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JWZ resigns from mozilla.org
jsr writes
"News.com is reporting that
JWZ resigned today
from mozilla.org. No word yet on why he
is quiting. Expect to see something on
his site soon though."
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When contacted for comment, jwz explained his retirement as a result of his death last year on slashdot.org. "Now that I'm dead, I have to re-evaluate my priorities," the late programmer remarked. "I need some time of my own, primarily to push up daisies."
Apologies to those already on April 2.
Yeah but he does point out that it's not a cure-all. A lot of things work, but that doesn't mean that they can't be screwed up.
In some ways, I think this can actually be a good thing in the long run. Mozilla always struck me as a questionable project from the start; not that the goal is unworthy but it was starting from a bad point. The Gecko base was a good idea but was too long in coming. An open browser project is a good thing and I hope that such a project continues in one form or another.
If jwz's words can function as some sort of wakeup call to AOL, then maybe that script goes out the window. I guess it's a little too late to release any 4.x code (see Excuse #2), but how about a Manhattan Project to ship ASAP a 5.0 that's as great as Gecko is supposed to be? Presumably AOL has the resources to do this. Do they have the will?
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=8^
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=8^
Yep, I was just going to say that. Now I'm depressed. I personally think he picked a crummy time to retire. For April 1st, I want either all fake news, or all real news. On most days, lying isn't fair. Today, the truth isn't fair. At least it's April 2nd now, I can sort it out tomorrow.
...and everyone knows about xdaliclock. Say what you will about Netscape, JWZ has made his mark.
"All the great themes have been used up, [and] turned into themeparks". -- HHH, Pump Up The Volume. Heck, I could quote that movie for pages, and they'd all be appropriate.
I know the feeling, but fortunately, there's no way JWZ can stop programming. Oh, I'm sure he could, but lets face it. Although there's a lot we could do, there isn't always a lot we want to do. I look forward to his next project. I love netscape. (It was so much better than Mosaic, but lately it's just been slowly loading pages and not displaying them until it finishes, just like Mosaic used to. Sure, the WWW is a more complicated place now, but computers are faster, compilers are better, and Mozilla is *way* faster. (Albeit not yet entirely stable, but neither is Netscape, or IE... IE hardly ever runs on Solaris, in my experience. It runs better in WINE on Linux.)) I love dadadodo, and I like xscreensaver. (It's a good concept. I'm more used to xlock, but xscreensaver has more display hacks, and an open, incredibly simple interface for adding them.)
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
*** STOP-PRESS TRIBUTE ISSUE: GOOD LUCK IN YOUR NEW JOB, jwz! ***
I assumed at the time that this was their April Fools joke. But did they really know ahead of time, or was it just life imitating fiction?
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Rod Begbie done this, and he's not
I wonder what he'll do next. He's probably feeling stifled in his new home with AOL. I wonder who will replace him? AOL/Netscape needs to hire around 100 new software engineers for the browser division--methinks that AOL wants to move from their current, dated user client to a Mozilla-based solution.
I'm just glad the Mozilla code is out there. And quite frankly, while I respect JWZ and ESR and their accomplishments, I disagree strongly with their philosophy of things.
We can all take refuge in the fact that RMS is not going to go away. Nothing short of death will bereave him from us (as did it to my beloved --jon.).
Cheers,
Joshua (a GNUite)
--jon. Postel is dead. May we all mourn his, and our, loss.
Well, I believe that it's one thing to start a project as open source and a different thing to successfully open a huge, closed source project. I think one of the major reasons for the lack of success in this case was that the source that was released wasn't usable, in addition to being huge. If they had released the source to Netscape 4, which at least is usable (if barely), it might have had somewhat more of a success.
I don't know though. The whole browser thing kind of sucks. We have Netscape - slow, bloated, buggy, bad with standards. We have IE - rather fast, but also very bloated, buggy, full of security holes and available on a limited amount of platforms. Then we have Opera. Small, fast, but still only available for Windows. Also not a full featured browser. Lynx is nice for some things, but worthless for many.
That's about it. All the other attempts are often less usable. It's a sad thing, really.
Hmm, wonder what he's planning to do. Fork the mozilla code, join the IE effort, start up something entirely new? It's hard to imagine that he left on good terms, since this had to put somewhat of a damper on the 2.0 party, if for no other reason than because of all the questions they're sure to be asked. The above is complete speculation--I certainly have no idea what he's doing and, ever since reading it on news.com hours ago, have been waiting for someone to tell me "April Fools!"
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Releasing Mozilla 5.0 is not enough. A couple of weeks after the Mozilla release, Microsoft will release IE 6.0, containing all Mozilla features, and breaking a few new standards in ways Mozilla can't handle. Then we're truly fucked. Mozilla 6.0 will, if it ever is released, be released a couple of years later than that, probably in time for IE 8.0.
That's right. The whole open source movement is actually in danger.
Unless Mozilla 5.0 get released (or Opera does something drastic), there will be no MSIE competitor on the Windows platform. That means that Microsoft controls the web. And when there's no Windows Netscape users to protest, and the trial stuff is gone, they will have no problem shaking us off and make most of the web directly inaccessible for us.
Who, other than me and other hardcore techies, will use free operating system when that means that they will loose access to the web?
I guess what really happened was that Netscape tried to beat Microsoft in their own game. NS 2.0 to 4.5 has been far from inovative, thei're just patched feature-filled bloatware.
What was really needed (but that's a luxury Netscape can't afford now) was to rethink the whole browser stuff and build another browser built on a better concept, not just a new set of features. That would have been both good for the world and the best way to beat Microsoft. MS have always been concept followers, feature leaders.
Although it's too late for Netscape, it might be time for someone else. That's our only chance. If that does not happen, I truly believe Linux and FreeBSD will be finished as end user desktop systems.
-segfault
http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nomo.html
Forum Foundry, Inc.
This is exactly what MS predicted in their "Halloween I" document. This is really scary! Quoting them:
Small Noosphere
An interesting weakness is the size of the remaining "Noosphere" for the OSS browser.
The stand-alone browser is basically finished.
There are no longer any large, high-profile segments of the stand-alone browser which must be developed. In otherwords, Netscape has already solved the interesting 80% of the problem. There is little / no ego gratification in debugging / fixing the remaining 20% of Netscape's code.
Netscape's commercial interests shrink the effect of Noosphere contributions.
Linus Torvalds' management of the Linux codebase is arguably directed towards the goal of creating the best Linux. Netscape, by contrast, expressly reserves the right to make code management decisions on the basis of Netscape's commercial / business interests. Instead of creating an important product, the developer's code is being subjugated to Netscape's stock price.
Integration Cost
Potentially the single biggest detriment to the Mozilla effort is the level of integration that customers expect from features in a browser. As stated earlier, integration development / testing is NOT a parallelizable activity and therefore is hurt by the OSS process.
The contention therefore, is that unlike the Apache and Linux projects which, for now, are quite successful, Netscape's Mozilla effort will:
Produce the dominant browser on Linux and some UNIX's
Continue to slip behind IE in the long run
Keeping in mind that the source code was only released a short time ago (April '98), there is already evidence of waning interest in Mozilla. EXTREMELY unscientific evidence is found in the decline in mailing list volume on Mozilla mailing lists from April to June.
Mozilla Mailing List
April 1998
June 1998
% decline
Feature Wishlist
1073
450
58%
UI Development
285
76
73%
General Discussion
1862
687
63%
In case you couldn't figure it out as it leapt like a blatant Microsoft promotional ad from every single one of his interviews: JWZ didn't agree with the direction Netscape was going. JWZ is foremost an end user guy. He doesn't care about toolkits, licenses, clean code, and programming languages. The only thing driving this guy is how well the user interfaces with the program.
Netscape on the other hand had this huge PR campaign which relied on toolkits, licences, clean code, and programming languages. When you look at it, the result of a year of hacking on this campaign looks really horrible to the user but to the programmer its a dream come true. All GTK in ANSI C licenced under something with the word "public" in it. Obviously JWZ wasn't interested in all the politics and wanted to take it back to the end users.
His last interview was like a battle, with the interviewer from a Linux site constantly pressing him about GUI toolkits and choice of languages and "But wasn't motif really badly engineered?", with JWZ constantly changing the subject to usability and "But motif worked".
JWZ brings up several interesting points in his excuses for Mozilla.
Primarily, he brings up what I think will be the most disappointing issue for companies releasing open source software. You probably wont *get* that many contributors. There are a number of reasons for this:
Licenses; most OSS licenses that have emerged from corporate lawyer departments are biased in favour of the originating company in several ways. That is fine. That will get you bugfixers when you ship your product and people start getting the bugs. But it wont get you any major contributors. Most Open Source hackers are either of the BSD or the GPL crowd, and something they both have in common is the level playingfield. For Mozilla, had it been GPL, it would probably have garnered a much higher level of support from the Linux desktop projects, and likely from commercial Linux distributors too. They might have gotten some code forks, but most work would be sharable.
Corporate code stinks; Anyone involved in major corporate programming projects is aware of the problem. Since corporate code is made of much tighter groups compared to most free software projects they can communicate in a closer fashion. Free software has to embrace modularity and sane abstraction simply to survive and be able to go forward. This makes it possible to work in a much more detatched fashion, where people can work on code without being able to talk to the other members about the changes they do.
Tools and portability; Corporate software is often built using commercial tools. Those tools are similarily not geared towards the issues that surround worldwide collaborative portable projects. Compare, for example, the usual project tools used for Windows applications with gcc, autoconf, CVS and company. The Windows tools are entirely geared towards being a monolithic application development environment, and you work around the bugs in the environment in your code. The free software development tools are geared towards modularity and portability. And there is an interchange between the tools development and the application development.
All these factors and more will result in bitter disappointment for corporate source code releases if they want a free ride.
Mozilla has several advantages by now tho. While JWZ may be tired of it, it *has* come a long way. The NPL and MPL are, as far as the commercial licenses go, among the better ones. They've worked through a lot of the codebase, and I think they'll get more active outside participation as it gets closer to a working product. They've made some hard decisions that will eventually pay off.