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Why Mozilla Needs To Pick a New Fight
nk497 writes "Mozilla has succeeded in improving the browser world, and its rivals have outstripped it in terms of features. So what's the point of Firefox, then, wonders Stuart Turton. He suggests it could turn its community of developers to better use than battling it out for browser market share. 'I think Mozilla has a lot more to offer as a kind of roaming software troublemaker. The company has already proven itself brilliant at pulling a community together, offering it direction and spurring innovation in a lifeless market. Now that browsers are healthy, wouldn't it be brilliant if Mozilla started a ruck elsewhere?' And where better to start than the stagnant office suite arena: 'Imagine if Mozilla decided tomorrow to build an office suite. Imagine all those ideas. Imagine how brilliant that could be. Just imagine. Now imagine Firefox 4. Honestly, which one of those are you most excited by?'"
The Mozilla project was started as a from-scratch rewrite of Netscape Communicator (Netscape Browser, Netscape Mail & News, Netscape Composer) in an open source fashion. Actually that's not entirely accurate: When the project started they started with the Netscape 4.x source code and only decided to throw it out and start over a few months later, probably after the project leaders had been drinking, but this is incidental.
As the project progressed Mozilla-the-project added all of the Communicator apps on top of a common core. Eventually Netscape the company took a pre-1.0 version of this and released it as "Netscape Communicator 6", which was commonly understood to be "As slow as molasses," meanwhile Mozilla continued to release Mozilla-the-suite (Mozilla Browser, Mozilla Mail & News, Mozilla Composer, and the new kid on the block: Chatzilla). Eventually some developers in Mozilla started up a guerrilla project to make "Just a browser" and released Mozilla Browser with a few UI tweaks as Phoenix, which was too bad because Phoenix-the-bios-vendor had a browser in some of their product and didn't like that, so they renamed it to Firebird, which was too bad because the Firebird database guys were there first, so they renamed it to Firefox, which made no sense to anybody but at least wasn't trademarked yet. Netscape-the-company, in a last gasp of breath, released a Netscape browser based on Firefox, called Netscape 8, which contained a brand new sidebar! But nobody cared. Once Firefox had stolen enough thunder and press Mozilla-the-project refocused its efforts on that and formally discontinued Mozilla-the-Suite, which pissed off a lot of people who said "But we like the all-in-one suite!" These people went on to rebrand Mozilla Suite as Seamonkey, after an old code name that somebody liked. Meanwhile Mozilla Mail & News was spun off of the Suite as Thunderbird and (eventually) the calendar component, which had never quite made it in to the suite, was spun off as Sunbird (after a few false starts) and then kind of re-integrated into Thunderbird with the catchy name "Lightning" when somebody realized that few people actually used a standalone calendar and sometimes bundling makes sense after all (which just proves the point us Seamonkey fans have been making).
Chatzilla, meanwhile, got more or less forgotten, languishing as a Firefox extension, and Composer saw some life as Nvu, stagnated, then became KompoZer (because Z makes everything better).
I think the point here is that Firefox is the bloat-free version of Mozilla Browser, in that you didn't have to get the rest of the communicator suite with it. Since that suite *is* Seamonkey and still shares a large majority of code with Firefox (common core and the Browser component) it's a bit ridiculous to say that Seamonkey is Firefox without the bloat, since (historically) it's the other way around and in terms of code-base there's a lot more 'bloat' in Seamonkey!
I want my Cowboyneal
Not correct: http://www.openoffice.org/
Take a look at the fat Oracle logo in the bottom left. Oracle is still very much in control of Open Office.
What you are probably referring to is the majority of other contributing organizations to Open Office have gone and started their own fork called LibreOffice, which is not under Oracle's control.
There are negotiations being held to have Oracle relinquish control of the Open Office name, but as of yet it has not happened.
Knowledge is just opinion that you trust enough to act upon. -Orson Scott Card