Hey, Mozilla, what you gonna do?
by
gavinhall
·
· Score: 3
Posted by shaver@netscape.com:
I guess I'm the person to respond to this, because reporters keep calling me to ask if I'm the Jamie replacement. I guess I am, as much as anyone is; I've been with mozilla.org since pretty much day one, and I was the ``virtual jwz'' when he was on sabbatical. So just pretend it's a really, really long sabbatical or something.
First, I'll do the eulogy thing: we will certainly miss Jamie -- I think any organization except the Vatican would mourn his departure from their ranks. He did some great work here at Netscape and mozilla.org, and he was (usually) a pleasure to work with. Thanks for all the fish.
As for the issues at hand, I think I agree mostly with Jamie on the facts of the case, but my conclusions sometimes differ meaningfully: I, too wish we'd shipped a browser already, and a great one at that. But I think that the switch to the NGLayout/Gecko engine is a great example of how the mozilla.org project is a success: it was the best way to get a browser that matched the demands of our users, and I'm not sure that Netscape would have done The Right Thing before the advent of mozilla.org. Also, as Jamie himself points out, it did help us recruit more developers, which is always a win.
The balance of Netscape vs. non-Netscape developers doesn't bother me as much as it seems to bother Jamie. When we started, there were zero external developers in any form, and there are now many (34 non-netscape.com people have commit privileges on the mozilla.org CVS tree, and many more contribute patches for others to commit), and I think that matters more than the comparison to the large number of developers that Netscape pays.
What does the future hold? Well, our work towards 5.0 continues apace, so we'll still be trying to help our existing developers and recruit new ones. We'll be finishing up our efforts to make some of the Mozilla code available under the GPL as well (the JavaScript engine, in this case), to broaden our ``technology reach''.
People have asked if we have a plan for attracting more developers, and I think that the best answer is ``ship a beta''. When we get onto hackers' desktops, we have a much better shot at getting into their hearts and minds, too. In the nearer term, we just need to weather the storm of reporters and pundits, and concentrate on getting our jobs done. We'll make Jamie proud yet.
Since it's the 2nd of April, I'm assuming that this is not yet another april fool's day slashdot news item
I've participated in a few opensource projects and helped code a few functional utlities that still helps a lot of people all around the world. When Netscape announced the release of Mozilla code, I was one of many to logon to their site and download the tar ball, but alas, it was too hard to decypher. I went through the code for 1 week (a lot longer than most people did). I couldnt figure out 75% of the things in there. So I gave up. (And I guess that is what happend to all the others out there)
Initially when netscape announced the release of mozilla, there were dozens of web sites, hundreds of mailing lists, just devoated to the discussion of what should be in mozilla. Over the past year, these web sites and lists just died away one by one. I guess what most people did not release was, that what mozilla needed was not new functionally, but... stablility, at a good speed. It did not need be a front end to your kitchen skin (should see some of the suggestions made on wishlists) it just needed to fetch a web page and display complying with most statndard as possible.
Then there are those who bitched about mozilla, from the start to the end (i guess when jwz leaves, it might as well be the end). I don't think bitching about the code would have helped making it more stable and fast. Helping the coders, coding it your self and replacing those netscape coders should have been the first thing we should have done. As jwz stated, most people thought netscape still owned mozilla and had full control over mozilla (this was inforced by the inital netscape/mozilla licence,) on that.. i belive mozilla would have been better accepted if it was released as BSD or GPL/LGPL.. most coders were weary of this and stayed away from mozilla just cause of that fact alone... and then there were those who, like me, waited for others to go ahead and do something to the code, test it, pinch it.. see if it bites.. (would a dead beast bite?)
Best jwz quote : I must say, though, that it feels good to be resigning from AOL instead of resigning from Netscape
PS: oops posted it in the wrong place:) --
-- ...free your source and the rest would follow...
jwz is one of the few latter-day saints to become known by their initials. i mean, you know GLS, RMS, ESR, ETC., but it's pretty kewl when someone your age is an undeniable net.god. (also, he's much less insane than the *other* TLA that worked on (l)emacs). so, it's undeniably sad to see him go.
it's also ironic to see this happen at a time when mozilla.org was finally producing a product that was starting to look like an early version of a real contender, rather than a cobbled-together POS.
however, maybe it's a good thing:
a) maybe jwz can get out there and do something he really enjoys now, which might be good for all of us:), and
b) maybe this will act as a wakeup call. with jwz gone, mozilla can go one of two ways: either somebody's gonna do *something*, or it's gonna die.
c) maybe all of us losers with delusions of grandeur will go download the tarball again...
This is indeed a tragedy, but frankly it does not surprise me.
I've been lurking around the mozilla mailing lists (mirrored in the mozilla newsgroups) and the mozilla.org website basically since they were created. Watching the dynamic of the mozilla communication mechanism over the period of a year, a number of things became unsettling. (I've only ever lurked, primarily because I'm not a sophisticated programmer, and I would have little to offer either the mozilla or linux kernel mailing lists. The development processes in both fascinate me, however.)
First, it amazes me that anyone in the Mozilla project was able to communicate with another at all. From the moment the mozilla mailing lists were created and mirrored, it was apparent that 80-90% of the mail/posts were, and would -always- be, irrelevant fluff. The primary reason for this is that while the Netscape 4.5 support newsgroups were not public - available only through nsnews.netscape.com, the mozilla newsgroups were public, and contained those compelling words "netscape", "misc" and "mail-news". From the perspective of a user with little knowledge of the significance of the word "mozilla", there was no reason to think that the most obvious place to ask Communicator questions.
The result was/is that despite the good efforts of Dan Mosedale and Jim Cape (each of whom made valiant strides to keep the mailing list topical), the vast majority of discussion was/is about 3.0, 4.0x and 4.5 problems. Combined with another 10% of posts of the "I want my 5.0 and I want it NOW!" variety, and a further 5% of the "Now that I can order you, I demand the following 50 stupid features that I have no idea how to program myself" variety, the mozilla mailing list, to the best of my observation, became a completely inhospitable place to have useful techinical discussions such as are seen almost exclusively - by contrast - in the Linux kernel mailing list. The latter, despite the fact that its content is usually way beyond this law student, is a pleasure to read. The Mozilla list is not.
I will leave remarks about the daunting complexity of the source as a major factor to jwz and other programmers/contributors. I'm simply not qualified. But another result is that because most of the contributors (as pointed out by jwz) were still Netscape employees, communication via the mailing list for the purposes of solving localized problems was (I assume) unnecessary.
I must, therefore, put a caveat on jwz's "fishbowl" analogy. These are two huge disincentives to communicating publicly about the source tree, and the lack of consistent communication on the nitty-gritty details of development may have played its part in the failure of the mozilla project to capture the imagination - and effort - of the programming community.
Aside from that caveat, though, jwz commented that such outside observation, combined with mozilla's independence, motivated the project to redesign the layout engine, and thus the UI, from scratch. It is unfortunate that the choice to rebuild a project thoughtfully and correctly, at the obvious cost of time, is considered a 'failure', or even a bad thing. Yes, some idiots have complained and threatened that if "Netscape doesn't come up with my browser now, I swear I'll move to IE5", not understanding that (a) the development regime has changed radically, (b) the project was rebuilt, (c) it's better to ship the right thing "late" - inasmuch as there is any such thing as 'late' in an open source project - than the wrong thing when users demand it.
For someone who has lurked and gained some familiarity with the dynamics of the project and the cast of characters, none of these conditions indicate 'failure' to me. It is unfortunate that jwz does, but he'd probably know better than I.
Before we go digging Mozilla's grave...
by
Frank+Hecker
·
· Score: 5
It might be a good idea to review things as they stand today, as well as a little bit of history. Some points to remember:
First, the Mozilla effort goes on: AOL is still funding development, non-AOL developers are active as well, the project is continuing to release "milestone" releases which you can try out, and this will culminate later this year in beta releases of Communicator 5.0 and then a final release, all based on the open Mozilla source code. This has been the case all along, and remains the case.
Next, in the Mozilla project there was a fundamental trade-off: build and release a product based on the existing in-progress 5.0 code base ("Mozilla Classic") or rearchitect the product to make it more standards compliant (i.e., use the new layout code being developed), more extensible, more open (e.g., use something other than Motif), and so on. In particular, many people complained vociferously that Mozilla/5.0 needed to have 100% standards compliance for HTML 4.0, CSS1, etc. Thus the decision was made (way back in October 1998) to rearchitect the product, use the new layout engine, use GTK+ instead of Motif, etc.
Most people on/. and elsewhere seemed to agree with that decision at the time, and would presumably still agree with it. However from Jamie's point of view it presumably would have been a better plan to go ahead and ship as early as possible even given the downsides. (Also, Jamie saw no reason to ditch Motif for GTK.) That's something about which reasonable people can disagree, but I don't buy the assertion that by taking the extra time to make a better product the Mozilla project has therefore "failed".
Slashdot Mirror
I guess I'm the person to respond to this, because reporters keep calling me to ask if I'm the Jamie replacement. I guess I am, as much as anyone is; I've been with mozilla.org since pretty much day one, and I was the ``virtual jwz'' when he was on sabbatical. So just pretend it's a really, really long sabbatical or something.
First, I'll do the eulogy thing: we will certainly miss Jamie -- I think any organization except the Vatican would mourn his departure from their ranks. He did some great work here at Netscape and mozilla.org, and he was (usually) a pleasure to work with. Thanks for all the fish.
As for the issues at hand, I think I agree mostly with Jamie on the facts of the case, but my conclusions sometimes differ meaningfully: I, too wish we'd shipped a browser already, and a great one at that. But I think that the switch to the NGLayout/Gecko engine is a great example of how the mozilla.org project is a success: it was the best way to get a browser that matched the demands of our users, and I'm not sure that Netscape would have done The Right Thing before the advent of mozilla.org. Also, as Jamie himself points out, it did help us recruit more developers, which is always a win.
The balance of Netscape vs. non-Netscape developers doesn't bother me as much as it seems to bother Jamie. When we started, there were zero external developers in any form, and there are now many (34 non-netscape.com people have commit privileges on the mozilla.org CVS tree, and many more contribute patches for others to commit), and I think that matters more than the comparison to the large number of developers that Netscape pays.
What does the future hold? Well, our work towards 5.0 continues apace, so we'll still be trying to help our existing developers and recruit new ones. We'll be finishing up our efforts to make some of the Mozilla code available under the GPL as well (the JavaScript engine, in this case), to broaden our ``technology reach''.
People have asked if we have a plan for attracting more developers, and I think that the best answer is ``ship a beta''. When we get onto hackers' desktops, we have a much better shot at getting into their hearts and minds, too. In the nearer term, we just need to weather the storm of reporters and pundits, and concentrate on getting our jobs done. We'll make Jamie proud yet.
Since it's the 2nd of April, I'm assuming that this is not yet another april fool's day slashdot news item
:)
I've participated in a few opensource projects and helped code a few functional utlities that still helps a lot of people all around the world. When Netscape announced the release of Mozilla code, I was one of many to logon to their site and download the tar ball, but alas, it was too hard to decypher. I went through the code for 1 week (a lot longer than most people did). I couldnt figure out 75% of the things in there. So I gave up. (And I guess that is what happend to all the others out there)
Initially when netscape announced the release of mozilla, there were dozens of web sites, hundreds of mailing lists, just devoated to the discussion of what should be in mozilla. Over the past year, these web sites and lists just died away one by one. I guess what most people did not release was, that what mozilla needed was not new functionally, but... stablility, at a good speed. It did not need be a front end to your kitchen skin (should see some of the suggestions made on wishlists) it just needed to fetch a web page and display complying with most statndard as possible.
Then there are those who bitched about mozilla, from the start to the end (i guess when jwz leaves, it might as well be the end). I don't think bitching about the code would have helped making it more stable and fast. Helping the coders, coding it your self and replacing those netscape coders should have been the first thing we should have done. As jwz stated, most people thought netscape still owned mozilla and had full control over mozilla (this was inforced by the inital netscape/mozilla licence,) on that.. i belive mozilla would have been better accepted if it was released as BSD or GPL/LGPL.. most coders were weary of this and stayed away from mozilla just cause of that fact alone... and then there were those who, like me, waited for others to go ahead and do something to the code, test it, pinch it.. see if it bites.. (would a dead beast bite?)
Best jwz quote : I must say, though, that it feels good to be resigning from AOL instead of resigning from Netscape
PS: oops posted it in the wrong place
--
jwz is one of the few latter-day saints to become known by their initials. i mean, you know GLS, RMS, ESR, ETC., but it's pretty kewl when someone your age is an undeniable net.god. (also, he's much less insane than the *other* TLA that worked on (l)emacs). so, it's undeniably sad to see him go.
:), and
it's also ironic to see this happen at a time when mozilla.org was finally producing a product that was starting to look like an early version of a real contender, rather than a cobbled-together POS.
however, maybe it's a good thing:
a) maybe jwz can get out there and do something he really enjoys now, which might be good for all of us
b) maybe this will act as a wakeup call. with jwz gone, mozilla can go one of two ways: either somebody's gonna do *something*, or it's gonna die.
c) maybe all of us losers with delusions of grandeur will go download the tarball again...
so, i personally wanna wish jwz good luck.
-k. ^-^
-k. ^-^ ^D
This is indeed a tragedy, but frankly it does not surprise me.
I've been lurking around the mozilla mailing lists (mirrored in the mozilla newsgroups) and the mozilla.org website basically since they were created. Watching the dynamic of the mozilla communication mechanism over the period of a year, a number of things became unsettling. (I've only ever lurked, primarily because I'm not a sophisticated programmer, and I would have little to offer either the mozilla or linux kernel mailing lists. The development processes in both fascinate me, however.)
First, it amazes me that anyone in the Mozilla project was able to communicate with another at all. From the moment the mozilla mailing lists were created and mirrored, it was apparent that 80-90% of the mail/posts were, and would -always- be, irrelevant fluff. The primary reason for this is that while the Netscape 4.5 support newsgroups were not public - available only through nsnews.netscape.com, the mozilla newsgroups were public, and contained those compelling words "netscape", "misc" and "mail-news". From the perspective of a user with little knowledge of the significance of the word "mozilla", there was no reason to think that the most obvious place to ask Communicator questions.
The result was/is that despite the good efforts of Dan Mosedale and Jim Cape (each of whom made valiant strides to keep the mailing list topical), the vast majority of discussion was/is about 3.0, 4.0x and 4.5 problems. Combined with another 10% of posts of the "I want my 5.0 and I want it NOW!" variety, and a further 5% of the "Now that I can order you, I demand the following 50 stupid features that I have no idea how to program myself" variety, the mozilla mailing list, to the best of my observation, became a completely inhospitable place to have useful techinical discussions such as are seen almost exclusively - by contrast - in the Linux kernel mailing list. The latter, despite the fact that its content is usually way beyond this law student, is a pleasure to read. The Mozilla list is not.
I will leave remarks about the daunting complexity of the source as a major factor to jwz and other programmers/contributors. I'm simply not qualified. But another result is that because most of the contributors (as pointed out by jwz) were still Netscape employees, communication via the mailing list for the purposes of solving localized problems was (I assume) unnecessary.
I must, therefore, put a caveat on jwz's "fishbowl" analogy. These are two huge disincentives to communicating publicly about the source tree, and the lack of consistent communication on the nitty-gritty details of development may have played its part in the failure of the mozilla project to capture the imagination - and effort - of the programming community.
Aside from that caveat, though, jwz commented that such outside observation, combined with mozilla's independence, motivated the project to redesign the layout engine, and thus the UI, from scratch. It is unfortunate that the choice to rebuild a project thoughtfully and correctly, at the obvious cost of time, is considered a 'failure', or even a bad thing. Yes, some idiots have complained and threatened that if "Netscape doesn't come up with my browser now, I swear I'll move to IE5", not understanding that (a) the development regime has changed radically, (b) the project was rebuilt, (c) it's better to ship the right thing "late" - inasmuch as there is any such thing as 'late' in an open source project - than the wrong thing when users demand it.
For someone who has lurked and gained some familiarity with the dynamics of the project and the cast of characters, none of these conditions indicate 'failure' to me. It is unfortunate that jwz does, but he'd probably know better than I.
First, the Mozilla effort goes on: AOL is still funding development, non-AOL developers are active as well, the project is continuing to release "milestone" releases which you can try out, and this will culminate later this year in beta releases of Communicator 5.0 and then a final release, all based on the open Mozilla source code. This has been the case all along, and remains the case.
Next, in the Mozilla project there was a fundamental trade-off: build and release a product based on the existing in-progress 5.0 code base ("Mozilla Classic") or rearchitect the product to make it more standards compliant (i.e., use the new layout code being developed), more extensible, more open (e.g., use something other than Motif), and so on. In particular, many people complained vociferously that Mozilla/5.0 needed to have 100% standards compliance for HTML 4.0, CSS1, etc. Thus the decision was made (way back in October 1998) to rearchitect the product, use the new layout engine, use GTK+ instead of Motif, etc.
Most people on /. and elsewhere seemed to agree with that decision at the time, and would presumably still agree with it. However from Jamie's point of view it presumably would have been a better plan to go ahead and ship as early as possible even given the downsides. (Also, Jamie saw no reason to ditch Motif for GTK.) That's something about which reasonable people can disagree, but I don't buy the assertion that by taking the extra time to make a better product the Mozilla project has therefore "failed".