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."

Comments

it's official

[ekool]

http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nomo.html

Scary! Microsoft Predicted It!

[SuperAnt]

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%

Here's why

[heroine]

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".

The difficulty of corporate Open Source.

[Znork]

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.