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IBM to Hire Firefox Developers

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the pays-to-know dept.

ta bu shi da yu writes "According to news.com, IBM has placed an employment ad for a developer who would be responsible for 'enhancing the Mozilla Firefox Web browser with new features complimentary to IBM's On Demand middleware stack.' IBM might possibly be interested in FireFox integration with their Workplace software. The job is not for just anyone, however, as those who wish to apply for the job should have some cred with the Mozilla development community."

17 of 187 comments (clear)

  1. Just imagine... by elid · · Score: 5, Interesting

    ...if Firefox starts making it into those IBM On Demand commercials!

    1. Re:Just imagine... by ackthpt · · Score: 5, Interesting
      ...if Firefox starts making it into those IBM On Demand commercials!

      What are you saying? Because Big Blue endorses it the PHB's of the world will embrace it?

      Sorry man, that paradigm died in the 90's. It used to be "Nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM" Now it's "Nobody ever got fired for choosing Microsoft."

      IBM is still out-earning Microsoft, but they're getting further away from hardware and are competing with the monopolist in some market segments.

      --

      A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
    2. Re:Just imagine... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      "Nobody ever got fired for choosing Microsoft."

      Who ever says this is an idiot. If I ran a serious business starting today, I'd be using GNOME/KDE and OpenOffice, not Windows and MS Office. Why pay money in licensing when I don't have to? It's fallacy to claim people would be less productive on OpenOffice than MS Office in any degree to make up for the thousands of dollars in licensing savings. Yes, OO.org and MS Office are close enough for that.

    3. Re:Just imagine... by secolactico · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Who ever says this is an idiot. If I ran a serious business starting today, I'd be using GNOME/KDE and OpenOffice, not Windows and MS Office. Why pay money in licensing when I don't have to? It's fallacy to claim people would be less productive on OpenOffice than MS Office in any degree to make up for the thousands of dollars in licensing savings. Yes, OO.org and MS Office are close enough for that.

      You might be missing the point. WHoever said that didn't say that Free alternatives to MS are less productive. What they (he/she?) meant is that when something fail, they are likely to blame whoever chose the alternative. If MS product fails, they'll point the finger at MS. Not that it's going to do them any good. "Cover-your-own-ass".

      On the other hand, you might have to pay for at least one license. Suppose your biggest client sends you required data in an MS format that doesn't fully translate to your alternatives. When you give them your reasons for not being able to access the doc, they might give you a blank stare. Worst case scenario: they'll take their business elsewhere and tell everybody you are too cheap to pay for MS Office (or whatever).

      --
      No sig
    4. Re:Just imagine... by secolactico · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Sun, Novell, SuSE, Red Hat, and several others are more than happy to have fingers pointed at them in exchange for letting people buy their Linux desktops

      Probably. But then you are not "buying linux". You are "buying Sun, Novell, etc...".

      I remember the original saying as "Nobody gets fired for choosing IBM". IBM re-sells Redhat.

      Also, "Nobody gets fired for choosing Cisco".

      --
      No sig
    5. Re:Just imagine... by Michalson · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Depends what kind of office you have. If you're spending most of your time in a word processor, doing documents that need to look a specific way, then Microsoft Office is not going to work well (i.e. the law industry is almost exclusively WordPerfect, because Word just isn't up to the task).

      On the other hand, if you are running an office that works with a lot of numbers (as do most "offices" that act as the pencil pushing arm of a company that does something else), you'll need a spreadsheet program, and nothing currently beats Excel (with the exception of a few scientific setups).

      So in general: If your office is your business, Office is probably not for you. If your office is what supports/manages your business, Office is probably just what you need.

  2. And in another area... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Sam Ruby, IBM employee, Apache/PHP/Atom hacker, is questioning the need for middleware completely.

  3. Loathsome Notes by Salo2112 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Good - currently, Lotus Notes doesn't work so well with FireFox, which forces my users to have to use Explorer. Maybe we'll have another good reason not to use MS Explorer.

  4. Celebrity *programmer*?? by heroine · · Score: 4, Interesting

    So the current darlings of slashdot, IBM, Apple, and Pixar, are on to doing the professional services thing and hiring celebrity programmers to win the contracts, just like VA I.O.U. and Redhat did.

    In the last round VA I.O.U. and Redhat had developers who were also celebrities and hiring celebrity programmers was the way they got contracts.

    Now all the celebrities are executives and programmers are fairly anonymous. There aren't many AOL programmers making headlines the way Rasterman and Mandrake used to. Today the headlines are always made by executives.

    Are they really looking for a celebrity manager to come from AOL and saying the word developer to get on the blogs, or are they still thinking programmers are going to make headlines today just like they did in the 90's?

  5. Re:Too Cool by MightyMartian · · Score: 2, Interesting

    IBM used to have a pretty neat browser that was bundled with OS/2, but they sadly stopped development of it.

    --
    The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
  6. Re:Too Cool by tmasssey · · Score: 2, Interesting
    Please, please *please* tell me you don't mean IBM WebExplorer. It may have been "pretty neat" *literally* a decade ago, but even Netscape 3.0 was better.

    I was a *die-hard* OS/2 user up until 2001 or so, and I just retired my last OS/2 server this year. But even I wouldn't call WebExplorer anything even approaching neat...

    --
    Linux IT Consulting and Domino Development in Michigan
  7. XRE - XUL Runtime Engine/Environment? by centinall · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Might IBM be creating a XRE? We all know that eventually Firefox/Thunderbird/etc will run off a global (to the system) XRE, right?
    or are they just going to be developing a suite of applications that use XUL?

  8. Re:Goodbye ActiveX... by Daengbo · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I sincerely hope that IBM gets on the XUL train, because I would like to see more documentation come out of it. The last two times I tried to learn XUL (admittedly over a year), the language had drifted from the documentation enough that most of the example code I found to learn from produced errors when the new tag name or options didn't match the docs.

    I'm just a part-timer, though, so I understand that you programming "hosses" have no problem with this.

    --
    Put identity in the browser.
  9. Payback? by MSBob · · Score: 2, Interesting
    It is becoming clear that IBM is betting the farm on Open Source. It is in our interest that IBM doesn't lose this bet. I wonder whether there is anything that Open Source developers (and users) could do to pay IBM back for their support. By "paying" I'm mostly talking about indirect support such as writing software that plays nice with IBM's offerings...

    Now, if one is inclined to buy a Thinkpad as a "thank you" note to IBM then I'm sure IBM would have nothing against that.

    Is it even worth conciously debating the forms in which we could "reward" IBM for helping OSS so much over the last few years?

    --
    Your pizza just the way you ought to have it.
  10. Re:Please be open minded, open sourcers... by rve · · Score: 3, Interesting

    IBM has invested a lot of money in websphere based thingies to make their Big Iron less tied to dumb terminals, only to make it more tied to Wintel PC clients running internet explorer, because it just won't work with other browsers.

    Rather than fix their middleware, I'm betting they want to try and fix firefox to work with deliberately IE-only websites.

  11. The big + for firefox by MemoryDragon · · Score: 2, Interesting

    And this has been heavily overlooked, Microsoft basically will try push stateful guys with xaml in Longhorn, Firefox has had that for years with Xul, in fact the whole old Mozilla guy just was a set of Xul scripts and templates.

    The main difference is, Xul is an official W3c spec, while Xaml again will be Windows only and patent plastered (while heavily borrowed from Xul anyway).

    Given the current really awful and sad state of affairs, where you have to try to make complex GUIs with a limited set of elements which break on the market leader most of the times anyway, a move towards a real platform independend solution instead of splitting again the html standards even more than they already are, is heavens sent for all of us who have base applications upon that "dreck" which is the current state of affairs.

  12. Firefox IBM "Branding" by vicbay · · Score: 2, Interesting

    A bit off topic but......I do some local IT support for my local community and every time I say, "Firefox is better than your current browser...safer, bla bla and you should use it......" they say "fire..what...."?. I am helping people that are almost IT illiterate and for them the internet is the big "E" icon on their desktops. However, if I could say that "IBM recommends it and uses it for its products" and "Google recommends it instead of..." it will be a different story. There is no doubt that Firefox is a better browser but you have to sell the idea of changing browsers to them.