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Firefox Developer on Recruitment Policy

Posted by michael on from the cathedral-or-bazaar dept.

wikinerd writes "A Firefox developer talks about the project's controversial invitation-only developer recruitment policy and explains why Firefox will never grow up."

7 of 300 comments (clear)

  1. Then what exactly is Open ? by Gopal.V · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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
  2. Devs do not care for enterprise features by puke76 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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
    1. Re:Devs do not care for enterprise features by sepluv · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Well, although I disagree with the developers not accepting many patches, this is not one of them. Anything that most people do not need is supposed to be an extension in order to stop bloat--that's why Firefox is so much better than Mozilla; this falls into that category as only a select few machines run by an even more select few of (hopefully technically knowledgable) indivduals would need this.

      The extension system is integrated into Firefox and designed to be used. The real problem with the Kiosk mode is that that extension looks like it hasn't been kept up-to-date/has ceased development.

      In the future (maybe 1.1), I think the Firefox developers will probably include the most popular extensions in the Firefox installer to make it even easier to do additional stuff like this.

      --
      Joe Llywelyn Griffith Blakesley
      [This post is in the public domain (copyright-free) unless otherwise stated]
  3. Re:They set themselves up in a Catch-22 by DingerX · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  4. Open Source? by vcv · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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

  5. pet peeve by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  6. Re:Why would they need to 'grow up'? by danheskett · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    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 :(" or some such nonsense. Great. Even better.

    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.