Slashdot Mirror
AOL Considers Ending Mozilla?
Wonko42 writes "Netscape is thinking twice about continuing to use Mozilla.org as the main tool to develop Communicator, and well they should. The project has received very little support from the open-source community, and the delays have been astronomical. While Netscape isn't sure that they could undo the open-source status of the browser, they're considering their options carefully. Also, according to the article, Communicator 5.0 is set to ship in December. "
After all, the kernel is getting very large...
"Netscape has posted a very good example of how not to run an open source project"
What utter nonsense. Mozilla.org's Open Source project has been an impressive piece of work - from development issues being sussed out in newsgroups, to weekly updates, to all the third party contributions that have produced versions for BeOS, OS/2 and Amiga(no Netscape coders involved), to Bugzilla, the open bug reporting tool.
Mozilla doesn't have a bevy of coders riding to their rescue, but so what? You expected Linux? In the first year? Get over it.
GNOME.
Mozilla.
How many other projects have floundered waiting for programmers to find free time?
AOL is simply wasting money making what is essentially internal work viewable and modifiable by the general public. The time spent to set up the public CVS, docs, etc. could have been spent rolling this product out 6 months ago, when it should have arrived.
Remember when IE was playing catch up with Netscape? Now Netscape is a year behind.
This was inevitable. They were just trying to get people to make the browser for them and it didn't work. In order for open-source to work, the starters of a project have to put in at least 95% of the work at first and come up with something compilable in order for users to debug it and add features.
Hmmm. I hope that the KDE folks make there browser a real contender and fast.
I'm glad you're quite satisfied with the elegance of the Mozilla architecture. Yet another ringing endorsement of "software engineering", which so far has only succeeded in making projects late.
By time Mozilla comes out, no one is going to care, which is too bad, because without a good browser, linux is doomed on the desktop.
You can't revive a dying project just by relicensing it. At least, not usually. Software's more complicated than that.
Put the Netscape code under the GNU license and it will be developped as well an any other large scale GNU project. But asking the community to contribute code to you freely so you can pick and choose through it and decide what to include while maintaining all control of the Mozilla project and "reserving all rights", don't expect much enthusiam from contributors (what few there were).
Can you read? Did you even read the article? Apparently not. Go back and read it. Geez, what a moron.
ICQ is so small that a single person could write a replacement (in fact, several people have, for Linux). If it's getting too bloated for you then write one for Win32 or port a Linux one.
As anyone who's followed the Mozilla project knows, the code is running way ahead of schedule. They simply decided to wait about making releases.
Anyone who understands open source development knows the difference between speed of development and frequency of releases.
I'm kinda worried too...
I've been using ICQ on and off since when it first came out and I'm surprised AOL didn't kill ICQ already. Consider that AOL still has their crappy "AOL Instant Messenger" (the bastards have it built into RealPlayer with almost no way to choose not to download it). I just wonder if they'll just try to kill it (bad, especially considering how many people use ICQ) or "merge" them (worse, because I hate AIM).
On the other hand, the ICQ protocol has been reverse engineered countless times and there are already several free, smaller clones for people not using Windows. Some even work with GNOME or KDE. I suppose with some time and effort people will find a way to reverse engineer the server components too. This way, at least ICQ won't die...I hope...
i dont know about you all, but i think M7 rules.. heres why
at my school they have all NT, you can choose from
a misconfigured netscape 3 or IE 4. when i am in the lab
i download mozilla M7, install it, and use it, because its
faster than either of those 2 bloated pieces of shit, and it
works very well on most of the sites i visit.
JWZ was simply mad because they chose not to do poor quality releases of non-standard junk.
As for Mozilla, you *can* use it right now. The web browser is quite functional, and the mail/news is getting there.
Upper management at Sun, though. Not Netscape/AOL.
It won't just be Microsoft. It will be all kinds of people from all over.
Unfortunately we can't just chain Raymond to the carcass of Mozilla and deep sink the whole mess.
Oh well, it looks like Netscape will hold the Luddux market for a long long time...
Everybody is looking for a big open-source disaster, because they don't believe the hype, and they're tired of snotty geeks carrying on like they own the world.
I read somewhere that AOL 5.0 will have IE 5.0 in it. The article at the top mentioned that aol may switch to gecko later like in december. Although I would guess it may take a bit longer than that even to make sure that gecko transitions in as smoothly as IE for all of the things they are currently working on.
I would not expect AOL 5 to have gecko, AOL can't wait that long to upgrade, they are a business and must move quickly. Give them some time, maybe AOL 6 will have gecko.
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then they pound you into the dirt!"
Ok, Bill, we know that it is YOU!!!!
The hammer has come down?
This is not the end of the world. Some loony at Sun wants attention, and so is making dire predictions about a free software project that is doing just fine.
So yes, I blame "them" - the people who don't bother to check their basic facts before posting stories, and the moron at Sun who has nothing better to do than comment on other companies' projects.
i have yet to come across so much self righteous
bullshit as when i gaze upon the massive heap
of crap that is the jwz web experience.
well i love his screensaver page but alot of the
rest of it is hype because he fits some kinda
90s cowboy/rock star mix image that has become
the new computer jockey cliche. thank you wired,
may you rot in hell for eternity.
Yeah, sure. Why pay for software....? (sarcasm)
You greedy leech.
what do you mean??
By what measure is it incredibly successful? Nobody outside of developers is using it, it poroduces no profit, and it barely even fucking works? How can you say it's "incredibly successful?" Just because it's OSS?
The lack of huge well-produced office applications, games, and browsers from the OSS community, and the proliferation of small, simple, command line utilities and applets is a testament to the fact that OSS doesn't handle intrinsically complex (those architectures which cannot be decomposed) applications very well
In other words, Open Source doesn't scale well.
It's best when it's a few programmers writing gee-whiz utilities to show off to their friends.
Linux is a success because of Linus. Not because of Open Source.
How's this different from Linux? When RedHat and Cladera become huge, the same thing will happen there. This is the inherent problem with OSS. It's pie in the sky. Linux has worked because there are no companies making visible $$ yet. As soon as they do, the OSS support will wane. OSS is a joke.
It works??? Last time I tried, it crashed/locked every few minutes. Is your version of Mozilla called "IE 5.0"???
ok, if you are using ie5, you are not using linux...
...so why the h*ll you are posing you comments here????
;-)
rtfm!
[ Baratz added that Communicator 5.0--which will ship in December--will be competitive with Microsoft's Internet Explorer,
especially since AOL will bundle the browser on its software CDs.
"You'll see a really good product in December, an XML-based, solid product with a great interface to the Java Virtual Machine,"
he said. "December would be a good defining moment for competition in the browser space." ]
I'm glad some guys prevented Microsoft from destroying a good standard. Sun's done a great job with Java.
What's with all of the friction between ACs and registered users? Are you somehow superior by having taken two minutes to register here? The AC you flamed had a valid point. Just because a person has registered doesn't make him (as if there were any hers here) any less of a doofus as you clearly evidence. Most people have enough accounts and passwords to remember without dealing with another one. Maybe you should spend less time flaming ACs and learn a thing or two about site development. I mean, come on, entry tunnels on one's vanity webpage are so David Siegel 1996.
Communicator 4.51 up (4.6, 4.61) glibc version on glibc linux IS STABLE and do NOT crashes Linux. If it crashes, crashes itself. If you restrart it porperly, it works.
Man, who installed Lininux for you if you can crash it via Netscape?????
Taking action like that in a culture of sheep will save you from the wolves, even if the other sheep don't like it.
It's automatically a 1 because it was posted from an account rather than by one of us Anonymous Cowards. Quit being such a spaz...
maybe there should be a sheep test (you'd pass)
In the beginning we had "free software". Then we coined "open source" and profiteers saw an opportunity to recruit volunteer labor to further their fortunes. We went from GPL and BSD to a world of *insert profiteer here*PL's.
OK, fine, we shouldn't blame the profiteer for trying, but we can thank them for playing.
I'm glad to see volunteer programmers aren't as stupid as the *PL people think they are. Maybe others should take note. They should be deciding if making a contribution to "free software" (not just "open source") makes financial sense. If they're trying to recruit a few fools to turn a buck for them without pay, it is probably a bad move.
Netscape could have bought a ton of goodwill over a very, very, long time in exchange for dropping that product out there, GPL. Microsoft turned it into the walking dead, so its residual value was marketing. No other effort could have bought that kind of exposure, bar none. But, they went for the greed. Their concept came across (to me) as "Lets shoot for the marketing angle, and we'll keep as much of the contributed work effort as we possibly can for ourselves.")
You have to admit, its good work if you can get it. Now we know good work isn't so easy to find.
BTW, before you flame on about Netscape being distributed without charge, I'll submit that this is done at their whim. Send it out free, rope 'em in, and start charging. It is a business model that works, well, and Netscape has never done anything to prevent itself from doing this any time they choose. Think IE if you're still confused.
In the end, I know there are good financial reasons for big companies to do GPL work. I ran a project that contributed a few thousand lines to xemacs. Doing the work was cheaper than buying, or building and supporting. Months of big company work, GPL, we're happy, you're welcome, done deal. We didn't try to squeeze every imaginable angle for every possible cent.
The terms of the virtual contract is better understood every day. It really does look to be pretty simple. If you want help from an unpaid volunteer, you have to cut a deal they can live with.
No honey, no bee.
This was true in RH5.2 but RH6 seems to make NS much more stable. I can nowadays run NS a day without a crash still using it all the time. (My windows98 crashes more often than my NS in my Linux box - though I use a lot different progs in both)
If MS released IE5 for Linux tomorrow, I'd be the first to download it.
I couldn't agree more. As I have many times said to my friends: IE5 is not good - it's only better than its competitors!
There are 3 reasons why I still use Windows anyway:
- ANTIALIASING in font rendering
- IE5
- DirectX
I still would correct one thing: "renders webpages pretty accurately"And for those who think Opera is a great program: If You really don't want to see pages "right", You can use LYNX. It's smaller and faster.
Too true. I run IE5 and it completely blows away Netscape. Netscape crashes continuously, uglifies pages, doesn't support quite a few w3c standards, and is bloated with advertisements (bookmarks, download manager). IE5 has a slick interface, loads up pages in a flash, and its bookmarks can be easily modified by simply dragging them around. I have high hopes for Mozilla, but as it stands, Netscape is losing the browser war with good reason.
It certainly isn't stable here. I'm running bleeding edge Debian potato on this machine and Navigator 4.61 freezes and segfaults when you're doing a lot at once. Its never crashed X or the kernel, but I can always depend on it dying at least 4 times a day.
--Ian
PS: Its Linux, not Lininux.
Traffic in Mozilla's news groups is down to insignificant. Unlike what you and I would like to see, Mozilla is mostly coded by Netscape guys. Alas.
"But IE5 is only a few months old"? Humbug.
IE5 is practically the same as IE4. It's just IE4 bugpatched, tweaked for speed, with an XML parser added. It even tells JavaScript it's version 4. It really ought to be called IE4.1.
He wasn't happy with the Aol-Sun-Netscape merger,
and wrote that so that he wouldn't look like an angry back stabbing fool.
Mozilla was making progress when he resigned, so
what's the problem?
Perhaps someone else was getting credit, or
perhaps _he_ was the only one getting the blame.
How long has mozilla.org been working on the next release of Netscape, far to long. This kind of shows that it does take big teams with lots of capital to bring forth a nice shinny piece of software to market. I suspect that Linux will not see another cool browser for years to come, while windows IE will evolve many times over and over in the next two years. W2K is an example of a brand new IE!
Netscape under linux, can we say "bus error"?
I got my W2K beta CD in the mail 3 weeks ago and it's been running since then without one program crash or BOD. IE renders web pages at least 5 times faster than any Netscape for windows of UNIX.
Anyway, I said one year ago that mozilla.org will not bring anything to market in a reasonable time frame and I was right then and I'm still right about that. It took MS less than 6 months to develop IE and less than 3 months to bring out IE 5.0. So if Open Source development of web browsers is better, then why is there not a fully functional web browser that supports all the possible web content that IE supports?
Hmmm maybe lack of manpower, no incentive ($$$)
Can you given an URL which clearly states that Mozilla is under GNU? I am afraid you can't. They can't GNU it and use their own contradicting or simply different license, there can be only *one*.
Lost look. Competition isn't the ruler of the game anymore. That's the whole point of Open Source. If you don't like it, fix it. If you don't want to fix it, don't complain. If you want to use something else, be our guest.
If netscape doesn't hurry up and release some alphas or betas then netscape won't
last much longer
Buddy, they just can't "hurry" up and release alpha of beta. Bugs doesn't disappear if you call your build beta X. Unless you go and code a line, or FIX (not just find, it's too lame) bugs, Mozilla won't appear a second earlier. In fact given current state of support or lack of which thereof, I won't be surprised that by December, 1999, there will be beta, at best.
1. the only guy i know who would be so brutal
is a guy i went to high school with who ran
a pirate bbs and is now sysadmin. i have no fear
of him, and i wont of any control freak boss either.
2. i am sure that in all of the millions of places in the world there are places
to find work where you dont have to act like an idiot
and say 'yassir boss' for no reason.
if life was all about obedience, there would
be no progress. there would also be no
hope, joy, love, pain, sadness, or happiness.
Heh.
and it's not even multithreaded!
In netscape's defense, it's much easier to write a multi-threaded application for one platform (Windows) than it is to write one that's portable over many Unix/Linux platforms. Multithreading is not at all standardized enough to make this an easy task. They'd probably have to support fewer platforms if they were to implement MT.
Looks readable at 1280x1024 on Windows, but I can *barely* make out the font at 1152x864 on Linux even with 100 dpi and truetype fonts
That is X's fault, not Netscape by any means. Try the XFree86 Font Deuglification HOWTO
I hate it when you blind-as-bats faithful-as-christians windows-hating linux bigots ASSume that everything on Linux is better.
You must be thinking of someone I don't assume anything of the sort. I've used them both and I prefer Linux.
One more thing. Stop your pathetic whining, it's childish. If you don't like something, don't use it. Sounds like Linux would be better off without you.
The whole Unix philosophy is geared more towards small components that do one thing and do them well. Perhaps if Mozilla were broken down into more compartmentalized modules that could be used interchangably with other applications it would evolve better.
and modems cost less than $100. that's not much of an excuse
Well if IE5 is really IE4.1, then netscape should be even more embarrassed that they can't compete with a product with which you claim they have version parity.
As long as we're talking about features... netscape 4 (the browser, not the mail clients) is for all intents and purposes netscape 3 with a fugly new gui that tries to copy IE tacked on... why don't we call it NS 3.5?
use kfm- slashdot looks better on it anyway... at least you can read the fonts
If you're going to get hundreds or thousands of people pounding away at one codebase, some sort of guidance - an ideal form if you will - is needed to draw the masses in the appropriate direction.
to work on AOL software for free anyhow.
Geez, working for trillion dollar companies for free, what a great idea!
Netscape Officials, we want a fast, configurable browser, we do not need netscape calendars, mailers, etc. The gecko project is very intersting. Please don't bloat it with the typical AOL crap/mailer/newsreader/etc. Perhaps you could make these compile/run time modules?
IE5 for Linux too would find its way on to my box. Netscape 4.61 never works right on win 98/95/nt at work, but IE is spectacular. Another curious thing is that the damn Quality Feedback agent always works even though Netscape just dies all the time. How disturbing.
It is like a slap in the face when Netscape crashes and than blasted quality feedback thingey appears. I'd like to help and mail them the difficulty I had, but I was not doing anything spectacular, just viewing some simple page, not to mention that I've already sent them many errors in the past.
Netscape on linux is good, but only because no one else has rised to the challenge. IE5 for linux, should there ever be such a beast, is gonna blow netscape away and in the words of another foolish (and famous) boob ... I'll eat my column if this prediction does not come true within 1 year
Lets all start another browser. We'll use alien technology for it. It will be able to serve up a dynamic page is record time and conquer the legions of mindless earthlings ... perhaps i've said too much already.
There are 53 developers outside netscape.com with direct checkin privileges to the CVS tree as of last Tuesday.
With all my due respect to Nescape and Mozilla, simple number of people who have assess has no meaning for me. How many, say lines of code, they contribute comparing with Netscape employees? Last time I have looked at the changelog, it was well below 50%. I don't want to say anything bad about that, myself rejected the idea to work on mozilla until it's released, but judging on low traffic in newsgroups (remember it was mentioned in Helloween document last years?), external participation in Mozilla project is next to zero. I would expect some *real* involvement only after it's release.
One License.
One OS.
Ein Deutschland.
You read Carnival at the Bazaar?
I thought it was some sort of neoPagan ritual work, and have avoided it thus far.
No, he actually wrote "Carnival at the Bazaar" he didn't just excrete it.
Don't let him shirk off responsiblity for it.
I thought the secret word was "xyzzy".
Foolish me...
I had moderator access on one of the accounts I threw away. Every once in awhile I get so disgusted with this site that I throw away an account. I've done so twice now.
AFAIK (correct me if I'm wrong), Mozilla is not colicensed under the GPL. However, the AC above is incorrect; there's no reason this couldn't be done. (And it has been done, in the case of Ghostscript, and most recently, of reiserfs.) Probably, since the MPL already meets the Debian Free Software Guidelines, they didn't see the need for it.
> I think that Mozillas biggest shortfall from my
. 01.tar.bz2
> perspective is that when the initial source
> release came out, the code would not compile
> into a useful product.
http://nin. cybertrails.com/pub/linux/kernel/Historic/linux-0
Think before you bitch.
Mozilla is DFSG free. Even RMS believes it is free software, although he still quibbles on a few details. How much more do you want?
Or, so much for ESR's influence. Cant say I blame them, the development model doesnt work for AOL or Netscape. It has contributed to OSS media attention, Eric Raymonds EGO, but little else.
Yeah - moderate this down to flamebait level. Don't let the truth out, just push it under the surface.
> Why do we have to go through this ``Mozilla is
> dead'' dance every two weeks when someone new
> wants their name in the press?
What rock have you been living under? Mozilla is nearly dead, Apple is going to be bought by Disney, and Pat Buchanan has a chance in hell this election. Bullshit just comes in cycles, usually from the same sources. (Also, Slate is worth reading. Really!)
It won't, but the % os users on those platforms is negligible. You can't please everyone. By writing IE for all flavors of Windows, and Mac, you have 97% of the web surfer market. Why would MS want to waste their time on factions of 3% of all surfers? That'd be a waste of money.
It means "OPEN SOURCE DOES NOT WORK"
Geez - read it and learn.
For all of your people calling me a leech this is a bunch of crap. I have a website devoted to beginners and have helped many people install and setup linux. My site has had info pulled from it and used by teachers for presentations and also the cheeck(sp?)) kb linux site. Will I give the address no, at this point i don't need a bunch of people giving me crappy emails about how i don't deserve anything.
More to the point i said i would pay for a browser, but again do think this should be included in my $80 for redhat 6.0 .
This is not about do i deserve a better browser i think everyone needs an alternative to netscape, is that so hard to get through your heads??
Even if i wasn't doing anything to help the community, which i am, people still deserve an alternative, just like i deserve an alternative to microsoft. Maybe its the word deserve you are all so hung up on, maybe i should have said would like, but at this point it does not really matter.
If you would like me to prove i have done something or debate this further send an email to testspamaccout@yahoo.com for the address.
not testspamaccout@yahoo.com
The reference to low newsgroup traffic in the Halloween document referred to the .wishlist newsgroup, not the day-to-day development newsgroup. It makes sense that there aren't as many wishlists now than there were before.
Those numbers sound highly suspicious...where, pray tell, did you get them?
This is good to hear. I will have to read over the MPL and see if it's more reasonable.
It is a shame that Mozilla isn't put under a "standard" license.
One of the REALLY bad side effects of the "Open Source" thing is that there are a lot of program-specific licenses, and, in many cases, nobody's really sure about what many of them mean. In a world where people have trouble understanding the meaning of the GPL and the BSD license, these random licenses have little hope.
My problem with the NPL comes down to points (1) and (2) that RMS makes.
Point (3) that RMS makes, well, RMS might consider it a bug, but I consider it a feature. The GPL as interpreted by RMS is incompatible with everything except the GPL, and this causes a lot of grief for a lot of free software programmers. Of course, from the RMS point of view, the problem is not the GPL, it's the NPL.
If you're going to use statistics, make sure that they support what you are saying. I would certainly consider two dozen or so posts a day to be a trickle. (Sure, wishlist is getting more, but that's to be expected. It's easy to ask for stuff; another thing to get it done)
I am the leader of a large opensource project
(no kidding) and I realize that managing open source projects is REEALLY hard.
OSS works well for small projects, but very few large projects ever make it. Linux and apache, X are all very large projects and they made it. The one good thing is once a project makes it it's quality is usually better than teh quality of commercial projects I see several reasons for it>
1- Commercial projects tend to go faster. It is not true that OSS projects whip up a product in no time due to collaboration. That's BS, if you rely on people's free time you need to take it easy.
2- Once commercial projects are finished the guys who usually takes care of bugs is not the best coders: bugy software remains bugy
3- in the case of OSS, it takes time but if a project REALLY makes it then all the dynamic of OSS (the eyeball bla bla) really comes into play.
In short einstein was right :
TIME IS MONEY
OSS needs TIME
commercial needs MONEY
Look how long it took GNU and BNU linux
Mozilla needs more time, taht is something commercial entities DON"t have.
regards
marc
If you read the News.com article and the front page of Mozillazine.org, you'll find that its not Netscape that's doing the considering, its Sun Microsystems (when they got to be the ones in control of Netscape I dont know). Mozillazine reports that internal sources at Netscape havent heard anything of the sort.
;P
The News.com article struck me as another attempt on the part of Baratz to flog his crippled Java horse
Ben
LOL bruce LOL
you're a rare breed man, keep on rocking!
I love you man
marc
teo@ejboss.org
yes but these setting aren`t applicable to all sites.
Slashdot is perfect with my current settings but www.freeserve.co.uk is unreadable. With IE5 I can read both sites just fine!
Perhaps they freeserve does it deliberately since they bundle IE?
That is because you don't use the Microsoft TrueType fonts in Linux. Fortunately, Microsoft has made them available for Linux users also. Can't remember where right now, search www.microsoft.com.
I think the point he was trying to make is this.
If Linux/unix etc. is superior to Windows .
And IE5 on win98 is far superior to NS4.6 on X (I know, I use NS on X at work and IE5 at home).
Then either
A) NS4 is a pile of Sh@t.
OR
B) Linux/Unix isn`t as good as Windows
You choose.
PS IE4 was a lot better then NS4 (which are the same age!)
And as for Amiga and X, there are multiple X servers for Amiga, so that comment was a bit off ;)
(Yeah, I used to be an Amiga user... Now I just keep myself updated out of nostalgia)
Man, who tttttought you hoe ttttoot typppee ??
In the last few months I have used all three version you quoted and they are all crap!
>Man, who installed....
Someone who earns a lot more money than you do!!
As for milestone 7, it works great here, but you have to understand a few things:
>except for small strange ones like BeOS and Amiga OS. ..... such as Solaris, ........
WRONG!
>Netscape Navigator is a well trusted browser
I use NS4 at work on solaris and I wouldn`t trust it as far as I could....{this browser has crashed! }
If they would use a KDE fe alongside the GTK fe,
the user/developer base would double.
What are you talking about? Mozilla compiles FINE. I build it nightly, in fact, and it is the most automatic build I have ever SEEN. It pulls itself directly from CVS when you type 'make' does the whole mess automatically.
If Netscape were to pull the plug on Mozilla, they would be doing everyone (especially themselves) a HUGE disservice. I am on the verge of boycotting ALL netscape products right now (not Mozilla) as it is, but this would be the final straw.
Mozilla is NOT a failure. Take a look through the many editorials on mozilla.org...even the developers don't consider it a failure. They don't EXPECT a huge open-source outpouring to come help them...yet. They realize that they need a working product to do just that and you know what? They are almost there. JWZ made some damn good points but I think he jumped ship way too early. I can't say as I blame him w.r.t. AOL however. It's no surprise that AOL has any kind of vision beyond their own stupid bug-ridden software.
The GPL is not a magic flag that attracts developers. It might make things a little more attractive but it isn't a guarantee that anyone will flock to it.
There are a LOT of GPL'd projects out there (even web browser projects like Mnemonic) that aren't attracting developers in droves at all.
I do agree that Netscape SHOULD have used the GPL (or at least the BSD license) from the start, however.
I compiled it under Win95 on the first day. I couldn't get the UNIX build to work right, but the Windows build hummed along for many hours.
Of course, when it ran it barely ran, but still..
DON'T judge Mozilla by the early builds. Give it a try now, it will surprise you. The UNIX build pulls itself right out of CVS automatically, and builds without intervention.
I've seen a LOT of comments here about how Mozilla doesn't compile. Please, before you dismiss Mozilla, take some time to actually TRY building it.
There are detailed UNIX build instructions at www.mozilla.org. The compile is surprisingly easy; you just pull client.mk out of CVS and run gmake on it. client.mk does the rest...it will automatically pull the entire source tree right out of CVS, run configure, and run the build.
I run the compile almost on a daily basis and it almost always compiles, and very cleanly at that. The days of the early-release code mess are gone--things have changed a -lot-.
Functionality is appearing by the day, as well. Mozilla will create user profiles now, and even handles bookmarking (finally!). It is pretty stable for general web browsing as well.
So, before you bash Mozilla's stability, give it a try first. Things have changed a -lot-.
--An anonymous Frobozz
I've used both and yes IE 5 is far supperior to Netscape 4.x, there's no doubt about that. However Netscape 4.x was supperior and more stable than IE4.x (at least in my experience).
So hopefully when Netscape roll out their 5.x browser it will be comparable to IE5.
Isn't the whole point of modular program and now OOP to minimize this sort of problem? I agree that a very small team of architechs should design the application/subsystem, but it really doesn't matter how many people are on the team of programmers who implement it. If function foo takes input bar and returns foobar, who cares what the internals are? What I think Mozilla needs is to work on their organization and make it very clear what needs to be worked on and how they want people to do it.
But Open Sourcing has not helped them much according to the Article
Judging by some of the rabid opinions this FUD has generated it seems that a significant number of people have no idea what is going on in the Mozilla project.
For your information, Mozilla is alive and well and very much a success. Yes, it had a shakey start but the pain caused by dumping the old codebase have gone. Mozilla has emerged with an advanced, fast, modular, standards compliant layout engine and an ultra cool and platform-independent UI defined in XML.
Of course as a product still 3-4 months away from beta, it is still under active and heavy development. Literally hundreds of checkins occur everyday as the product moves rapidly foward. Hundreds of messages pour into the Mozilla newsgroups discussing the latest developments. Interest in Mozilla is enormous. This is not a product that is going to die.
Such a moving target does pose a problem for volunteers, but a hardy few (myself included) have stuck with it and contributed _significantly_ to the project.
And now we have reached the stage that Mozilla has become a stable and usable browser with mail and news following close behind. With the stability comes an ever increasing number of contributors. By the time we reach beta the figure is likely to be in the hundreds. Thousands more will contribute in other ways such as building it, testing it, submitting bugs, writing skins, developing web content and so on to ensure that Mozilla is the best browser bar none.
Such is the way with all Open Source projects. It starts off with a few masochists and by the final release there is the multitude. So how can anyone judge that Mozilla has failed when it is still going strong and gaining strength everyday? If we all believed the merchants of doom then products such as Gnome, KDE, Gimp and Linux etc. would never have succeeded either.
So less of the FUD please!
Apart from the obvious (IE exists outside windows), I don't see how having the source code to Windows would help the IE team. Yeesh. Everything IE does, even desktop integration can easily be done by any semi-experienced windows programmer, even by me! I doubt the IE team have even seen the code to much of windows (unless they originally worked on it). The only thing I can think of is Explorer (file) integration, but I believe they basically just wrote some explorer bands (the panel on the left that shows the tree of folders) for IE. That's the point of componentised programming. Writing one of those explorer bands, or a toolbar for the task bar etc requires absolutely no code from explorer/taskbar etc. You just need to know what interfaces are exposed by explorer and what interfaces explorer expects you to implement.
No need for source. Blackbox programming.
Who's spreading FUD ???
I'm not a developer, I'm currently only a user. But
1) Give us a list of things that should work and that we should test. (ie a checklist - additional to the debug menu.) I believe I saw one for an older milestone, but not for M7. This is the most important.
2) If Mozilla crashes, what do you want us to provide? Do you want the stuff that goes to stdout/err? Do you want us to backtrace the program? If you do want us to backtrace, the provided binaries has should have debugging support provided. Do you only want kernel version, or also the glibc library versions etc etc.
3) If we see a badly rendered page and we don't understand HTML. What should we do? Save the page and send the whole lot? Do you wanted to be slashdotted?
The main thing is that I'm scared of overwhelming the developers with useless information. Bugzilla is good, although not comprehensive.
Thanks for the great work.
Nobody's BIG yet. Nobody's making a mint yet. But as soon as a company starts to get big, people start to back off. I've read it right here in Slashdot. RedHat is starting to get big, and people are less willing "to do their work for them". It's gonna happen. It's inevitable. If RedHat becaomes HUGE. Let's say their distribution sits on 50% of the desktops out there. They're a huge multi-billion dollar company. You think people are gonna be hacking code for them? fuck no. Think about it. I'm backing this up with evidence (Netscape, Red Hat) and common sense. Open Source is doomed to stay in the closet.
When the free/open source Netscape announcement came out, I was doing preliminary work on developing my own, free web browser. When free Netscape was announced, it look like we would have a free browsers, so it didn't seem like a project worth pursuing, so dropped work on it. My first instinct was to get the Netscape code..
I downloaded the code, but I couldn't compile it. It relied on Motif, which I did not have. I downloaded a compiled, ``working'' version, but I couldn't do anything useful with it. I read the license. It seemed to be of questionable worth. Netscape could proprietize my code at any minute, and pull further development out of the free domain. One of the best uses of a web browser is to embed it in other programs. The NPL/MPL was GPL-incompatible, so that was impossible with most free software.
Overall, it didn't seem worth my time to develop Netscape, but it also no longer seemed worth my time to develop a different free web browser, so I ended up switching to doing some work on Linux audio projects. From me, the major gains of the MPL/NPL was that (a) I continued to use Netscape, instead of free alternatives (b) I stopped work on a competing product (c) I highly recommended Netscape over IE to others.
Right now, pretty much all of the major problems have been solved. The only remaining issue is that of license. If the NPL/MPL had a clause that stated ``This code may, at the user's discretion, be used under the terms of the GPL,'' I'd probably start hacking.
Yeah everyone knows IE and W2K are 6*6*6 times better, faster, and more stable than anything that begins with the L word!
My beta three has been up for 3 weeks running!
Sorry, this is Linux country where uptime is measured in months and major kernel releases. Not minutes or hours.(or weeks for that matter.)
Heh. Your words are now prominently displayed on jwz.org jwz certainly has a terrific grasp of irony.
except that MS api documentation is really,
really, really, awful. If you had good docs,
those with source would indeed have less of
an advantage with some well designed
modularized system, but the docs are
intentionally bad to put people on the
outside at a disadvantage (yes this is my
biased opinion...)
FUCKING WHORE.
I hope to hell Netscape gets its act together, the only reason I use them is because thats all linux supports, I am sorry but ie5, is by far superior..
With all due respect to the Mozilla project we need more than just netscape as a alternative to ie which will never come to linux. I have used lynx, amaya, and several other browsers and none come close to offering what the average user needs. Netscape has been disapointting (sp?) since post 3.x and is large and slow. I even think at this point with a few added features the browser in kfm could be better. December is a long way away in internet time and I am still stuck with a ok browser at best when using netscape. At this point i would even pay for opera if it were available for linux although i shudder at paying for what should be included for free in a distro. Bottom line is you may say code it yourself but i can't and won't but i and others still deserve a fast lightweight reliable browser to use on linux.
The reason it looks to everyone like it's not going anywhere is because they essentially started over. They had to take a crappy design and crappy code and fish what could be salvaged from it, then rewrite a major portion of it.
The reason it doesn't look like a successful open-source project is because it didn't start off as a functioning piece of software.
I predict that once it becomes stable enough to d/l, compile, run, there will be a massive influx of suggestions, patches, assistance and all sorts of code improvements from people who are willing to take a look at the 30 lines of code that affect the particular piece they don't like and fix/change it. There are *not* a lot of people who are willing to look at 30,000 lines of code and fix them up before it will compile just so they can then decide whether or not it does what they want it to do and if they can fix it up to make it so.
Once 5.0 is released, I'll bet that development pace will not only increase, but quickly surpass that of IE.
If they decide to make a 5.0 version and then pull the code, they will have lost the market entirely and handed over the keys to the Web to Micros~1.
Mozilla's Future Uncertain
Wednesday June 30th, 1999
Benj, Ben Marklein, Geoff Elliott and J.R. have some distressing news. Apparently Sun is considering changes to Mozilla's licensing model, because in the words of Alan Baratz of Javasoft, "I'm not sure Mozilla.org is working all that well."
Alan actually mentions the possibility of moving Mozilla to the Java community licensing model, as if it would be a better option. I think that they should seriously consider every other option first. And then reconsider them again.
UPDATE: Apparently AOL has nothing to do with the comments made by Javasoft's Alan Baratz.
Every article that quotes your Open Source Fuhrer ESR usually contains the following disclaimer:
"Eric S. Raymond, the author of The Cathedral and the Bazaar, was one of the major
influences behind Netscape deciding to distribute the source code for Communicator under the open-source model."
Time to rephrase that:
"Eric S. Raymond, the nitwit who excreted The Cathedral and the Bazaar, was one of the major causes for Netscape gambling away their majority market share and finally going belly up by letting a bunch of drooling monkeys mess with the source code for Communicator."
As someone who writes a lot of code and works on a lot of things that someone needs to implement for a major web client, making the source code to Mozilla available looked like a really good thing. I'd be more than happy to implement some very useful things if they'd take the code.
HOWEVER, when the NPL came out, my interest level went to zero. Mozilla is "Open Source." Mozilla is NOT, in my opinion, "Free Software." Either the BSD license or the GPL would have been fine, but the NPL and its "you have to give us everything you do, but we don't have to give anything back" attitude scared me. A lot.
I am not interested in doing other people's jobs for them. Especially companies like Netscape and AOL that have plenty of money (at the least, several orders of magnitude more money than I do). If I'm doing this stuff in my spare time and giving it away, then giving all these special extra licensing rights to some large rich companies does not sit well with me.
I know a lot of other people who looked at this issue and came to the same conclusion. If it were truly free software, we'd contribute code. Good code, too. But the NPL looked way too much like a one way sort of freedom to encourage us to contribute.
I think that the single most clever thing that the Mozilla.org guys could do right now is to make Mozilla really be GPL. If there are IP issues with other companies, get rid of the code and make the rest GPL.
My complaint about Bill Gates
I feel I must assert my freedom to comment on an important public issue that Bill Gates has thrust into the vortex of public comment. Let us note first of all that compared to these jealous vermin, every pimp is a man of honor. When we discuss, openly and candidly, a vision for a harmonious, multiracial society, we are not only threading our way through a maze of competing interests; we are weaving the very pattern of our social fabric. It makes perfect sense that he doesn't want me to fight to the end for our ideas and ideals. It is unclear whether this is because some of his reinterpretations of historic events raise important questions about future social interactions and their relationship to civil liberties, because he works from the false assumption that most people actually want nasty boeotians to progressively enlarge and increasingly centralize the means of oppression, exploitation, violence, and destruction, or a combination of the two. According to the laws of probability, what our nation needs is more respect for the law, not less.
What is often overlooked, however, is that Bill just keeps on saying, "I don't give a [expletive deleted] about you. I just want to encourage a deadly acceptance of intolerance." The only way I can possibly forgive him is if he tells the truth and makes restitution. The same poisonous spirit that infects frightful insipid jerks also pollutes Bill's thinking. Bill's co-conspirators are unified under a common goal. That goal is to let us know exactly what our attitudes should be towards various types of people and behavior. For those of you who don't know, to forestall Bill's oppressive agendas, it would be immensely helpful to have more people understand that Bill can't see beyond his own neurotic concerns. The truth hurts, doesn't it, Bill?
By the same token, poison is countered only by an antidote. No group has done so much to fortify a social correctness that restricts experience and defines success with narrow boundaries as his accomplices. Bill reminds me of the thief who cries "Stop, thief!" to distract attention from his thievery. His perceptions of a vast conspiracy lead him to inappropriate assessments of even the most innocent interactions with fork-tongued fault-finders.
Now, more than ever, we must see through the haze of propagandism. Bill must believe that if he doesn't treat people like yawping ragamuffins, he'll have led a meaningless life, to put it mildly. Sure, some of his litanies are valid, but that's not the point. Will his wicked cult followers lead to the destruction of the human race? Only time will tell. You are, I'm sure, well aware that opposing his clueless rantings actively and earnestly is the moral duty of every good human being. But did you know that juxtaposed to this is the idea that we should give him a taste of his own medicine?
I am not in any way placing the blame on Bill for insolent scientists who turn positions of leadership into positions of complacency. That notwithstanding, Bill is still culpable for plotting to transmogrify society's petty gripes and irrational fears into "issues" to be catered to. While these incidents may seem minor, it breaks my heart and fills my chest with agonizing pain when I see him make corporatism socially acceptable. Notice the stupid tendency of his memoranda.
Easy as it may seem to pronounce the truth and renounce the lies, it is far more difficult to drive off and disperse the contumelious saboteurs who let advanced weaponry fall into the hands of pompous braggarts. Just don't expect consistency from a man who is utterly and certainly two-faced. Bill is not above the law. This is not rhetoric. This is reality.
If truth, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder, then feelings of inferiority are characteristic of combative misfits. Every time he tries, Bill gets increasingly successful in his attempts to deploy enormous resources in a war of attrition against helpless citizens. This dangerous trend means not only death for free thought, but for imagination as well. I, for one, have the following to say to the assertion that it's okay for him to indulge his every whim and lust without regard for anyone else or for society as a whole: Baloney!
Until we criticize his assertions publically for their formalistic categories, their spurious claims of neutrality, and their blindness to the abuse of private power, he will continue to incite an atmosphere of violence and endangerment toward the good men, women, and children of this state, at least insofar as this essay is concerned. Our conception of parasitism still remains a good deal less clear than we would wish. And if that seems like a modest claim, I disagree. It's the most radical claim of all.
Why do we put up with Bill? Voyeurism is the last refuge of the nettlesome. Since their emergence on the stage of history, the worst sorts of sinful schemers there are have been a parasitic growth on the stem of true citizens. At this point, all I can do is repeat a line from my previous letter: "Bill is deeply involved emotionally in his attack on truth and reality". We have come full-circle.
We need to stand up for our rights. Then again, that notion has been popular for as long as teetotalism has existed. It would be more productive for Bill to take a more diplomatic and conciliatory approach, and that's one reason why I'm writing this letter. True, his death squads employ carefully-developed psychological techniques to pooh-pooh the reams of solid evidence pointing to the existence and operation of a grotty coterie of defeatism, but according to the dictionary, "Bill-ism" is "any of a set of arguments that create an intimidating, hostile, or demeaning environment". If there's a rule, and he keeps making exceptions to that rule, then what good is the rule? As stated earlier, he carries nothing but hatred and destruction in his heart. Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't it true that Bill is not interested in a true and honest improvement of social conditions, but rather in a way to scorn and abjure reason?
dont know who left the gate on the idiot farm (tm) open, but some seem to have escaped.
moderation rules:
1. anything that disrespects mozilla is automatically -1
2. anything that disrespects linux is automatically -1
3. anything that remotely advocates an alternative browser (lynx, say) is automatically -1.
grow up, kiddies.
Also, speaking as someone who haven't yet contributed code, but which will, I think you'll see a stead increase in external Mozilla developers. I'm technical director in the company I work for, and we are on the verge of hiring two people to work full time working on Mozilla. Mostly on issues that we need, but lots of that will be of interest to others as well, and of course all of it will be released publicly.
But these things take time. How many people contributed to Linux in it's first year? It's second?
It takes time for the project to mature enough, and it takes time for lots of people before they are familiar enough with the code to start submitting fixes (I've spent LOTS of time with the code regularly since the initial release, and only now I'm starting to get familiar enough with it).
No, Mr. frobozz (you stole my name!) I disagree.
It doesn't say anything about Open Source movement at all, but it speaks volumes about the commercial 'commitment' to open source. AOL/Netscape completely missed the point...they didn't understand at all how an open source project works. They expected miracles from day one, and only succeeded in creating animosity. Now that things are finally starting to happen, they want to pull the plug.
Worse, they are considering yanking the source. Now, I'm not sure if they can actually do this or not, but if they succeed, they will have eliminated themselves from the entire Linux/OSS marketplace in one fell swoop. The community won't support this kind of stupidity. I've been skeptical of Netscape for quite some time, and I've been watching their open source experiment with interest. I don't believe Netscape has had the corporate culture to tolerate such a paradigm shift for a long time, if ever. Netscape has -never- been open...they refused to play by the standards right from the start, and this wouldn't be the first time that Netscape has pulled the switcheroo with licensing agreements (anyone remember the big license change between the 1.0 betas and the 1.0 release of Navigator?).
And does ANYONE trust AOL? From day one on the internet AOL has defined the entire concept of cluelessness and mismanagement. There are a LOT of horror stories from former AOL members about how they were continually billed even after cancelling the service. AOL is a big monster that is swallowing whatever they can...anyone remember ANS.NET? GNN? Webcrawler? AOL doesn't care about quality. EVERYTHING they have touched has dropped in quality by orders of magnitude.
Even though it's not high-profile, there are a number of free web browsers out there in development: Konquerer/KFM, Mnemonic (yes, it is still alive), and I believe there's even a Gnome web browser in the works. BeOS comes with a surprisingly good and FAST web browser out of the box.
Anyway, that's my 0x02..
--An anonymous Frobozz.
"Fierce!"
That fact is, developing a valid and correct CSS browser is a very complicated feat that is not easily distributed amongst thousands of developers like Linux.
Expecting an army of OSS programmers to rescue Netscape was wishful thinking. Netscape was a poorly managed company and their development continues to be poorly managed. I mean, they *JUST* instituted milestones a few months ago. And they introduced and reintroduced several designs at the last minute (communicator, vs apprunner, vs XUL)
Slashdot users might have a hard time believing this but not all problems are horizontally scalable. (I say this because Beowulf rears its head way too much)
For instance, as mentioned, a team of chess players don't play better than a single one. A million OSS programmers are not neccessarily better than a team of 5 dedicated ones.
Linux can easily be decomposed into thousands of independent modules and utilities which can be maintained separately. But a rendering engine is a highly interdependent piece of code with a combinatorial explosion of use cases, where any change propagates throughout the entire system and requires reunderstanding how the flow works.
Thus, if an outside developer patches some code, understanding what the patch did may require a lot of work in and of itself. Just like understanding why a chess move was made by someone may be very difficult and affect your game plan well into the future.
Most Linux code isn't this complex and I would say that the most successful browser projects have been produced by highly cohesive small teams working together (ala Opera)
What does this mean? I believe the biggest contribution the OSS community can make to Mozilla is testing and feedback. I believe it is futile for them to get involved trying to develop the core display engine.
Oh, and before someone chimes and in and points to compilers like GCC as an example of complex software in the OSS community, keep in mind that compilers are taught as a standard course for CS students and there are well known textbooks on how to produce compilers (Dragon Book). On the other hand, rendering engines are not taught as part of any standard curriculum and there is little literature on the subject, so most people have to reinvent them.
When Mozilla does get released, I believe the OSS community will produce one thing more than anything else: Thousands of useless themes and graphic variations of the interface ala Desktop Themes, Winamp Skins, etc.
Conclusion: There are some problems that DON'T work very well with an army of people contributing to them, and in fact work better when a small closeknit team of competent people TUNE OUT everywhere, hole up in a garage, and pound it out. After its done, it can be released as OSS and let the legions of lemmings pound out bugs and contribute to featuritis.
The lack of huge well-produced office applications, games, and browsers from the OSS community, and the proliferation of small, simple, command line utilities and applets is a testament to the fact that OSS doesn't handle intrinsically complex (those architectures which cannot be decomposed) applications very well.
Shaver requested:
good, concrete suggestions on what would make you want to contribute are always welcome.
I'm not likely to even attempt to become a core Netscape/Mozilla/Gecko developer, since I've got too many other things on my plate. However, I (and I assume there are many many others like me) would be eager to contribute little things here and there, assuming certain things are the case.
First, it would need to be at the point where I can use the program regularly. As the milestones go by, this is becoming true for more and more people. This also explains why the number of contributors is increasing. So far, so good.
Second, the program would have to be imperfect in my eyes. Any contributions I (and people like me) are likely to make are the itch scratching type. Since perfection is essentially impossible in a large project, that one should be easy to cover.
Third, the code would have to be fairly easy to grok. If I have to spend a week narrowing down the location of the feature I want to tweak to be spread amongst twenty files of spaghetti code, I'm going to do something else instead. I have not looked closely at the Mozilla code, but if, as you say, a significant portion of bug reports come with patches, this is not likely to be a problem.
Lastly, there has to be an easy way for me to get contributions to the project. As long as bugzilla stays up and used, that's covered quite well.
So basically, it looks like the Mozilla project is doing all the right stuff from my viewpoint. It's just a matter of time, time to get it closer to feature complete, and time spent using Mozilla by busy but well-wishing programmers like me. I think you will see the number of auxilliary developers grow very quickly over the rest of the year, and even faster next year.
As for getting more core developers, someone else would have to answer that.
----
Open mind, insert foot.
Beware, the story above is MAJOR FUD!
Anyone even remotely involved in the Mozilla project knows that what is claimed above is completly untrue.
Everyone is quick to dismiss Mozilla as a failure because of the lack of outside involvement and time it's taken, but that is so so untrue. The reasons for this are simple and have nothing to do with the viability of the project, in fact, they prove how viable of a project it is!
Mozilla has taken so long because less than a year ago they basically decided to throw everything away and START OVER, yes, that's right, start pretty much from scratch. This means completly redesigning the entire architecture and reimplimenting it according to those new designs. The fact that they have a usable browser that is quickly approaching completion in less than a year is nearly HEROIC!
The reason for the dearth of outside involvement is fairly simple to explain... it's complex, it's a rapidly moving target, and everyone who can help others jump in are too busy to do so. Very very few people could just download the source for this beast and be able to start hacking it, and even if they could, it's likely to change in a week or two.
Mozilla is an amazing and incredibly successful project. The tools available at mozilla.org and the modularity of the design are simply generations above and beyond any other open project ever attempted. In time everyone will start to see this, go check it out now and start getting involved now before the wave!
As has been said by many others here, good portable software takes time. OSS helped the Mozilla team decide to do the right thing--they rebuilt the software on a solid foundation.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
fluff
Bill - aka taniwha
--
Leave others their otherness. -- Aratak
A great many tasks can be done by combining (relatively) small, simple programs; Indeed, Mozilla need not be as complex as it is. If Mozilla used protocol and parsing libraries available elsewhere (not that I'm advocating that it switch now) rather than including them in its main source tree, it would be that much easier to understand. If it decided on ONE cross-platform widget set made by someone else (not part of the source tree) and stayed there rather than trying to do its own front-end, it would be that much simpler. If it called 3rd-party mail and news software rather than trying to be everything to everyone, it would be that much simpler.
Indeed, the core Mozilla code could consist of little more than a rendering engine with an interface and hooks going out to plugins providing Java, image decoding and whatever other functionality is desired. This would be a Good Thing, lending itself to the kind of parallelization you discuss (look at The Gimp).
Sadly, Mozilla hasn't taken this route.
I don't know about you, but if I can't use Mozilla, I'll not be improving it; Lots of other people have said the same.
This provides justification for ESR's observation that an open source program should be released in a functioning state if it is to be well-received. Do you seriously think that had I not read CAtB I'd be hacking on Mozilla right now?
(Note that I'm not the original poster... indeed, disagree with him quite strongly about cross-platform support being a turnoff).
It's not about the codebase being small -- it's about the design being well-documented and easily understandable and extendable. Some time ago I wrote a w840 driver for the linux kernel (Donald Becker has since written his own, which actually works). I had absolutely no trouble doing so because, as large as the kernel may have been, it was simple to pick out the right part of the codebase, understand the relevant functions and interfaces, and plug in my file.
GTK is another example of a fairly complex program with readable, simple-to-modify code (I've never had cause to mess with it, but have poked around a bit while debugging a GTK-using application). The GIMP, with its plugin architecture, is even better -- almost all of the functions could be debugged or extended without touching anything but the code in its own directory which extended the remainder of the program in a well-defined way. At worst, I'd have to make my own plugin... hardly a difficult task.
By contrast, I poked around Mozilla a bit shortly after its release trying to add the ability to only show images coming from the same server as the html file. After spending a few hours trying to make out the project's design, I gave up (vowing to return later, after the project was nearer completion... since, however, I've picked up new projects of my own).
Don't consider this a complaint as much as an explanation. All the large projects I've done design on (all 1 of them) have been very easily divided into small, simple segments which could be isolated from each other; The failure of Mozilla to be so divided (something which could well have been unavoidable -- I'm not trying to disparage anyone's work) is what accounts for my failure to participate and perhaps that of others.
Extending Mozilla is all well and good (certainly useful), but it doesn't go far enough. What can be extended through the new plugin API? (Yes, I know how to add new hooks to it now... but that involves understanding the code's design; I just want a list of the hooks presently available). If a clearly defined list exists, put it up somewhere in plain view.
As an example... where's the layout engine documentation? "Layout and Layers" under the "technical documentation" page is mighty sparse. If this could be improved to at least the quality of the Imagelib docs, life would be much better.
To end the rambling and get back to my point... It's not about overall size, but division and documentation. Get these right the first time, and far more people will participate.
Were GTK the chosen widget set (yes, its non-Unix ports would need a bit of work), all Mozilla users (not just the Unix ones) would benefit when I worked on it. Same for libxml and other libraries used widely outside the Mozilla project. If Mozilla has its own PNG decoder, that does me little good when I use a different one, and it does Mozilla little good when I include it.
Am I being a bit more clear about what I mean here?
...in case you've checked the Preferences menu.
Rereading my original post, I realize I misspoke myself. My other followups should clarify what I meant to say.
This is, however, less a matter of having done no research than foot-in-mouth disease.
(Btw... Java-as-a-plugin is done through a Java-specific interface, no? It looked that way last time I poked at it... ah, well).
Thanks for the education.
I still have some reservations regarding the quality of documentation, but it's now reduced to that.
Another problem with the released code was that they had to strip out a lot of stuff. They had to strip out all security code because of export law. And, they had to strip out anything that was the result of an NDA. I don't know how much code was stripped out, but I wouldn't be surprised if they had to strip lines of code from all over, instead of just removing modules.
Posted by The Mongolian Barbecue:
If MS wins and IE takes over the browser market, we are in big trouble. We have seen how MS can use their OS and Office monopoly to control the industry. But until now, they have never had a real monopoly on part of the www.
But if they get IE to hold most of the market, they can "embrace and extend" apache, and by extension linux, out of the market. Now granted, the DOJ would probably rip them a new one, or try, if they did this, but in the meantime...
The release notes usually list new things in a given milestone that you should check, but there's lots of simple stuff too: browse your favourite sites, tell us if (ok, when =) ) it crashes. Try to send/read mail, submit forms, resize quickly while crossing your toes and winking, etc. (The provided binaries should bloody well have debug information; if they don't, we have done a bad thing and you should rub my nose in it).
And when you find a bug -- or think you've found a bug -- check out the bug writing guidelines for more information on how to report a good bug.
To report a bug in the bug writing guidelines, mail the authors listed at the top of the page. =)
Actually, when Netscape made a non-working product Open Source, they weren't surprised that nobody wanted to fix it. Netscape didn't want to fix it either, which is why they told their engineers to work on fresh code. (And if you think that was a mistake, you can always pull the MozillaClassic code and work on it. Surprisingly, few do!)
If you'd taken the time to actually read the article, Bruce, you'd see that neither Netscape nor AOL nor Mozilla have said anything about a change in development model. Seems a bit premature to be deconstructing our demise, doesn't it? You could at least wait until it happens. (Maybe you were fooled by the original headline of the article, which had ``AOL mulls'' rather than ``Sun mulls''. Still, you should read for content.)
Why do we have to go through this ``Mozilla is dead'' dance every two weeks when someone new wants their name in the press? Can't they pick on gmake or XFree86 for a change? =)
(Sorry if I seem a bit short; it's been a long enough week without this.)
Posted by The Devout Capitalist:
There are over a hundred comments about open source. Very few talk about the business issues from Alan Baratz's perception. I've heard Alan speak several times, in public and in private, about Netscape and Java before the Sun-Netscape Alliance. The concern is simple:
Enterprises must be able to deploy current Java 2 applets.
Only Java applets written to support the ancient 1.0.2 version can be reliably deployed on the Internet; and this hurts the Java cause. So far, Sun's attempts to aid its screaming customers have included the HotJava Browser, the Java Plug In, the Personal Application Browser, the compliance lawsuit with Microsoft, collaboration attempts, and prayers. Now with the alliance, Alan sees a chance to make a world class browser that will power the next wave of the Java movement, and he is willing to pay for it. As Mozilla hasn't provided the browser, the field is open to new approaches. I expect Alan would pay $75 million to fix this problem this calendar year.
Please remember that this discussion is about money.
Mozilla's cross-platform story is one of the strongest parts of our charter, right up there with commitment to open source and a love of sugar. You'll have a hard time finding anyone to apologize for it. (And it does go beyond Unix, Windows and Mac: BeOS, OS/2 and QNX are well-represented.)
The vast majority of the Mozilla code is cross-platform, with per-platform differences abstracted under NSPR, widget and gfx code. What were you trying to work on that was in platform-specific code?
If you have a patch that you want to put in, and you don't have the ability to test it on other platforms, please send it along. File a bug describing what you're fixing, and attach the patch to the bug. Look in the owners list and send your patch to the owners of the affected module(s). If you do that and aren't happy with the results, please mail me.
Lots of people manage to work successfully without direct access to the other platforms; I don't have Windows installed here either, and I do just fine. We can find you ``platform buddies'' to help you check your code on other platforms, if need be.
What open source projects do you contribute to? Which ones have a small enough codebase and narrow enough platform focus to suit you?
I keep hearing in articles and here on slashdot that Mozilla doesn't have any external developers, and I'm starting to wonder where it comes from. There are 53 developers outside netscape.com with direct checkin privileges to the CVS tree as of last Tuesday. I sure hope they -- and people like Chris Nelson and L. David Baron and Jeremy Lea and Bert Drehuis[*] who don't have CVS access but do contribute in very real ways via patches and quality bug reports and advice -- don't take offense at this denigration of their efforts. (Even Mr. Baratz's own developers are working on Mozilla -- the Blackwood team are working on OJI and XPCOMJava connection technology.)
[*] And others whose names elude me, in my slightly adrenalized state. Apologies to the dozens I've forgotten, I really do love you all.
In addition to these major players, more than two thousand (2337 as of right now) bugs have been reported by people not at Netscape and subsequently resolved. (Many of those bug reports have patches attached by the reporter or other ``external'' contributors, but I can't pull those stats up right now.)
How many ``external developers'' is enough? If Netscape suddenly fired 2/3 of their Mozilla developers -- taking them down to about 35 -- would Mozilla all of the sudden be a greater success? (``But Ironhead, most of the developers work for Netscape!'') Literally every week, more developers apply for CVS access and get accounts to check into the tree -- we've more than doubled in the last few months. I can't speak for Netscape/AOL's HR policy, but if they start hiring at that rate I'll be really surprised.
What needs to happen to get more people involved? Answers like ``I feel like Netscape's pawn'' and ``the code is so big, it makes me afraid'' don't help me -- I'm not going to get rid of Netscape's developers, and I'm not going to throw out code -- but good, concrete suggestions on what would make you want to contribute are always welcome.
As a minor point of fact, nobody at Netscape, AOL or Mozilla has said anything about making Mozilla's development less open, and I can honestly tell you that this press release is the first thing I've heard about anything of that nature. It wouldn't surprise me a lot to discover that Mr. Baratz was talking out of an orifice that wasn't his mouth. (His left ear, of course.)
You should, of course, feel free to armchair-psychoanalyze me to your heart's content, and to assume that the ~4,000 words I wrote about my reasons for leaving Netscape and AOL aren't true, or aren't complete, or whatever. But think about it: I quit. I have nothing to hide, and no reason to tell you anything other than the truth.
In my estimation (and this is of course something on which reasonable people can reasonably disagree) the project was going nowhere. But more importantly, it was no longer any fun. Both because the project itself was moving at a snail's pace, and because Netscape is a lousy place to work now.
After having worked on Mozilla for just over five years, the last year and a half of which was at mozilla.org, I quit. Does that make me a ``quitter''? Sure. But how many of you have contributed even 1% of that amount of time or effort to the project? That makes you something quite a bit less than a quitter, doesn't it? Like... irrelevant.
(And for that matter, how many of you have worked on the same project for five years, or even at the same company? That's pretty rare in this industry too, you know.)
There is nothing in my resignation letters that is factually inaccurate, and those of you who imply otherwise don't know what you're talking about. (Have you even read them?) It may be that the Mozilla project is going to succeed despite all of its very real problems, and really, nothing would make me happier (because I don't want to end up using MSIE either.) I hope it's so. But I decided that if it was going to happen, it was going to have to happen without me, because I was done.
Why do you ankle-biters have such a problem with people making their own decisions about their own lives? I (and others) gave you much and owe you nothing. Deal with it.
So what, I should have said ``everything is going just great, I'm leaving for personal reasons unrelated to the project''? That would have been a lie. And frankly, I think it would have been unfair to the people still working on the project, too, who were in need of a wake-up call. Keep in mind that I didn't say ``the project is dead, you should all go home.'' I said ``the project is broken in these N different ways, for these reasons. You should fix them, but I'm not going to. Good luck.''
Then get out there and make them interview you! I did it, and you can too. It's not that hard.
I'm involved in the effort to provide MathML support in Mozilla. This involves a deep an meaningful interaction with the Mozilla Layout Engine. I've been hacking and poking at the layout engine for a month or so now(I don't have much spare time) and it's really not that tough. I managed to figure out the basic interaction of content v's frames in a few hours...a few questions to the layout newgroup sorted a couple of misconceptions I had in no time.
;).
It's a big bit of OO software but nothing that should scare any moderately experienced programmer. The average Perl hacking slashdotter will have trouble though...but that is the same regardless of the project.
I have to say that the Netscape guys have been incredibly helpful... Guy's like Eric Krock(Navigator head honcho) and Rick Gessner (layout god) have bent over backwards to help out an unblock problem areas...even for my own minor project. Real pros.
I suspect that the reason that there *appears* to be little 3rd part involvement is because of the size of the Netscape effort. They have 100 guys working on the project full time... it's tough for part time people to show up as having contributed as much.... that's not to say that non-Netscape people aren't providing critical parts of the system (James Clark and Davin Baron take a bow please
I guess for Sun, Mozilla development "not going very well" means that it's not going ahead under their dodgy "community" licence scheme and being manipulable by their upper management who want more people to massage their over inflated egos.
In terms of an Open Source project Mozilla is working very well...lots of contriubtion by non-Netscape people(growing by the day) and a workable bit of software.
In terms of a Netscape project Mozilla is working very well. Stong product coming together mostly on schedule, strong standards complicance, light years ahead of the "competition" in every respect, etc, etc.
Besides it's been a week or two since a Sun/AOL story did the rounds...they need to give their PR people something to do.
I'm confident about mozilla; the milestones have been going by at a nice clip. I'm impressed by what I see, and know that I'll be using it soon. And, yes, the increased feedback from use will make a lot of difference.
The "cue the foo posts in 3, 2, 1..." posts will commence with no subsequent foo posts in 3, 2, 1...
Of course I don't need your permission to psychoanalyze you, but I thank you for it anyway. I'm intrigued that you assume that I think your letter was not truthful. Rather, I assume that you are an honest individual. My hypothesis was that your reasons were not complete. That's a different matter. Comments?
The "cue the foo posts in 3, 2, 1..." posts will commence with no subsequent foo posts in 3, 2, 1...
I think it shows that just making a project open source doesn't guarantee success. Linux is a success because it has attracted talented people, and it's rewarding enough to them that they stick around. I suspect that whatever Linus is working on at Transmeta will be a success as well, despite the fact that it's not open source.
No process or development method can replace real skill and talent.
TedC
According to what I've read before... moderators ARE "us". As users post messages that are recognized as being usefull, they gain moderator status. They then blow their moderator points on whatever they see fit and fall back into the nameless masses that are the unpriviliged users. They then have a chance to be called to service again as their posts receive attention.
Pretty close to my understanding, though take out the "useful" part. I've been a moderator once, and don't think I've ever been scored up for a post. The ingredients for moderatorship are regular reading, not a new user, don't post lots of scored-down stuff, and "willing to moderate" in the user preferences.
Here's the official explanation.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers. -- Pablo Picasso
Let's hope Andover.net doesn't consider dropping slashdot.org after a year or even worse "undoing" some of its current traits.
The original delay is _not_ due to mozilla.org being run badly, but two other factors:
1) The original decission to base the free 5.0 release on the old code.
2) Netscape's decision to release a (non-free) 4.5 based on the old code.
Since they changed to the new code base the code has been progressing smoothly, with milestones being meet within a week.
Also, while one cannot expect significant outside contributions before one has working code to show, they have already received contributions such as ports to "minor" platforms and translations to tons of languages, as well as a continues stream og bug reports and fixes, especially for partability.
However, the major affect at this point of going open source, is on the quality of the design. Since they went Open Source they have made all the right technical decissions. Close adherence to standards, no more proprietary Netscape extensions, clear and documented API's between components, use of standard and open tools wherever possible. Netscape 4.x is something a good engineer would be ashamed of, 5.0 will be something he can be proud of. I'm not sure how much of this is due to outside input, and how much is simply due to the process being open for everybody to see.
It seems to me that the Sun/Java guy is only attacking Mozilla because it works so well compared to the failed attempt to sell their own Java development as being some bastardization of open. The dangerous thing is that the AOL suits may not be able to see that the Mozilla project is working very well _now_, and buy into his lies.
JWZ is a great hacker and has an intriguing personality, but he is not a good designer, nor a good project leader.
People worship him because of his personality and because of his programming skills, but everything he says shouldn't be taken as gospel.
Mozilla.org has, as far as I can see, been running better and more smoothly since he left, even if (or maybe because of) it no longer is personified by a strong and very visible personality.
These cries about Mozilla's failing are really only disgusting; the development model works. As others said too, their progress is perceived slowly, but only because it's not an evolutionary progress from the last Netscape code base, but instead the "redo everything correctly" way; opening up to the public might not be fully successful, but I think it improved the developer's communication enormously. Just think of the development tools they had published, tinderbox, bonsai, bugzilla are still mightily useful and they really help the developers work.
Now contrast this with the "Community" licensing, and development model for Jini/Java. Do they help communication? No, they just help making sure you know their rules. It's still basically a large cathedral, surrounded by small shops connected to the cathedral, and rarely communicating with eachother. Sounds perfect for the control freak, but it's the kind of development that's being shown to not scale with other commercial software. If you are not free to restructure the communication, and you can't take the code for your purposes (i.e. fairly, abiding to share it), it won't scale.
And yes, Mozilla is really needed as a real, hardcore, full-featured, top-notch browser, fully opened up to cope with the future. Thinking about a future where core technologies are controlled, and licensed (financially) from central organizations controlling the given stuff makes me vomit. And that's just because Baratz and a few thinks it will pay them better? The conspiracy theorist in me says when "they" get this done, a few months later they become managers/presidents at another Big Company to further work on their own wealth. There's nothing more bitter than news like that, rumours about closing a good, important, open project. Make it not happen, please.
"Ten years from now, they could do it in a few seconds." -- The Racketeer of the Hellfire Club, 1993, Phrack 42
How can MSIE "win" on the Linux, FreeBSD, OS/2, BeOS, or the other dozen or so platforms that it doesn't even EXIST on?
Mozilla created a code base which is portable, and while MSIE may well end up winning in the Windows world (big surprise there given the fact that it's bundled a/o required with almost all of MS's other products), there are lots of people on whom it will make very little impression.
--
-Rich (OS/2, Linux, BeOS, Mac, NT, Solaris, FreeBSD, and OS2200 user in Bloomington MN)
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
I believe this falls under the planned category:
d oc/www/index.html
http://www.mnemonic.org/mnemonic/documentation/
narbey
-- "The evil stops here" -Petr
Then again, I had access to a Solaris machine.
Still, saying "it didn't even compile" is misleading.
--
Marc A. Lepage
Software Developer
"Mozilla is an amazing and incredibly successful project."
If your soo sure, how do you explain this
I am all for open source, but when someone like AOL want's to exploite it for thier own profit or dump it, which would you really rather they did?
Also, slightly off topic, but I worry that Open Source development will slow down drastically if there is a lot of Open Source projects. Actually, I suspect the more there are the better, for two reasons: First, because more projects will draw in more people (and get them indoctrinated/educated). Second, because open source projects, by definition, can share code between themselves. For example, I worked briefly on mozilla last year, and while my code never made it in (it was for Windows FE toolbar stuff that got completely chucked), I learned a lot of stuff that I've been able to apply in other net projects. The more projects there are, and the more code sharing, then the more eyeballs there will be on the internal libraries and the OS itelf, which means better performance, fewer bugs, more features... :-)
This has no bearing on the ability of the free
software community to develop large applications.
If Mozilla had been free from the start, it would
be in much better shape, most likely. As it is,
Mozilla was a closed application that had been
developed in-house for years, and probably not
always with the intention of releasing the source.
Postfix would be a more reasonable example (though
the MTA world is decidedly simpler than the
web browser world and it's not an end user app).
--
Kevin Doherty
kdoherty+slashdot@jurai.net
Kevin Doherty
kdoherty+slashdot@jurai.net
last I read about the new licencing scheme is that mozilla is co-licenced under the GPL.
--
-- Knowledge shared is power lost. -- Aleister Crowley
The MS trial is about over. I wonder if this news story has been designed to influence just what kind of punishment that MS gets. I wouldn't worry about the project REALLY getting dropped... I just thing they wanted to give the judge something to think about.
--
-- Knowledge shared is power lost. -- Aleister Crowley
Quite frankly, I don't understand why Jwz has to explain anything to anyone. It was his decision, and if he wanted to buy a blind camel, it's his decision, and nothing can stop him. And he shouldn't have to explain his morals and every move towards doing it.
I'm glad to see someone from Netscape speaking up in this. There's a lot of bad words flying around in spite of the great job everyone involved is doing. Mozilla is a fantastic piece of software. The milestone releases are fairly stable, even if a lot of the features are disabled. Even daily CVS pulls tend to work, although anyone thinking they want to try should be warned that at least the Linux build has system requirements (that I never did track down) that aren't picked up by the configure script. I've had good luck with clean RedHat 5.2 installs with the most recent Gnome.
:)
Mozilla is an extremely complicated piece of software, but not unmanageably so. My guess is most of the people who say its too complicated to jump into haven't been trained in development on such a large scale. (Trained in that its really not something so easily picked up on the fly... good team programming skills tend to be taught IMHO)
But there is a LOT that people who can't jump in and contribute patches can do. Any bonehead can easily pull a tree and build it, at least under Unix. Follow the directions on the site, but in a nutshell this is all it takes, once you're logged into the cvs server:
cvs -z3 checkout mozilla/client.mk
cd mozilla
gmake -f client.mk
Not too hard huh? The new configure/client.mk stuff they've got in there handles keeping the tree in sync (most of the time), and handling the configure and build process.
Do that. Run it. If it craps out, fire up gdb, so a stack dump and figure out where it crapped out. You might not be able to figure out exactly why, but a stack dump and a description of what you're doing goes a long way towards having other people know what happened. Bugzilla is a nice system -- its very easy to submit bugs and search for current ones. If you can't find the one you posted, then stick it there. E-mail a patch if you think you know what was wrong. No one is gonna yell at you if its not.
Personally, I've done a lot of builds, spent a lot of time tracking down wierd dependancies on the four Linux systems I've had bad luck building it on. I'd like to think some of that work has helped, I've noticed the issues slowly being fixed, so I think they have. Just testing it is a big help by anyone.
I've thought about jumping in and helping, but it IS complex. And with the necko code being switched in, and some of the other big branches that have been dumped into the tree lately, I can't figure out which end is up right now...
If you haven't seen Mozilla yet, its worth the download of one of the milestone builds. The page rendering is SO much better than any other browser I've seen. It just looks fantastic, and is FAST even with all the debugging code in there.
I hope AOL doesn't make a real mistake and end this when its making such progress!
Maybe it would be good when AOL stops Mozilla. Because that would certainly mean that a lot of Linux/Unix-based volunteers would start developing their own Mozilla, based on the current sources, and give up all the Windows and Mac stuff. Then I would seriously consider to contribute. But I will never ever work with the Win32 API. I tried it once, and it so unbelievable ugly... under no circumstances.
As I've learned in my years of programming[egads, did I say that? :-) ], sometimes the time and effort involved in deciphering existing code is better spent rewriting the code from scratch.
I suspect that if a group got together and started to hack out a "truly" open-source browser, where the public peer review starts at the beginning instead of at version 4.x, that something useable would result in fairly short time.
If you sum up all those very specialized lists, that gives a rather good figure (and things often "gets done" outside of newsgroups and mailing lists anyway, whereas public forums are where wishes belongs best). So ?
I am very disappointed with what has come out of the Mozilla project, as no doubt many people are. I've download milestone 7 for the Mac, and frankly I don't know what the h*ll they're doing over there at Mozilla.org. The revamped interface is *again* stupid, but I guess they have to keep up with the strange tradition of completely changing the way Netscape's browser looks at every major release.
Netscape, with intelligence, could have released version 4.9, addressing long-standing and requested issues such as the ability to resume downloads and improved stability, and *then* screwed everything up. It is always possible to continue work on a major revamp while continuing to spruce up the older major release with minor updates. This keeps customers "into" Netscape. Instead, we've had absolute nothing come out of Netscape in eons, and that means the only way to get a decent browser is to use IE. Add to this the fact that, oddly enough, IE is probably one of the nicest apps ever built by Microsoft - uncharacteristically intelligent, simple, fast and full-featured without too much bulk (and then there's the price). Netscape might have had a chance had IE turned out to be a piece of garbage like Windows itself, or MS Office. Instead, Netscape's browser is the one that's overly-complex, and rapidly falling behind.
My 2 cents.
"Microsoft killed my company, I hold a personal grudge. I don't use Microsoft products and neither should you."-JWZ
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
The source of this story isn't connected with AOL or Netscape at all. Like many others, I got taken in by this story, posted a knee-jerk reaction, and made a bit of an ass of myself as a result. Sorry Mozilla and Netscape.
Ignore the story, it's from someone at Sun who I'm told is more than a bit of a turkey, isn't connected with decision-making at AOL and Netscape, and spoke out of place. Hopefully someone at Sun will have a quiet talk with him.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Netscape can stop making contributions of Open Source code, but they can not take back what they've already contributed. Open Source developers will continue to use that, and will place their contributions under the MPL, preventing Netscape from reselling them under another license. The result will be an Open Source browser that competes with Netscape's own product.
Thanks
Bruce Perens
Bruce Perens.
It was really Netscape really that opened my eyes for Open Source and not Linux. Before I just thought Linux was a good OS, but couldn't really compete with Microsoft. Then shortly after the Netscape announcement Linux started to conquer the media and world. Linux would have done it anyway but Mozilla did speed up things a lot.
I still think that Mozilla could be a success if they just managed to release the product. Then a community outside the Netscape employees could be built. In the beginning, development would of course rapidly drop but slowly it would start up again, hopefully as a part of both GNOME and KDE. But the browser must be released first!
(If I had only some influence, I would tell them to drop the news and mail client and the Composer)
I must say that I also is disappointed with both the KDE and GNOME communities. They should have embraced Mozilla early. I mean, no one can honestly say that the browsing capabilities of KDE is good?
But I also blame Mozilla.org (and jwz for being such a quitter). I helped out in the beginning, but felt to be out in the cold with their great code drop of the old layout engine. I know that they finally decided to pay for old sins, but how do they think developers will react to their constant incompatible changes?
Gee I thought IE sucked...maybe it's because IE is ugly and it has a bug which causes it to neglect to display graphics on my WinNT box. So I downloaded Netscape and it's better looking, easier to use and about the same speed.
In my heart I feel that you have no idea what you're talking about. However logically I know that this all comes down to personal preferance and luck - you should try to keep those straight.
that sounds very cool... i don't usually use cvs - i tend to get tarballs... but to be able to have the tree of code all branched out and color coordinated and to be able to graphically zoom from a tree branch directory/file view to a line of code view would be cool... are you sure similar things dont already exist?
--
Marques Johansson
displague@linuxfan.com
Marques Johansson
Damn!!! you folks biting today? maybe it is in the stars that everyone is pissed or has had a bad day - or maybe netscape / mozilla is a touchy subject....Can't we all just get along?
Personally I find that mozilla is doing great for what it is - even for what it is not yet... it is aimed at the right direction and is definetly growing in leaps and bounds..
several months ago i tryed mozilla and it would not compile... a bit later i tryed it and it was so basic as to be useless...
recently (m6) it is fast to startup, has many features, and is just as flashy as ns4.5 or ie5... the only flaws that i currently see are part of any growing program and i am sure that they will be banged out so that by this time next year mozilla will be the unquestioned leader of linux desktop web browsers...
(kde/gnome browsers are still weak - staroffice is kinda cool but closed, amaya is SLOW to render.. emacs, eh? lynx rox... telnet hostname 80 seems to work well)
--
Marques Johansson
displague@linuxfan.com
Marques Johansson
Uhh, what does the Internet have to do with OSS?
There are companies making money with Open Source and it hasn't killed Linux.
If you're gonna say something, then have some sort of backing behind it.
I'd say that it's premature to be writing off Mozilla at this point. They're still making noticable progress, and I've been keeping a relatively close eye on the project; a lot of the developers are still Netscape engineers, but there have been and continue to be some very important contributions by outsiders. Moreover, even with the revised milestones, we're still looking good for December.
The key here is to get a more or less stable, usable product out. Most causual hackers are going to want something that they can add on to incrementally, and having to engage in massive debugging gets in the way of that. I think that's one of the things that's turned off a lot of potential developers.
Unfortunately, because of the size of the product, it's not really that easy to pick a subset of the functionality, clean that up and release it. Given the product, I'm really not sure that they have much choice but to try and make it spring from the head of Zeus fully formed.
One of the major delaying factors, too, was that the realization that the thing needed more or less rewriting from scratch came so late in the game. It wasn't that long ago that they were still trying to kluge around the Mozilla Classic tree.
In fact, I think the existing codebase is going to be an issue in a lot of cases where a propreitary package is open-sourced.
With some notable exceptions (i.e. massive, mission-critical efforts like Oracle or IBM's database products), closed-source software as a whole tends to be extremely poorly engineered in comparison to most of the open-sourced software I've seen, no matter whether it's written by Mentor Graphics or Netscape or Microsoft or some 14-year-old kid writing shareware. These monolithic kluges are not only badly engineered, they make it extremely difficult for "casual developers" to get involved if the source is ever opened. Open Source development thrives on lightweight, modular designs.
So, more often than not, the new core developers end up with the old codebase dangling from their collective neck like a bloody albatross. It's happened to the Mozilla people, and it's happened to me...
Enter MegaZeux, a considerably more advanced clone of Epic Megagames' first product, ZZT. The original author abandoned it about '95 or '96, and being somewhat of a fan of the software, I campeigned for it to be released under the GPL. I finally got my wish.
I and a handfull of other people spent the next eight months (or perhaps even a little longer than that) trying to coerce the old DOS codebase into something cleaner and more portable (even for DOS; it was beginning to suffer majorly from realmode limitations, and we wanted a 32-bit protected mode port). The code still gives me nightmares. I finally gave up on it late this April.
So, now I'm rewriting the thing from scratch. (I suppose I should point out that the release of the original source wasn't a total waste, as it's not only been an invaluable reference for me, some of the other members of the development team have been adding minor features to the original codebase, which still builds only in Turbo C++)
I guess what I'm trying to say is that it's probably unrealistic to expect newly released proprietary source to be useful for anything beyond reference and scaffolding.
If the codebase actually proves usable, that's great, but I don't think we should launch into these things with the expectation that we won't have to rewrite it all anyway. I think that expectation has been the cause of much of the dissillusionment surrounding Mozilla.
[ n.b. Mozilla has other problems too, ranging from poor management to funky licencing; I just don't think they're as major as most people seem to think ]
that's my $0.02.
P.S. If anyone reading this is interested in the sort of retro-gaming stuff like MegaZeux for Linux (the primary target platform of my rewrite), drop me a line after appropriately de-spamming my email. Or drop by http://www.zeux.org/mzx/ if you're just idly curious about the whole thing.
---
DNA just wants to be free...
just like the rest of windows...prob is, windows doesn't claim to be pre-beta. And as long as IE isn't for linux or BeOS who cares
---
If you don't have a job how did you get the $99 for Beos and your internet account? Ahh.. parents...
Stan "Myconid" Brinkerhoff
SB.
While it was really nice of Netscape to release the source of Navigator, I really don't know why they expected thousands of hackers to start working for them for free.
If they had released software that actually compiled, they might have more to show for it. Many of the improvements people wanted to add required significant restructuring of the code base. How could they expect people to contribute freely when the results wouldn't even be usable?
I saw the source release as a publicity-seeking and cost-cutting move on the part of Netscape.
Since I remember times on the Net before Netscape, I blame them for everything: non-standard browsers, an over-abundance of low-quality porn, ignorant and ill-mannered newbies. The commercialization of the internet was the worst thing to happen to it.
> The best thing for Sun/AOL/Netscape
> to do is throw more in-house developers at it.
Bzzt. Throw "Mythical Man Month" in your nearest web search engine.
Netscape Navigator. is strong on everything besides Windows 98 and Windows NT 4.0, for the reason -- it just works better on other platforms. Microsoft Internet Explorer for the Mac is junk, it has lots of features, but it is unstable and dog slow. (Unlike Outlook Express for Macintosh which is fast and nice). I have heard of similar problems with Sparc.
However Netscape Navigator runs pretty good on most platforms (the gui is a bit sluggish on lesstif-based systems, but still), it's the best browser out there. Heck, I know some Windows users who sware that Netscape Navigator is great.
On Mac-centric websites often see a ratio 8:2 or 9:1 Netscape Navigator vs Internet Explorer. Basically that means that MSIE hasn't made a real splash on the Mac platform (at least for technical Mac users). And yes, MS has tried doing bunding shit with Mac OS 8.x so you get MSIE installed with Mac OS 8.x (surpise, surpise). At least the icon on the Mac OS desktop is deleteable (or switchable to Netscape Navigator).
Netscape Navigator is a well trusted browser for the various flavors of *nix. I have seen Netscape Communicator on these various *nixes for years, such as Solaris, HP/UNIX, Linux, LinuxPPC and a bunch of other werider ones. It's pretty hard to find a platform without Netscape Navigator support (except for small strange ones like BeOS and Amiga OS). Sorry if I insulted you guys, but those OS's lack many of the things found on tradional OS's such as X.
Looking at the time stamps, you've allowed the moderators twelve whole minutes to react. Don't you think you should wait a little longer?
Somebody'll get to it. Don't worry.
Do they expect something that is fast, not bloated, and funtional to appear out of the ether?
I know that there hasn't been much community support, but I would like to compare the contributions to the Mozilla project to something else, like maybe the KOffice apps or something.
I hope that Sun/Netscape/AOL will reconsider this -- it seems like they are ready to cancel the project just as it is gaining momentum and direction.
What is your point? If any.
Help fight continental drift.
Release EARLY. Release Often. Release something that works, so that lots of LITTLE changes can happen.
Unfortunately your first and third wishes were mutually exclusive in the case of Mozilla. They chose "early".
And as for release often: you can download not only the milestones but nightly builds, and for the source code, how much more often can you get than CVS?
I miss Meept.
Most people won't jump into a project unless they can contribute. That only happens either during the specualtion and design stage, or after a stable product has been released. In between, the fun design work has been done, and the source is changing too fast for casual helpers.
I myself have several ideas for Mozilla (one on the software bazaar is to stop animated gifs and blink tags). But there's no way I am going to try and learn a moving target for such small projects. When a release version is ready, and development slows down to a more "normal" pace, then I will try to contribute.
--
Infuriate left and right
I'm sure microsoft PR is going to have a field-day with this. "See, See! proof that open source doesn't work", they'll all cry in unison.
It'll get finished. Planning what may very well be the most important piece of software most users will run on their system takes time.
In the meantime.. brace yourselves for the FUD-slinging.
--
It's good to see (at least a minority of) positive comments for mozilla.
Why does it seem like such a large segment of the open source/free software community wants to see mozilla fail? I really don't understand it. I hear about how bloated it is, how it crashes all the time, blah, blah, blah.. and it's just not true! Try a build! Mozilla.org really helped put open source into mindshare of people who would never have known or cared (I am one of these). I am thankful for mozilla.org, and am thrilled about the builds of late. Starting from scratch after six months of moving in the direction the legacy code had taken them was the right thing to do, it's apparent today. But, sheesh! You sure couldn't tell that by all the negative press. Don't you people want to see the dominant browser end up being mozilla? If not, why? Don't bitch about how it's a failed project- why the hell do you want to see it fail? It's doing frickin' great in my book.
Excuse me, but last time I checked AOL owned Netscape, not Sun. Yes, AOL and Sun have an alliance -- so did IBM and Microsoft in 1990. IBM said that Windows was just a transition stage between DOS and OS/2...and Microsoft decided differently, no? So take that Sun guy's talking with a grain or sixty-nine of salt.
Also, people are calling the next release "Navigator 5.0". However, remember that it's being built on what was originally going to be the 6.0 codebase. If Netscape had simply called Navigator 4.5/4.6 Navigator 5.0/5.1 instead, the pundits would be talking about the amazing success Mozilla is in delivering a better 6.0 than Microsoft faster...
My guess is that no change in policy regarding Mozilla has occurred. It just seems to suggest that the senior management of Sun/AOL/Netscape have discussed the matter, and Sun ('we') are uneasy about Open Source (big shock there).
The only real complaint about Open Source in the article is that its failed to attract developers prepared to work for free and meet commercially imposed deadlines. Booo hooo. I'm afraid if you want to gaurantee you'll meet your deadlines you have to hire people. Maybe Sun are worried about contaminating Java with some nasty Open Source license.
Sun's source license for Java has a lot of problems. The biggest is that it does not attract outside developers who are prepared to share their changes, because they're not allowed to sell them themselves (though I think they can give them away ?).
Ummm... that's exactly what Mozilla did.
It was completely rewritten to be modular and threw out much of the old, crufty code base. These things just take time, and it's nearing the final stretches now. Check out the project plans!
> Why do you ankle-biters have such a problem with people making their own decisions about their own lives?
JWZ, while I respect all the work you did on Netscape/Mozilla, I think you're missing the point about why people are upset about your departure.
It's not that you left, it's the way you did it. It grew beyond being a decision about your own life.
When the spokesman for a project leaves and rips it apart, that's all the media needs to make a field day out of it. We're still constantly seeing stories about how Mozilla is a "failure" because of the way you departed. No one interviews the hundreds of people who disagree with you and are excited by Mozilla's progress. And in a world ruled by sound bites and shallow reporting, your critique was all the masses needed as proof.
So I think you're incorrect that your critics have a problem with you making a decision about your own life. They just wish you could have shown more leadership by not tearing down something they're still fighting for.
Here are some ten-day daily averages for number of posts to select Mozilla newsgroups (20 June - 30 June):
skins: 7.0
dom: 7.8
webtools: 9.3
jseng:10.5
css: 16.1
html: 23.9
layout: 32.8
wishlist: 105.3
Bear in mind that these are only the groups that I happen to subscribe to, which are mostly concerned with fairly specialized authoring issues not directly related to the source code itself -- the groups for those actually working on The Lizard tend to get a lot more traffic. You might also remember that somewhere out there in that vast, murky Neverneverland beyond your monitor, it's summer. A lot of people are out of school, on vacation, etc. At any rate, no, I don't think Mozilla ng traffic is "down to insignificant".
--Z.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Hrm....
Try xfstt.
-rozzin.
Jabber's supposed to be working on a chat/internet presence type program that's cross platform AND supports all the popular chat protocols, including IRC, ICQ, PAL, and AIM (lots of three letter acronyms there...)
Don't know what's going on with this, but a few months back I read a ton in their mailing list and it looked pretty cool...
http://www.jabber.org I think.
W
-------------------
-------------------
This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Just GNU it. That'll fix the problem.
Linux: Long live the source code.
You're absolutely right about that, at least in my case. I spent a lot of time on the mozilla mailing lists right at the very beginning and I very quickly decided to wait for the first stable release.
I simply felt I could handle fixing a bug or adding a feature to a finished product but I didn't have enough experience of the relevant technology skills to tackle the big issues that were under consideration back then, even when they were still working with the old code base. I knew the code was a mess even before it was released. Just look at the way it eats up every last byte of memory until it crashes, even now.
When a finished mozilla is released I'll hack away happily and who knows, maybe I'll contribute something. I'm sure a lot of wannabee hackers will come out of the woodwork when they see that they've got something mostly unbroken to start with.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
In case you hadn't noticed, you Anonymous Coward, all non-AC posts default to +1. Figure it out. The moderators haven't gotten to it, yet.
In the mean time, who the hell are you to be complaining, if you don't even have the courage to register your account?
Let's look at this. Internet Explorer 5.0 supports nearly all of the standards, is moderately fast, and--gosh--exists as a real product.
The only thing that is keeping Mozilla afloat--apart from the promise of "it'll be great sometime"--is that it's open source. That's the only thing. Period.
C'mon. If Mozilla closes source, they lose programmers. They lose prestige. They lose their biggest customer base: the Linux/UNIX/Anti-Microsoft communities.
Endgame. Checkmate. IE wins.
(And don't even come to me talking of Opera. I'm not interested in a $30 browser that still uses the MDI interface. Ugh. I'd rather use IE.)
I am a student, hoping to be a professional Web developer come the fall. If this goes down, my career is ruined.
First of all, I'd like to say I concure with the above poster. Second, Mozilla is a great project which would have gone faster if they started from scratch, instead of deciding what to keep, what to scrap, and what to rewrite, which limited innovation and stifled creativity and the occasional 'itch' hack.
-- d'arcy poirot
I guess it depends on what you call "elegance". For me, "elegant" code is primarily code that is cleanly organized and cleanly written. This pays off in spades when you have to revise the code - maintaining bad code is Not Fun (I've had to do it).
AOL is getting ready to open source their webserver that they've up til now only been giving away binaries for. Interestingly, they have gutted a large amount of "bloat" from the 2.x codebase and are throwing it out as a lean and mean but feature poor 3.0. I guess the assumption is that if people really liked the 2.x features that were removed they will re-implement them properly. It would seem they have learned a lesson from the 6 months of aimless wandering of the Mozilla project and have preemptively extricated all the cruft that made entry into the mozilla project so daunting.
Left shift 1 for e-mail...
Sure it is blowted....but hey it's not even really in beta. It is a step in the right direction... and it NOT that bad, it is a nice product, it was orginzed wrong, that's the problem.
Overflow on
"I want to use software that doesn't suck." - ESR
"All software that isn't free sucks." - RMS
Why should this be such a surprise? There are 2 reasons that Netscape released the source to Mozilla:
/.ers, but that Netscape failed to recognize, is that good software cannot be produced quickly and cheaply (when time is viewed as having monetary value). Mozilla is going to be good software. When it is released, anyone who values quality and hasn't been totally brainwashed by MS will eventually choose it over IE. If AOL/Netscape had any courage, they would stick it out. The delay on Mozilla's release is a major setback, but the quality of the final release of Mozilla will more than make up for that.
1) They thought that releasing the source would result in a better product, developed quickly, at less cost to them. After all, most of the work was going to be done by volunteers.
and, more important,
2) Netscape recognized OSS as being The Next Big thing. By releasing the source, not only would Netscape get the image of a cutting-edge, daring company, but it could guarantee that it would be mentioned in nearly every article about OSS software.
Well, 1 obviously didn't happen, and 2 is partly true, but the press exposure is getting less favourable. The truth that is probably obvious to most
Disclaimer: All critisisms of Netscape are referring to upper management's decisions, not the people actually working on Mozilla.
Mozilla's core development isn't quite finished yet. Even so, the open source machinery has already started working. Prerelease versions of Mozilla have been converted to widgets in GTK and Java, parts of the code are being used as parts of other projects, etc.
By keeping Mozilla open, AOL/Netscape continues to be the standards setter when it comes to what browsers are expected to do. Making Mozilla proprietary now would accomplish little (would they try to make licensing revenues from it?), and lose a lot of opportunities for influencing the future of the web.
Looking from the outside and experimenting with the occasional beta release, Mozilla looks like it's on-track to me. Once a beta release is out, more outside, open-source contributions will start happening. I hope AOL has the courage to stay the course.
So what's your excuse for Mozilla on Linux?
Gee... AOL is going to shut down Mozilla. Imagine that. I knew they would... heck everybody should have known that.
My only problem is that I am a heavy ICQ user... Don't get me wrong, I like Mozilla, and have submitted bug reports-etc. but it is going rather slowly, and this guy is right, it isn't getting much support from the community. But, back to ICQ... is my beloved program next? They've already bloated it beyond degree (like 3x bigger in KB from pre-aol release to post-aol release), will they now charge for it?
Hmmmm... did we let the big lizard down? Is ICQ next?
----- if ($anyone_cares) {print "Just Another Perl Newbie"}
warn "Just Another Perl User" if $anyone_cares;
The problem with mozilla was that a bunch of source code that was never meant for public consumption was released. From what I understand it was pretty much a developement version of netscape 5.0 that had certain sections of code ripped out that netscape could not release to the public. On top of all of this it didn't compile into a useable product. It still is barely functional. IMHO netscape would have done better by starting a new project from scratch that was open from the start. If they put some of their own serious coders into it (especially those who had worked on prior versions) they probally could have churned out an amazing product by this point.
I think the biggest problem was that it didn't work from the start. When they first released the source I grabbed a copy, and was very frustrated at the dificulty in compiling and then realising that it didn't work. I'm sure the same was true of other coders as well. I would hate to see the mozilla project die, but i can understand why aol would kill it. At this point it's probally a huge revenue drain that is providing little return. Remeber, that AOL is a bussiness and their primary responsibility is to make money, not keep the free software community happy.
-matt
You do have a valid point as far as the Windows versions go, but it doesn't explain why Microsoft has blown away Netscape when it comes to making a web browser for the Mac. Nor does it explain why Netscape on Linux is so poor (not so much better or worse than Netscape on other platforms, but poor nonetheless), since they do have complete access to Linux's internals. I can't comment on IE5 for HP-UX or Solaris, since I haven't tried it since the original beta for Solaris. Anyone?
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Seriously, why do you "deserve a fast lightweight reliable browser to use on linux"? What have you done to deserve it? As we can see from Mozilla, coding a good browser to work with today's standards is damn hard work. So why do you "shudder" at the thought of paying for something like that? Because you're cheap? Because you think it's your birthright to have complex code available at no cost and no effort on your part?
Gimme gimme gimme gimme gimme gimme gimme gimme gimme gimme gimme gimme gimme gimme gimme gimme gimme gimme gimme gimme gimme gimme gimme gimme gimme gimme gimme gimme gimme gimme gimme gimme gimme gimme gimme gimme gimme gimme gimme gimme gimme gimme...
Please be sure to post a list of other software that you deserve to have so that we can quickly code it and give it to you.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com, who deserves a hummer, but is not gonna tell his girlfriend that, no way no how.
Get a life. There are people who use operating systems other than Linux out there. Duh! (and no, i'm not just talking about Microsquish products either)
First of all, they are right, nobody's helping the project outside of netscape.
;-)) from us.
We are all cheering for them, but noone acts.
A few days ago i submitted a story about how mozilla wants us to help debug gecko,
it wasn't published, and you really should visit the page (at mozillazine).
We have to prove them wrong, not just wait for other people to work.
Working on Mozilla will provide a browser for all of us (even windows users
I think some of us have worked hard, people like the BeZilla team (not sponsered by netscape or be inc),
and the os/2 team, have made a good job by porting mozilla to their platform.
Why don't you help too?
There are many things to add and improve, and you can join too.
So - stop bitching that they won'y open source it, and prove them they should not close it again!
I don't know about you, but I'll start working on that whole bug-athon thing right now.
---
The day Microsoft makes something that doesn't suck,
---
I'm going to live forever, or die in the attempt.
In his speech, Alan Baratz (of Sun) implies they're considering moving Mozilla to something like the Sun Community Process... To see what the Java community thinks of the SCP, check out this article on Javalobby.com.
The Sun Community Process has been very little use to anyone, even Sun, because Sun is mainly ignoring the Community. I certainly hope AOL isn't dumb enough to do this to Mozilla. As one poster on the Javalobby article points out, Mozilla is actually not doing that badly, outside of the press...
Check out the mozilla-fonts package I've put together. It's a complete set of Times, Helvetica, and Courier typefaces for Netscape, in the big, voluptuous sizes your eyes know and love ;-)
Get 'em right here!
iSKUNK!
I saw AOL is just spooked by the recent lawsuit by their volunteer channel moderators. They're afraid the open source contributors will rise up and sue them too. :)
_______
2B1ASK1
Okay. Antialiasing looks nice until you actually decide to sit around doing development work all day. Anti-aliased fonts cause eye strain, because the fuzzies (instead of jaggies) make them look out of focus. Your eyes continuously try to compensate for by refocusing, ergo, increased eyestrain. And all the time you don't really notice -- who focuses their eyes consciously, really? -- and just think it looks better.
Anti-aliasing is appropriate for logos, low resolution rendering, graphics, etc. It is NOT appropriate for reading text from a screen. If your fonts are looking too jaggy, just go to a higher resolution. At 1680x1024, I can't see the pixels at all any more.
How come there are so many window managers, for instance, and NO free browser meant to replace ns/ie coming from the community? Not even planned.. I really don't get this. Is it that much more difficult? Is making a browser more difficult than writing a kernel with assembly code? Is it less fun?
:)
More importantly, why is it that people spend time working on very similar things like making another text editor, another desktop system, another mail transport engine, but nobody made *one* browser or even started working on one?
As the things are right now, I'm using lynx. It's great but I wish it had jscript/frames. Some sites require that. It'd be nice if lynx could render tables the way ns/ie do. But, Linux obviously needs a graphical browser that is competitive with ns/ie.
I think it's quite possible that mozilla won't get anywhere. I think this should've started out alot simpler: no mail, news, even java. Fast, clean browser with html/jscript/css/ssl, very modular, gpld and community would play with it and make it into something really cool.
Maybe it'd make sense to start working on a clean light browser from a scratch right now? Mozilla might make it, but what happens if it doesn't? How is Linux going to amount to anything if 95% of pages on the Net will be made specifically for IE in a few years?
Also, anybody wants to help me make a subspace clone for linux?
-- ATTENTION: do not read this sig. It doesn't say much.
What about another paradigm shift ?
We all hated Sun for their embracing policy on Java. We all loved NSCP for their courage, although it was ambiguous (http://language.perl.com/versus/hats.html).
This situation looks like a half-heresy; slowly backing away from a OSS scheme we're approaching Microsofts licensing scheme.
Sounds like a compromise to me. Not a good one, not a bad one. But exactly what compromises are all about.
Anybody thinking about not having corporations setting the rules ?
While I agree that it *should* be a good learning example for other companies. I fear that it might end up scaring off potential participants.
"It failed for Netscape, we should avoid it..."
Maybe I';m just being pessimistic today.
\//
Actually, part of the reason I read /. is because sensationalism gets discovered, flamed, stomped, squashed, massacred, and moderated out.
Well, considering this is the first time a post of mine has achieved a score of 5 and I got a vote of confidence from "displague", I think I'll put some effort into the idea. Of course I will try to make the best possible use of work that's already been done by doing a search on freshmeat. Even if a graphical map doesn't turn out to improve the horizontally-scaled development model, at least it would be possible for alpha testers and general users to get a view of the project as a whole and its parts.
Can anyone point me in the direction of some open source software that might fulfill part of this need?
It would be interesting to find out just how much the open source community has contributed to Mozilla. A /. poll would be good, I think... ask "how involved are you in the Mozilla project?"
I, like so many others, downloaded via CVS the whole seamonkey tree and tried to find my way through it. It was just so massive! For a week I did a "cvs update" every day and I noticed so many files were in motion that I couldn't tell what wasn't being worked on.
This may sound naive, but I think the primary reason Mozilla hasn't received much attention from open source developers is because there isn't a simple, graphical "map" that shows the progress of each section of code. I hope you can understand what I have in mind--it would look very similar to a real map but would be colored according to how much work needs to be done in each area. The areas would be zoomable to the point where if a developer wants to fix a specific bug, he just zooms in to the specific function.
I'm a developer who has precious little time yet has a lot of interest in seeing Mozilla completed under the current licensing model. Would you folks think this idea is worth the effort?
When Opera first started out, every other browser was free (gratis). Both MS and NS could do this because they considered their client browser to be a loss leader. They could make up lost revenues by selling the server end, etc.
But OperaSoft was a single application company. They couldn't give it away their only product and expect to eat. So they decided to make it the best possible client browser available, and charge a nominal fee for it. They couldn't give it away and then charge for support, because no one needs support for a "browser-only" browser.
What they ended up with was a browswer a tenth the size of NS or IE, with 99% of the features intact. This is still having repercussions in the browser industry. There is a growing perception that browsers should not be "applications", but should instead be "tools".
They've been very successful in the Windows world, and I have no doubt they'll do the same in the Linux, BeOS, Warp worlds as well. This is the type of prodect I expect to see in the "commercial" CD for SuSE, Caldera, Mandrake...
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
A nice, tight little text (or ps or html or whatever) document giving a rundown of how all the pieces of Mozilla fit together and how those pieces work (and of course associating pieces with particular sections of source code) would go a long way in telling people who both know how to write c++ code and actually have a desired change for mozilla in mind where the fuck they're actually supposed to start.
I kind of wonder if this says anything negative about the ability of the open source movement to develop large applications... kind of worrisome...
The changes Baratz hinted to do not appear to include termination of Mozilla, but rather evolving it to something like the Java Community Process.
I would suggest you read the article before adding your 2 cents.
The project is not behind because it is open source, it is behind because not enough people are working on it. The best thing for Sun/AOL/Netscape to do is throw more in-house developers at it. The project can't speed up because they deny outside developers access to the tree!
This should be a learning experience though. I don't think it is an opensource flaw so much as a netscape or mozilla flaw.
- It's been mentioned before, but it wouldn't compile at first. That is and was frustrating. Something that impresses me with most OSS/Free software is the remarkable clean build process. Mozilla didn't have that for a long time. I was very amped to start making tweaks but I didn't have the time to figure it all out, I just wanted "configure;make" like most other projects have. Maybe that was a poor expectation on my part, but I don't think so.
- Mozilla quickly splintered into countless groups and projects. The ports were easy enough to sort out but some of the other projects really confused me at the time. Again, maybe I had poor expectations but I've got a full time job and at best mozilla was going to be a spare time activity for me, I wasn't really motivated to figure out what was what and since I couldn't readily compile a lot of code...
- There were radical design shifts, I'm not sure where this came from. I agree with it and I think most of the community likes the idea of a mozilla component being available and componentizing the product but this is radically different from what they put out. Clear leadership is needed for that. I still don't know who's baby it is. I still don't know which baby it is that I want to jump in with, or are they not splintered any more? I've got things I would still like to do, I'd love to see GNOME and KDE components made out of it.. I kind of think Netscape had hoped to open it up and the world would just sort of know what to do and in 3 months there would be this radically different product. The code didn't compile and we were heading off into the night on a runaway train.
- Netscape really cut it loose after a short time, am I the only one who thinks Communcator 5 is going to be very different from mozilla? After it got off to a slow start, reading the newsgroups and listening to the "leaders" made it sound like the project was just floundering. I never felt like netscape was in on the project. I felt like they didn't see what they wanted in a few weeks and then bailed.
- Then the PR fizzled. Mozilla now is looking impressive. It's looking like a product, it's still rough and there is a lot of work to be done but there are areas to work on and things to improve and ideas to incorporate. I think a lot of us have dismissed it by now though. Some how the PR machine needs to generate that excitement again. We need some goals and some plans and wishlists, what are we aiming at, what needs aren't we filling? How can it be better? Someone will have to fork the code when mozilla get's to m8 or m9 and start working on a "new project" it will start to take off more then.
- The need isn't there. NS has been working very nicely for me. If I was browserless I'd be more inclined to perform miracles to make mozilla happen. At this point it's just a war of virtue. NS gave their code away and won my heart over, I had no problem using communicator because netscape "did the good thing"
I hope ESR makes some addendums to C&B, I also hope that the mozilla projects continues on. I think it is finally on a good track, it just needs to pick up some passengers and gain some speed.This is my signature. There are many signatures like it but this one is mine..
You know, the biggest benefit AOL has for Mozilla is to kill it and claim in the antitrust suit that micrsofot is hurting an opensource movement.
But on the other hand, mozilla is rocking along right now.. the latest build is actually pretty sweet, while not completely different, it offers alot more then the crummy 4.6.. rememebr they're talking about Mozilla, and not "Netscape Communicator"
But, i'm just assuming, and making an ass of myself probably. But i do think AOL sees more money and bigger dollar signs in a Lawsuit or a totall new product, and claiming that Netscape died officially would mean a very hard blow against microsoft.
Also AOL 5.0 is being released.. so that may be the reference they're using as for a release date.
It has seemed kind of obvious that this hammer was going to come down, it was just a matter of when.
Netscape has posted a very good example of how not to run an open source project though, which should prevent others from making their mistakes in the future, which is a good thing. i.e. don't just throw a bunch of stuff out there and expect people to run with it, having some goals before the project was 6 months old may have been nice too.
In retrospect it is obvious that opening up Navagator was a last ditch hail-mary desparation shot of Netscapes to regain some of the momentum that it lost to MS...
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
I use win95 (Hated win98) and Linux. I have AOL, thats all I have access to so Linux isn't the way to go for my everyday life. If I could access the 'net with Linux and AOL I would switch to Linux at the drop of a hat. But I can't.
/. is mainly a Linux/GPL geared site, but it's more than that.
My Point is that I still read slashdot, even though I use Win95. This site says "NEWS FOR NERDS. STUFF THAT MATTERS." Not "NEWS FOR LINUX. WE'RE ALL THAT MATTER." Catch my drift.
Sure
Personally, I think that the font sizes for NS4 on Linux are a joke, I need a mag. class just to read it. NS4.6 on windows is great, IE4 is good, IE5 I protest.
Beau C
When JWZ left, he stated quite clearly the reasons why and why Netscape's Mozilla had foundered. He was in the middle of it, and he saw this coming I'll bet.
Release EARLY. Release Often. Release something that works, so that lots of LITTLE changes can happen. Not a mass of bloated unusable code that 99% of the people will never be able to make small changes to.
Open Source works when you follow the principles that it's based on. Netscape didn't, and has paid the price - it's slowly getting better, but I can't use Mozilla today INSTEAD of Netscape 4.6, which if they'd done it right, we'd be able to.
Regarding ICQ, ICQ was reverse engineered, so even if AOL stopped it tomorrow, we could still have 3rd party software, clients AND servers, and keep it alive. Same goes with advertising on it, etc. Basically, the day they screw it up, I will ICQ all of my friends, give them my new server address, and a link to a free clone of icq, and we'll all switch to that.
I'd like to know what browsers people recommend for Linux... Netscape 4.6 is nice, but a pig, Lynx is great but text only, KDE browser is simple but slightly too simple. What other good browsers are there for Linux? For Windows, Opera is nice...
Help achieve Liberty in your lifetime - join the Free State Project - http://www.freestateproject.org
MS absolutely relies on just this sort of behavior. Remember windows 95? Remember how tech support said "NO! We Won't Support It!!!" Remember how 10 million adults installed it anyway? Well, maybe not 10 million, but tech support be damned; we installed four copies. And they had to support it. And perhaps that is the way it should be, tech support supporting users.
Maybe thats why (l)users don't run unix.
So, put a lid on it there Mr. Adult. I don't know where you were in 1976, but I was swamping 4k of core (an old-fashioned word for ram there junior) from a teletype trying to program Buffalo Castle in BASIC...
I just don't get it, every milestone I've tried under Win95 crashes very rapidly, it's just unusable. How can other people have the opposite results? I know Win95 is a piece of crap in itself, but NS4 and IE5 run just fine, crash much less, and I'm using them all day long. The box is a PII 300 w/128 Mb RAM so that should be enough. I really want to use Mozilla, but can't get it to work for longer than a few minutes. Maybe you have some secret you might want to share with me?
In other words, Open Source doesn't scale well.
It's best when it's a few programmers writing gee-whiz utilities to show off to their friends.
I like to "show off" the amazing things I can do with Emacs to my windows programmer friends. Larry Wall probably gets all the chicks after showing off his "gee-whiz" Perl language. 57% of the web site administrators out there are impressed with a little "gee-whiz" utility called Apache. And a "few programmers writing gee-whiz utilities" sure impress the hell out of me with their incredible collection of GNU tools. I'll take gcc, gdb, make, emacs, and rcs over VC++ any day!
If you really meant what you said in your post, then I invite you to explore the Open Source/Free Software world in more depth. If you did you would realize how far off the mark you are. I mean this as a friendly invitation. I felt like I had been reborn when I discovered GNU/Linux a year ago. I wish everyone the same joy!
My advice: find your local Linux users group, attend meetings and ask questions. Contrary to some unfortunate things you may have seen posted on Slashdot, most Free Software/Linux people are really great people. Most would gladly give up an evening to help you install and learn Linux, and answers to your questions are never more than an e-mail away. If you've been in the Windows camp for a while you'll rediscover why you became enamoured with computing in the first place!
And if you're a Microsoft troll posting flamebait, my advice remains the same!
Chris
csimpkins@mindspring.com
(simpkins.org is temporarily down).
well, it costs quite a bit less money to anti-alias text than it does to buy a huge monitor. and when you do, smaller fonts become a *lot* more legible. it does more then just blur it....
_
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
I was just thinking that I don't really care whether Mozilla is open source or not. For a good, fast browser with MathML support and real standards compliance, I'd shell out money.
But if it's not free of charge, no one will use it, so there won't be an audience for a standards compliant, MathML capable browser. Then, naturally, no one will write MathML documents because there won't be an audience for it and the world that relys on the web for real content will be set back another five years while advertisements and commerce expand.
My conclusion is that whether or not a browser project is open source or not, Netscape will have to be free to be widely used and it's standards compliance have an effect. And if it must be free, it might as well be open source, no?
Peace.
... for two reasons. First and foremost, Mozilla is on the way to being the most open and accessable browser ever, supporting all the W3C standards and running on numerous platforms. Secondly, if Mozilla is actually retracted (not just funding cut), then we've been lied to. When AOL took over they swore up and down that they would keep funding Mozilla, and at the very least that the Mozilla source code, such as it was, would be free for all time.
If this now turns out to be bull it would be a great blow, not only to Open Source but to AOL and Netscape's credebility.
I am not, for the record, an active contributor to the Mozilla project. Unfortunately, my limited experience with programming does not include anything that would make me more useful than harmful. I do, however, regularly help by downloading a nightly build or milestone and reporting on bugs. Similarly, I plan to take part in the BugZilla 300 by breaking down current bugs to the simplest test case so that the real engineers can stamp them out effectively.
Come on, folks. Let's all Slashdot AOL with what a bad idea it would be to try to close the mozilla sources!
Hey, did you check out the big "IF" there, Sparky? I said "IF" it was so, then there were big problems. Yes, I read the article before I posted. Yes I know there isn't any official word on the matter from AOL.
The fact of the matter is, ever since jwz resigned there has been a lot of FUD bandied about in the press. We keep hearing (even from Mozilla insiders like Jamie) about the dearth of "outside help". Mozilla is regarded either as a savior or an albatross in the press, depending on what flavor of enema the particualr reporter is using this week.
I think that at the slightest hint (yes, even a rumor) of AOL doing anything fishy with the Mozilla project, they need to hear from the populace what we think of Mozilla. If the rumor is unfounded, we all wasted two minutes out of our day and AOL will still have a new respect for what the public's opinion of Mozilla is. If the rumor is true, it might disuade AOL from rash behavior.
I'm about to date myself, but when I was a kid the show Quantum Leap was canceled due to the perceived indifference of the public. A massive letter writing campaign brought it back from the proverbial can shortly therafter. Do you suppose that if the outpouring had come when there was even a hint that the network might cancel the show, the execs would never have done what they did?
I was quite far from going off half-cocked. I believe this is a prudent course of action, no matter what the truth of the rumor. Sorry if I only dealt with the worst case, but I had to go to work, and direct, if a bit too light in reasoned arguement, was all I had time for.
On a more personal note, may I suggest you get some counseling? You seem to have this "They can't see me so I'll say whatever I want to piss them off" attitude that is way too prevalent on the web today.
There are two things you should consider. First, there really are people at the other end of your little Anonymous Coward(ly) barbs, and I doubt many of them are morons. Second, you shouldn't feel clever for what you said. It was childish at best and I would have to care about your opinion before you could piss me off.
Regards,
Monkey-Boy
If your soo sure, how do you explain this (referring to jwz's gruntle on the issue.)
Yes: jwz's major concerns were that (a) it did not attract a lot of developers because (b) only products people use attract developers and (c) nobody's using it.
Does nobody see the vicious circle here? Does nobody understand that if you insert the word YET at the right spots in the above logic, there is much cause for optimism?
Fine - it's taking a long time: as anyone with the slightest clue understands, this is A GOOD THING when it means they've re-written the layout and networking code. WHEN the first useable release is done: (a) people will start using it; (b) people will start saying, "oh- I found a bug in a program I actually use quite often, and OH YEAH - I can download the source and try to figure it out!"; leading to (c) lots more developers as time goes by.
HOW many non-Linus developers did Linux have between 1991 and 1992?
"Waa, waa. I want my browser and I want it NOW!"
I.
Okay. Let's accept the premise that Freeing the Lizard did little or no good to the mainline browser development. Two issues remain:
bsd/gpl liceses are more attractive to
...
...
;-)
developers. the npl grants aol more rights
than other developers. this is *not* what i beleive
the free software movement is about. i never liked it,
even on the first day they released the code.
lgpl would have been the right one
changing it now won't help for the completion
of 5.0, but
this is not a failure of open source, but the
outcome of a we-are-more-than-an-external-developer
license.
if they think they are more, the have to work
more on the code
Talk about frustrating.
It's just looking like they're getting more interest from the community, more people're checking out the product, and it's coming along so well (the debug pages all show quite a lot of promise for changing elements of the dom and that lot), and then they get Sun mulling changing the status of the project. It has taken a lot of resources, and Netscape developers have taken a large (err...) bulk of the load in an incredibly public project, but it was just feeling a whole lot closer, a whole lot more promising in the last few months, certainly moreso than last November or so.
It's just really too bad it hasn't quite gotten the rabid development Linux has gotten.
(And yeah, the contractions are an easy way of getting around commiting to the past tense or the present)
Has anyone been by http://www.mozilla.org/newlayout/bugathon.html?
_m
Why on earth would you want to kill a big strength like multi-OS compaitibility? You make it just for Linux, excluding even the other open source OS's out there, and are you really any better than a company who writes their program only for Windows? Linux isn't the only thing out there, and it will never be the only thing.
"That's Tron. He fights for the Users."
Mozilla M6 and M7 worked for me on both linux and win95. I could surf with it. Never crashed.
We should start calling the new browser, Mozilla 2000, this way the media will ignore any FUD.
Incidently, my last IE installation killed my win95. If there were a Linux port of IE, it could not kill Linux.
Word to you mother. --V. Ice
1. The mindshare problem: quality takes time
True, open source software may be higher-quality in the long run. But, since Netscape and Microsoft have two *very* similar products, the competition is based more on capturing mindshare than on producing quality software. Microsoft has succeeded in this by releasing frequently -- and while snazzy (and buggy) new features may not do much for the user, they get attention and make headlines. Meanwhile, from the mainstream's point of view, Netscape seems to have hit a dead end.
2. Reinventing the wheel
One of the many goals of OSS is to prevent the costly and time-consuming duplication of labor necessitated by proprietary code restrictions. However, the Mozilla project is doing exactly this: duplicating work (triplicating, actually) already done by scores of Netscape and MS programmers. It may be a *better* wheel, but it's still reinvention.
3. Necessity is the mother of invention
It's one of the best reasons to program for free: you need a tool to help you do something, but no such tool exists, so you build it yourself. However, the need for a good web browser is already being met by both Netscape and MS. Put simply: who really *needs* another browser? (besides Netscape, of course)
4. Cost isn't an issue
Cost is probably THE reason that Linux is attractive to so many people -- it is a free alternative to expensive proprietary OSes. However, Netscape and Microsoft's already give away their browsers, so cost will not be a compelling reason for IE users to switch. To make an analogy: Linux probably wouldn't be taking the mainstream world by storm if Microsoft were giving away NT for free.
Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.
Sorry, I've already posted way too many times today so I'll try to quiet down tomorrow.
So who's fault is this? Why does the "Open Source model" (TM) get blamed for this? Open Source developers did not develop the original crufty code that was discarded.
Furthermore, no one seems to take into account the cross-platform nature of Mozilla. This is basically several projects -- Mac/Windows/Linux. If they only concentrated on a single platform, would progress come faster?
Also, the "lack of response from the Open Source community" line is growing tiresome. Let's add up the number of man-hours contributed by Open Source developers to Mozilla. How much would it cost to hire programmers for the same amount of time? As great as an Open Source browser is for the community, perhaps many developers see AOL as the chief beneficiary. Can Open Source developers be blamed for not wanting to further AOL's plans for world domination?
Save the whales. Feed the hungry. Free the mallocs.
As far as I understand the license, yes, you can. From the Netscape Public Licence:
This means, or should mean, that if AOL wants to pull the plug, they can do so by keeping for themselves all the code they develop from now on. But the code already released can always be used in the terms of NPL 1.0.
I believe that, if mozilla.org shuts down, the development of the browser can continue elsewhere. Sure, won't be the same code used by "Netscape Communicator 7.532", but I don't think anyone cares about that.
Oh, and IANAL etc.
Mozilla is working. There are quite a few outside developers and the code is already a central piece of many outside projects. It will continue to be an open source development effort because it can't be contained. Not even by AOL. And who the hell does this Sun guy think he is throwing out his opinions anyway. Mozilla belongs to the community. Sure AOL could pull the developers and that would probably kill what momentum the project does have but they can't take the code back. Outside development continues to grow as the project gets closer to beta and after this december's release of a fully functioning, standards compliant browser, I think the community will take up the torch. The rumors of mozilla's death are greatly exaggerated.
Mozilla the browser works! Go get a nightly or a milestone. Not only does it work but it works on more platforms than any other browser. Mail and News are coming on-line with great speed. Don't lose faith. Go get a build, give it a work out, report bugs, read the newsgroups and contribute.
Heil Goodwin!
Forward, retransmit, or republish anything I say here. Just don't misquote me.
We don't care who you are. Even if it's an untraceable handle it's more respected so that people know who they're speaking to even if they can never identify them in real space. It shows that you intend to carry on a conversation that is more coherent by being able to identify you. If we can recognize the handle then we know that we don't have to repeat statements already posted.
And for the AC-kneejerkers:
The cyberpunk:cyberpunk thing with NYTimes' login is to prevent marketroids from filling our inboxes with crap and all the rest of the tracking shit going on.
This does not work:
AC - says blah
Registered - says blah my ass
AC - says blah (could be completely different)
This is ridiculous:
AC - says blah
AC - says uber blah
AC - says blah to all o' yas
This works:
X - says blah
Y - says nope mister
Z - says i agree and...
Y - bull
Z - that's not what I meant
The ship sank. Get over it. (This sig was cut out from another's shirt and painstakingly hand-posted)
It seems to me that the mozilla project is managing to demonstrate something that the open source community is going to have to deal with for a long time to come (when we succeed in converting the world), which is that we write code differently than programmers squirreling away in cubicles (being one myself during the day, sadly). The code that's been locked away for so long is going to be hard to work with at best, and (in Mozilla's case) will need a near complete rewrite in order to be workable in the worst case. It can be done (check out the mozilla releases if you don't believe it), but it takes time and patience. I wouldn't be suprised to see interest in Mozilla pick up with time. And no, the article itself doesn't seem to say anything about them seriously considering killing off/altering the project. Indeed, it says that AOL hasn't really thought anything in that regards at all. Sun seems to be hinting at it, but Sun would hint at anything that they thought would give them more firepower to slay the M$ beast. If 5.0 comes out in December with all the features that have been promised, don't be suprised to see Netscape's browser share rocket up. If for no other reason than that a large amount of the browser market (something like 15%) is dictated by which browser AOL is using. It'll definitely be interesting to see where we are 2 years from now.
-Mike
The article quotes Alan Baratz of SUN, not someone inside AOL/Netscape. AFAIK, SUN does not have its hands significantly in the browser pie, and Baratz is not at the helm of the combined SUN/AOL effort either. So, that piece of journalism is just FUD. Besides, the way I read the netscape/mozilla license, the code can't be closed anymore.
Its funny how SUN people push their misguided Community license stuff. It just won't fly. It's just a cheap attempt at grabbing attention and get a few gullible souls to work for them for free.
I prefer the Elvis Costello line, "I used to be disgusted, but now I'm just amused."
Seems pretty fitting to this whole whiny thread.
Netscape thought that they could go open source and suddenly get all the benefits of the Open Source Society. Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way.
:)
For people to support something that is Open Source, and do it for free, they must enjoy the work. If you don't make it enjoyable, then the people won't do it. There are lots of other Open Source projects that I want to work on and Mozilla is near the bottom of that list. I rather work on the Linux kernel or XFree86 or GTK+ or another project. Others may feel differently about this but only if they like to work on Mozilla.
I didn't join the Mozilla development so I don't know how enjoyable it was/is. Also, it takes time. Before you can help out, you need to know the system. Once you get a standard set of people who know the system, then improvements/bug fixes/ enhancements will come quickly. But you can't just release something Open Source and see the effect immediately.
Also, slightly off topic, but I worry that Open Source development will slow down drastically if there is a lot of Open Source projects. This will spread out the resources (people) and then the development slows down. The advantage of Open Source is that it is easier to work with something that is not a total black box. This is only true if you are a programmer and can understand the code. But that takes time as stated above.
I think that Netscape/AOL should give Mozilla more time, or at least keep it going. This way you can get a good set of developers. Also give some sort of compensation for those who submit a large amount of enhancments. Keep this going for the sake of Open Source, and you will benefit. Keep it going just to benefit, and you won't. I can't prove this, but the atmosphere is there. (what ever that means
Steven Rostedt
-- Nevermind
One of the reasons why it wouldn't compile, at least in part, is that if you look at the development environment for any major enterprise-level software project, it typically demands a very particular setup and environment to compile (i.e. you must be running the following apps with the following directory structure with teh following path and the following environmental variables just to get compilation, much less linking or debugging). Abstracting that away to a more general case of "I'm going to download the source and compile it because I'm bored" is a very very difficult proposition.
Most of the truly successful cases of open source projects have followed the "Release Early, Release Often" mantra. Perhaps if this is something that is that important to the community (which I think it is), it is worth starting from scratch. The problem is that starting truly from scratch would result in Mosaic, and it would take just as long to get something working. But in all likelihood the process and major contributors would be set by the time it got to have something useful in it, which would increase speed dramatically.
Kirk
I think that Mozillas biggest shortfall from my perspective is that when the initial source release came out, the code would not compile into a useful product.
While I was interested in attempting to revamp the bookmark code, it made no sense to me as I couldn't even get it to compile.
When Mozilla actually builds the foundation for an open source browser that is useable and that others can build upon, I might be interested in contributing.
Perhaps then it can meet the most basic Cathedral and the Bazaar requirements by my standards.
That this is SUN talking and NOT AOL, granted AOL has not denied it yet either. The browser does not fall under the SUN/Netscape alliance so SUN does not make the final decision. Let's hope AOL does. *shiver*
-- This space intentionally left blank.
Normally I hate to feed this kinda thing. But the irony is too fun to not point out.
According to what I've read before... moderators ARE "us". As users post messages that are recognized as being usefull, they gain moderator status. They then blow their moderator points on whatever they see fit and fall back into the nameless masses that are the unpriviliged users. They then have a chance to be called to service again as their posts receive attention.
It's mindless bashing and thrashing that causes the necessity of moderators to begin with. Too bad we need them here.
I suppose the idea is to get the general readership/community in on the task. He all can't be technical Hemmingways... but that doesn't mean we can't be a part of the community voice.
Unless you post flaim bait. :)
Ahh well. Interesting system, still.
I read the NPL back when it came out, but I forget the specifics. Would it be legal to take the current sources and spin it off to a new distribution, possibly a Linux-only one?
To everyone (the open source community), it still looked like a netscape project. I would hesitate to put my time and effort into something where I felt like a cog in the system. I've enough of that at work.
Netscape could have done better by offering support to other Open Source browsers.
What would your opinion have been had Netscape offered to enhance Arena or another browser? More favourable I think.
Actually, smaller fonts become a lot *less* legible than their corresponding non-aliased fonts. They get unrecognizably fuzzy. Subpixel rendering is the next advanced technique for font clarity at all resolutions.
Check it out:
www.woz.org
(yes, Steve Wozniak)
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Just because software for a certain OS has memory leaks or is a bit buggy doesnt make that OS worse than an OS that does not have software that has memory leaks and bugs. I am one to agree that nutscrape for linux is awful, I have never had it crash a machine but it has died so many times on its own. This doesnt show that Linux is worse than windows though. Windows itself is a memory leak ;)
Just my $00.02 =)
- "My name is Legion, for we are many" -Mark 5:9
Communicator 5.0 not suppossed to ship until December! By then it may be too late, and thats if they can actully manage to ship by the deadline. Don't get me wrong, I like netscape and mozilla both and I think 5.0 will be an excellent browser, but by then IE 5 will have been out for over 8 months. Even if this browser turns out as fast and stable as it looks like it will be, it's still gonna be difficult to go against IE, which by then will probably have a large majority of the market.
Oh well at least it looks like netscape will hold the linux market for a long time
Didn't Eric Raymond cite Mozilla as an open source success story in his latest piece?
Stephen Molitor steve_molitor@yahoo.com
Oh shit. If this is true and those nazis @ aol are going to kill mozilla then we could be screwed if Opera doesn't get some major backing. If netscape doesn't hurry up and release some alphas or betas then netscape won't last much longer. I don't know what the linux version of mozilla is like, but BeZilla looks pretty good so far. Just my $.02
---Got Coffee?---
NC 4 is MUCH MUCH older than IE 5, I am sure that NC5 will be really good. However IE5 is better for now if you use the option to install it without desktop integration
---Got Coffee?---
OSS has its place. Without OSS there would be no competition to Microsoft. Ooops there would be plenty. Microsoft would be 50 companies after the judge is done splitting them up.
---Got Coffee?---
People like you will end up scaring droves of people away from linux. I use BeOS and Win98. I have a winmodem. If I had a serial port modem or a decent isa modem (not going to waste a pci slot on a damn modem) do you think it would take long for me to choose between BeOS r4.5 and Win98? It would take about 5 minutes to replace Win98 with BeOS R4.5.
---Got Coffee?---
When you don't have a job it is a perfectly good reason to not have $100.
---Got Coffee?---
and now this is what gets +1 ? "shut up"? what the fuck is wrong with you people? ... if you'd read the moderation guidelines, you'd realize that logged in users (those not posting as AC) automatically start with a score of 1 ... You replied while this "shut up" post was still at 1, unmoderated ... As soon as moderators noticed, it got moved to -1, flamebait ...
... we do control slashdot ... again, I refer you to the moderation guidelines ...
Here's another offtopic, but it clears something up
moderators are no better than the rest of us. we should control slashdot not a bunch of two bit morons on an ego trip.
As for that comment, sorry to inform you, but moderators ARE the rest of us
--elint
UFO's are real. The Air Force doesn't exist.
Even if this happens, someone will pick up from where mozilla left off. You can't stop a good thing that easy.
-overlord
Everyone: Don't forget two things 1) The internal politics at netscape and mozilla is always a strain. Netscape tries to keep the current browser up to date, but doing this means keeping programmers away from Mozilla. There is resentment in both camps, remember some of JWZ's comments? 2) FUD is also a problem and is a direct a result of the politics here. When both sides are fighing for resources you will get rumors about this. Don't belive the FUD, the source is there, use it.
It is interesting to note that on this issue, which is exactly opposite from what usually happens, the FUD seems to be mostly coming from WITHIN the Open/Free software community (or at least the /. community). As was noted earlier, the linked article, is written by someone in Sun and not Netscape/AOL and does not really trash the project. Certainly not as much as people are trashing the project here. A number of comments here talk about the failure of Mozilla. If anyone has followed Mozilla at all, they would hopefully see that this is not the case.
By whose standards is Mozilla a failure? Maybe by Commercial software standards but certainly not by Open/Free software standards. The Mozilla development effort has been open now for about a year and half. If you subtract another six months for initial growing pains and the decision to abandon the original rendering engine, you have a very nifty piece of software nearing the beta stage in only a years time. What other Open/Free software project of such scale can boast such a short development time. Granted this is mostly because Netscape continues to supply paid and experienced developers to the project, which is a luxury most other projects don't have. Nonetheless this seems more like success than failure to me.
Many people have commented that don't really care much about web browser development. We should care. Having a unified cross platform browser that supports the latest W3C standards is one of the best arguments for choosing to use Linux, Amiga, OS/2 or any other alternative platform (alternative to Wintel). People are more likely to choose or stay with an alternative platform if they know that at the very least they can surf everything out there on the web.
You can bet that as more and more networked devices like set-top and palm devices become prevalent, the browser will be the most prominent piece of software that users of these devices will be exposed to. Wouldn't it be nice if that software was Open/Free.
Darrel Y
p.s. My apoligies for using the Open/Free wording to try and not offend people that have a preference for one or the other, while at the same time annoying everyone.
-- E-mail any Flames or Spam as addressed. Otherwise replace with first name