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Mozilla Foundation in More Development Trouble
sebFlyte writes "After the reports of problems with Firefox' development earlier this week there are now rumblings about more serious problems with the Mozilla Suite. Some developers want to spin the suite out as a community project that the foundation has no responsibility for, and others want to create a Firefox Foundation to deal with the success of the standalone browser."
Firefox is wonderful, but it isn't the Second Coming
Shit, don't let Asa hear you say that or he'll have a horde of fanboys gearing up to brand you.
The main problem is that you have a bunch of talented but young coders with shitheads hanging on their coat-tails repeatedly telling them how wonderful they are. Eventually, they will believe the hype about themselves and think they can do whatever they like and simply can't understand that a lot of people don't care about/don't like what they are doing.
cf. Mike Matas.
FOSS is not great because it tends to suffer a surplus of prima donnas, all of whom would rather be the boss of their own project rather than cooperate on one project. And of course once they fork their own project they continue to be prima donnas and make life miserable for people who want to contribute to their project, causing those people to want to fork and start their own project to escape Prima Donna #1, and in the process have a high risk of becoming Prima Donna's #2 through 8.
FOSS is great when a project stagnates like XFree86 so X.org starts fresh and fixes a broken system.
FOSS is not great when you have massive duplication of effort, for example in putting out a Linux distribution mutation #106. It takes a lot of work to collect all the bits for a distribution, build them, get a critical mass of people to test them, and fix the bugs. When you fragment and duplicate this effort 106 times you are wasting vast amounts of man(woman) power that could better be spent moving forward instead of reinventing the same wheel over and over again.
FOSS is not great when it develops 10 GUI "standards", 8 audio "standards" and 104 window managers. Its great for tinkerers but it is living hell for people who just want to develop and deploy applications that solve problems and for users who just want their problems solved.
Anytime you develop the urge to be a prima donna or to fork, just look at Linus. He is, in my book, not worthy of the God status most bestow on him around here, but his one greatest attribute is he holds together a complex and often problematic development team and he has so far managed to avoid a serious fork that would potentially wreck future kernel development. He is great because he is not a prima donna.
@de_machina
If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to here it, does it make a sound?
If a developer only wishes to develop for the moz suite but no on is there to use it, are you making a difference?
In addition consider these additional points: Many of your changes could wind up in firefox anyway... and MORE IMPORTANTLY>>>>> YOU ARE A DEVELOPER, IF YOU DON'T LIKE FIREFOX MAKE IT BETTER. If you abandon mozilla for dropping the suite you were never a true open source developer to begin with.
The recent browser comparison article Slashdot posted showed that the Mozilla suite actually starts up faster than Firefox.
There is very little difference in the interface. I doubt your standard user would even notice the difference if you replaced one with the other. If the only difference is the interface, Firefox should have just been an XUL theme for Mozilla in the first place then.
Extensions required a whole new browser?
And yet, the recent development trouble articles posted show that it is Firefox that is stagnating, due to lack of developers and commitment. 2.0 ain't coming out this year as planned. Just watch.
This simply hasn't been shown to be the case. As for the end-user who just wants a browser, Mozilla has always had the "Browser Only" option during install.
Firefox, when you get right down to it, really is somewhat pointless. Not that it matters if people continue to like and use it, but I think a lot of people just use it because they've been told it's better than Mozilla, not because they actually decided that it was.
No way.
God doesn't play dice.