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
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".