Slashdot Mirror
Shuttleworth on Open Source Development
An anonymous reader writes "Mark Shuttleworth (retired cosmonaut and Ubuntu daddy) has written an informative blog entry about the problems associated with open source development. He found that paying geeks to code without assigning them managers lead to "shiny geek toys", rather than the product he was actually paying for. Shuttleworth says that left-field thinking is required when it comes to managing open source teams. See also Andrew Orlowski's analysis of why AOL eventually killed the Netscape project from a few years ago, where he describes Mozilla developers as "wandering off into Lotus-eating land"."
Ugh. Mozilla. Blech.
I assume by "neat C++ framework" he means XPCOM, which, I suppose, meets the bill. It's a C++ framework, although "neat" is a completely incorrect way to describe it. XPCOM is probably one of the primary reasons Mozilla leaks so much memory.
The reason Firefox did get a huge market share is not because of the XUL framework
No kidding - XUL is terrible. The core UI in Mozilla is an ungodly mess of XPCOM objects, JavaScript objects, and XML. XUL is almost certainly what set Mozilla back so far. XUL continues to prevent Mozilla from fitting in with any local environment. Sure, it gets close now - but it never quite makes it.
Mozilla is definitely the poster-child of a mislead open source project. It concentrates on useless technologies (XUL, XPCOM), making the code-base a bloated mess that's essentially impossible to understand. In order to understand how Mozilla works, you have to know C++, XPCOM, JavaScript, XML, XUL, HTML, XBL, and a whole host of other technologies. It's a beast more than a browser.
Firefox reminds me of a poorly constructed piece of furniture. It wobbles even when just sitting there, and you're never entirely sure you can use it without it just falling to pieces. It's the "shiny geek toys" that does that - it's a huge collection of various one-off "this is cool" projects glueing the entire thing together.