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Mozilla Dev Team On Firefox's Success

Posted by kdawson on from the include-and-reveal dept.

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."

4 of 184 comments (clear)

  1. Not our experience by wombatmobile · · Score: 5, Interesting

    "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.

    1. Re:Not our experience by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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

    2. Re:Not our experience by xant · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

      --
      It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
  2. Re:The prefect blueprint? by hdparm · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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?