Mozilla Dev Team On Firefox's Success

Titus Germanicus writes "If you're thinking about open sourcing a project in the near future, Mozilla might be the perfect blueprint to follow. At last week's Mesh 2008 conference in Canada, Mike Shaver, chief technology evangelist and founding member at Mozilla, and John Resig, a JavaScript evangelist at Mozilla — two of the key figures behind the success of Mozilla's Firefox Web browser — listed inclusivity and transparency as two of the top cornerstones of any community-built project. Shaver said in this interview that because the Web is intended for everybody, the level same openness should be shared with Firefox's open source contributors."

Comments

Not our experience

[wombatmobile]

"two of the key figures behind the success of Mozilla's Firefox Web browser â" listed inclusivity and transparency as two of the top cornerstones of any community-built project."

That sure wasn't our experience with contributing to FireFox. My company contributed several person months of code to FireFox 3 to build out a text placement capability. Our patches were never accepted; However, they took 80% of the code and reused it to fix half a dozen incidental issues that we had had to fix in order to implement the character placement issue that we were addressing.

All of which is OK, except that our authors were not given any acknowledgement or attribution.

But then they turned around and said we'd have to rework our original patch because now "80% of the code is redundant".

We are not contributing to FireFox any more. I thought about point out our experiences to Brendan Eich and asking him if he's OK with his people's behaviour. But it was easier just to walk away. We've now changed our focus to WebKit.

Re:Not our experience

[Anonymous Coward]

AC so I don't lose what little "street cred" I have.

I had this exact same experience with Pidgin back in the Gaim days. Patches submitted, never accepted, code used to fix bugs, and contributions never acknowledged. It became obvious that I just wasn't in the clique of core contributors; and I just took my expertise elsewhere.

So, how often is this happening to other people contributing to "open" source projects

Re:Not our experience

[zappepcs]

That was in reference to the other poster's comment:

....means inviting idiots who don't know anything about software engineering to come change the direction of your project the month before you hit important milestones.... When the project scope is being redirected, or attempts to do so, in such fashion, then those people did not participate as they should have at the beginning, and the PM did not do their job right to start with. With transparency and inclusivity, the project should already have accounted for their needs. Any derivation from the agreed goals/schedules etc. requires that everything be reviewed, and any change in scope be either shut down asap or the project re-aligned to meet these hidden agenda goals, including reshaping the timeline, milestones, and scope of the project. Read that as a do-over agreed to by all the principles. In effect, stopping the current project cold, then starting a new project that covers the newly agreed goals.

Re:Not our experience

[xant]

IME, it's perfectly normal to ask patch contributors to re-submit patches, frequently, until they're right. The patch contributor is the one benefiting most directly from the patch, and is the one with the most knowledge about the patch, and is the one with the most motivation to fix the patch. That makes the contributor the only party who can be asked to fix the patch.

So they used some code from it, and then asked you to resubmit it built against the new codebase. This is perfectly normal and reasonable. They can't use the patch as-is when it has been mangled to death; and in the final analysis they don't really care whether it gets used, even though they did care about selected parts of it. You care whether it gets used. So you are the one who should remake the patch.

Re:Not our experience

[mw22]

Wombatmobile, what is the bug number where you were working on this text placement thing? Just curious.

Re:Not our experience

[gbjbaanb]

Pull copyright on their ass. Get your lawyers to insist that the code is removed or they pay you compensation (that you can obviously donate to whatever other OSS project you like).

Unless you explicitly gave away your code, it belongs to you. The mozilla licence doesn't apply until your code is accepted by them - I'm sure you have a case to say that your code was never submitted under any OSS licence until it became part of the FF project, and even if it was then you must get credited for the work.

It sounds like you can prove your claims, so go for it. Its not just for you, but for all the other contributors who may come after you.

Re:The prefect blueprint?

[hdparm]

If shitty IE is the only reason, then why for instance Opera did not catch-up and replaced both, as you and some others imply, crap browsers?

Re:The prefect blueprint?

[KURAAKU Deibiddo]

Obviously, you're not a web developer, because "performs better" and IE really don't fit together, especially when it comes to rendering web pages in a standards-compliant manner. I suppose IE7 performs better at providing possible exploits for malicious pages to attack, though. By that metric, IE is the best browser ever. If you write web-driven malware, or engage in phishing.

I've not seen Firefox behave as badly as you describe; are you using Vista with less than 2GB of RAM? ;)

I do really recommend trying either a nightly build or the release candidate for Firefox 3, though; I've been using the nightly builds as my primary browser for over four months, and they've worked great. 3.0 is definitely faster and more responsive than 2.0, and the improvements to the location bar are very welcome, to the point where I can't imagine wanting to browse the web without them.

John Resig == JavaScript Evangelist

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to disregard John Resig's work at Mozilla, but I wouldn't consider him key figure in the success of Firefox, as the summary states.

He started at Mozilla in January 2007, after Firefox 2 was released.

The article states he's a JavaScript Evangelist at Mozilla. His work on Firefox 3 is certainly important though.

Re:Yea right.

[renoX]

>A lot of the memory issues have been fixed in Firefox 3 as well as improving JavaScript performance.

Great! Now they just have to fix their threading issues (one 'frozen' tab shouldn't be able to freeze the whole browser), their stability issue (as much as possible a crash of a plugin shouldn't be able to crash the browser) and it could be considered as a solid browser..

Until then it *isn't* an example to follow!

Re:The prefect blueprint?

[jc42]

Opera, historically, has had crappy usability. It's better now, but it still has a much worse interface than both IE and Firefox, and is generally more annoying to use.

Oh, I dunno about that. On both my linux and OSX machines, I keep stumbling across a common situation where I've discovered that the simple solution is to copy the URL to opera and continue from there. The situation? There are a lot of web sites that like to use buttons rather than text links to navigate. Within a single site, I often want to open new pages in a new tab, so I can switch among several pages easily. Opera uses middle-click (linux) or CMD-click (OSX) to "open in new tab". With most other browsers, if you use middle-click or CMD-click on a button, the new page opens in the same tab.

I've looked around in various browsers' Help stuff, but as far as I can tell, the only other browser that makes "open in new tab" easy with buttons is Safari, but that doesn't run on my linux box. I have a dozen browsers on the Mac (because I do lots of web-page testing), and Opera and Safari are the only ones where I can do "open in new tab" easily.

You'd think that firefox and seamonkey would also have picked up on this, but if they have the capability at all, they've hidden it too well for my feeble brain to find. So, although I like them for a lot of things, extended work with a single site usually means that I switch to Opera.

Of course, slashdot is an exception here, because it seems to do most everything with plain links. So I'm typing this into a seamonkey window which has 7 tabs open right now.