Slashdot Mirror
IBM to Hire Firefox Developers
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."
Years ago many of us would cringe at the thought, but these days Big Blue has taken on a certain cachet with their cozying up with Tux, sharing the wealth (IP, source and application contributions) and profit(!!!)ing (which many of us don't mind, because it helps promote the cause.) Sounds like a dream job, I just hope between Google and IBM they don't deplete the Mozilla development team. Maybe IBM would be friendly to the development and effectively underwrite some of it in this manner.
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."
For sure. Don't expect a successful interview to go like this:
just a heads-up, ya know
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
...if Firefox starts making it into those IBM On Demand commercials!
Sam Ruby, IBM employee, Apache/PHP/Atom hacker, is questioning the need for middleware completely.
One must realize that the fact that IBM is showing the desire to produce technology using Firefox is incredible. When BIG corporations decide to make Firefox specific technologies, we can finally say "Goodbye IE and Hello Firefox." I'm not saying IE is bad, do not get me wrong. However, this will make competition in the browser wars improve SUBSTANTIALLY, as now IE really does have competition. No matter what you said before, 9 times out of 10 a computer you go to will, no doubt, have Microsoft Internet Explorer installed and used as the default web browser. However, with IBM throwing itself to Firefox, this may improve Firefox's race in the browser wars - leading to more competition - leading to both IE _AND_ Firefox improvement. Who knows - we may even see IE for loonix soon, after all, everyone knows Microsoft is the king of business. Maybe not software/whatnot. But, they are the kings of business. They will make sure they have a share in every part of the market. Why do you think they g0t a huge part in APPLE/Mac? =P =P =P
It gets worse.
There are bugs in Santa.
94% of Repubs and 21% of Dems voted to renew the Patriot Act
Uh, yeah, thanks... Just in case C|Net gets slashdotted...
This is the ideal situation for an open source project. Big companies who use the software all pay developers to add features that they need or want. It results in more development, more developers with experience, and ultimately makes the software better. Now, if we can just get a dozen more major companies to each hire a developer.
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.
Microsoft followed suite by placing the following ad:
"Wanted, anyone who is currently or is wishing to be part of the firefox team for immediate interrogation and death. Email names, addresses, daily schedules, to Not.Microsoft@gmail.com.
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?
It makes sense to me. IBM Rapid Restore & Recovery, at least on my boxes, uses Opera as the browser. It makes good business sense to switch to an open source browser with reduced licensing costs, and it's good for their developers because they can customize the browser in the recovery partition specially for recovery needs. By using Firefox, IBM can also score points with the open source community... evidenced by this posting on slashdot.
I'm the Devil the Windows users warned you about.
It struck me reading this headline that the Firefox dev team is under tremendous recruitment pressure, and it makes me wonder how all this cherrypicking of developers from the Firefox team, by the likes of Google and Big Blue, will impact the project's future development cycle.
Is this brain drain going to cripple the project eventually or contribute to the problems we've read in March about the Firefox development review process?
A little refresher....
The Mozilla Release Process
Posted by CmdrTaco on Tuesday January 18, @06:25AM
from the every-time-you-ask-we-delay-it-one-hour dept.
David Gerard writes "Asa Dotzler from the Mozilla Foundation invited questions on his blog on the Mozilla release process. The answers are up."
Firefox Lead Now Working For Google
Posted by michael on Monday January 24, @03:50PM
from the speculate-all-you-want-we'll-make-more dept.
zmarties writes "In a very low key announcement on his blog, Ben Goodger, lead developer for Firefox, has announce that effective from a couple of weeks ago, he has become a Google employee. In practice his day to day job won't change that much, in that he will still lead Firefox through its forthcoming releases, but with Google paying his wages, we can be sure that new and interesting overlap between the Mozilla Foundation's browsers and Google's services are sure to develop."
Firefox Developer on Recruitment Policy
Posted by michael on Monday January 31, @03:05AM
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."
Problems With the Firefox Development Process
Posted by Zonk on Sunday March 06, @11:39PM
from the eyes-on-the-prize dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Mike Connor, one of the core Firefox developers, is raising a flag concerning the Mozilla Firefox methodology of development. From his blog: "In nearly three years, we haven't built up a community of hackers around Firefox, for a myriad of reasons, and now I think were in trouble. Of the six people who can actually review in Firefox, four are AWOL, and one doesn't do a lot of reviews." In an earlier entry, he raised concrete concerns about the community involvement. Asa Dotzler recently elaborated on the process, as previously covered on Slashdot."
Mozilla Foundation in More Development Trouble
Posted by samzenpus on Thursday March 10, @07:44AM
from the who-will-get-the-kids dept.
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."
It seems hireing Firefox developers is the new fad. Google just picked up a few, and if I rember correctly, there's no shortage of other companies who have one or two.
I know alot of slashdotters are scared of big companies trying to grab up peices of open source - but I for one think that this is an entirely good thing. It removes some of the nesesity of the end users to contribute (We alwas should, but some of us aren't skilled enough to code, or fiscaly stable enough to donate).
I'm just waiting for the news to break that Apple is looking for some firefox developers. I know they're using KHTML for Safari, at least at the moment, but Mozilla is, in many ways, a better browser - it just needs alot of polishing for the Mac. For example, Safari with 10 tabs, over 3 windows uses just over 30MB of ram, while Firefox eats up nearly that much with just about:blank open, and once you begin to actuly surf the web, it climbs sometimes 100MB of use.
The opinions in this post are ficticious. Any similarity to actual opinions, real or imagined, is purely coincidental.
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?
It was intended as a rhetorical question. I was told to think "radical" after all. ;-)
- Sam Ruby
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.
I was refused an interview for a linux kernel development position because I hack FreeBSD. Now IBM isn't interested in me because they want FireFox and I hack Konqueror.
Many people made lots of money in the .com boom, while the company I worked for kept going downhill. Get a job I like, and they go bankrupt in 3 months.
If this trend continues much longer, companies are going to refuse to allow me to work for them because I'm bad luck. Then I won't be able to earn money and I'll starve ...
Sorry, I got little carried away. Its all true up until that last paragraph though.
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.
I'm not sure how this got so hyped up, but this is not IBM waking up looking for a Firefox Dev, they already had one. Darin Fisher.
He moved on to bigger and better things at Google, so really all this Hype is over a simple position replacement ad.
Blah... the media sucks.
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.
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.