Slashdot Mirror
Ask Mozilla Foundation Chief Mitchell Baker
There have been several recent reports of squabbles and problems involving Mozilla and Firefox development. In an attempt to clear the air about what's going on inside the Mozilla Project and the Mozilla Foundation, Mitchell Baker has agreed to answer 10 - 12 Slashdot questions. Please look at some recent interviews with Ms. Baker and check her blog before posting in order to avoid duplication. We'll publish her answers within the next week.
Now that seamonkey has being discontinued are there any plans to release a libgecko/libgre type package that the aviary products can link against and that the embedders (e.g. yelp/galeon/epiphany) can link agianst?
Why do you think it is that so many people continue to claim that the Mozilla suit was "cancelled" when the Mozilla foundation has just spent several years upgrading the suite to a new code-base which breaks the suite from a single executable into stand-alone applications?
Why do you think this caught people so off-guard, given that the Mozilla Foundation announced its intention to do so several years ago, and it has been clearly stated on the development roadmap for 2 or 3 years? What could you have done to be more clear?
If it was stated on the roadmap 2 or 3 years ago that there would be no Mozilla 1.8, then why was it a discussion issue just a month or so back? It certainly seems like someone in the Mozilla dev crew didn't know as an absolute fact that there'd be no Mozilla 1.8, and if their own developers didn't know, how can you fault average users for not realizing it?
Yeah, people knew it would stop being supported, but I think they just thought they'd get a little warning beforehand. After all, what were all those people testing, then? The "backend" of Mozilla? Was this made clear to them? Did they realize they were testing software that would never be officially released? If they DID realize it, would they have still spent time testing it? I read about one poor guy who actually went through and updated language translations for Mozilla 1.8, only to find it was pointless of him to do so. A little communication earlier on in the process would have avoided all this.
Criticize all you want, but big organizations would be eaten alive by their customers if they pulled something like this. Microsoft has trouble discontinuing Win98 support YEARS in advance. Mozilla is growing, and open source is a give and take strategy. If the project wants the support of the community, they've got to be willing to accomodate the needs and concerns of the community as well. I don't think it's fair to simply bash Mozilla for their mistakes, but I believe they could have dealt with the situation better than they did, and it would benefit the project if they learned how to handle these situations better, especially now that they're getting the attention of the public in general.