, modified, imnproved and adapted. It does not, to my recollection, mean that those maintaining a given heap o' code have to take "all comers", or even have to have a formal mechanism in place to consider adding to their number.
I don't know what kinds of projects y'all work on, but where I come from, when someone comes up asking to join a project, or asks for collaboration, in the name of "The community", "the open source ideal", or other high-falutin' sounds, it usually boils down to one of a series of options:
A) Can you give me lessons?
B) Can you spend time working on my project?
C) Can I boost my own social position by claiming to work for you guys?
If you have the luxury of an abundance of people who want to work on your free project, you pick the ones who are most capable of doing work with the least amount of management. Going through a list of submitted applications is not the most efficient way to do this. You find who's doing good work, and talk them into working for you.
If someone has a brilliant vision for OSS, that person is usually better served realizing that vision in a dedicate project. Giants on the shoulders of dwarves.
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.
The only time I've ever been embarrased professional is when I was making a pitch to a long-time consulting client about using some fairly standard FOSS packages in their previously pristine Windows and SunOS environment.
:(" or some such nonsense. Great. Even better.
Presentation is going well. Price points get a big eyebrow raise. Lead-in time is great. Non-proprietary is great. All good things.
Question and answer period goes all to shit. Made the mistake of referencing "GNU/Linux". My bad. What does the G-N-U stand for? GNU is Not Unix. What's that now? Huh? Ohh.. I see. What's this other acronym? KDE? Is that like CDE, which we use now? Ohh yes, but much better. Sure, let's take a look. Client clicks around on the laptop for a few seconds.. boom boom boom.. hits a panel that reports "Not finished yet. I'm too lazy
What a disaster. I was mortified. He picked apart all kinds of the typical Linux stuff.
In the end he went to another consultant and stuck straight to Windows. It was very embarrasing.
The bottom line is that in the real world, no one cares about having the source available. The investment is very small. If Firefox dies, what, are they going to hire a programmer to keep it alive so they dont have to switch? Lets get real. Trying to pitch anything but a polished product is, well, just asking for a beating.
I think you hit the nail on the head with your comment.
After all, not everyone in Debian are the smartest coder.
Firefox actually want the 'smartest coders' that work with their codebase.
While it is certainly elitist, it makes sure that only the elite (dedication plus skill) get to work on their branch of the browser. If that ends up making it work faster, more robustly and more efficiently, then all to the better.
A small team of highly skilled individuals can often achieve more than a large pool of medium skilled people, and usually far more than a huge team of mediocrely skilled people.
Everyone they compete with (corporate entities, such as MS and Opera) is pretty much guaranteed to be elitist (they'll hire the best coders and designers they can at interview), so why shouldn't the firefox team?
Of course, as has been noted, if you think you can do better with your choice of team recruitment, then fork the project, and see which one survives.
Yep, that is how I have worked on every open project so far. I see enough bugs with a particular function and complain on bugzilla. End up in small debate about the issue in bugzilla. Offer my time if he/she will explain how to setup a build environment. I do, fix the bug, and send in the patch file to the developer on bugzilla.
:P
Then the next bug I simply file the report, ask if its valid, and if so submit the patch to bugzilla again. Once this happens a few times it becomes more time consuming to manage my contributions than to let me contribute directly, and I usually get requested to commit directly to cvs. I actually prefer not to have that burdeon/responsibility
Created due to licensing, but heavily adopted due to people being fed up with XFree86.
The Cygwin folks already had to fork XFree because of the orgainization's refusal to accept patches. And Cygwin was far from being the only ones annoyed with XFree. It was just easier for distros to stick with XFree instead of maintaining their own, and causing a political mess.
The license change was merely the last straw, and was very indicative of how XFree operated. By unilaterally changing the license, then refusing to work with the people who ship their product on fixing it, they showed an even higher level of elitism than before. By this time there was a large enough group X11 developers that were doing great work, but not part of XFree (mainly Keith Packard), that the distros had somewhere else to turn.
So it was more than a simple license change I'm afraid. They kept some of the best developers doing the most innovative work outside of the group, and alienated the very people who distributed their product. Their own elitism made them completely irrelivant in the development of X11, which was supposed to be the entire purpose for XFree's existance.
It is not impossible that this could happen to Firefox too, but right now they are the main drivers in the browser market, and generally are keeping their use base happy. No reason to worry quite yet.