When many of us threatened to forever pull all content from GeoCities and to never ever use or link to Yahoo again, they changed the terms immediately. My own mail to them included the something to the effect "The customer is always right, and I'm the customer. Respect us, and we will return the favor. Piss us off and you will forever regret it." Oh, how the mighty fall!
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.
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...
(This is the short version of my licensing rant, because I'm tired. Come to OLS and you can hear the whole thing.)
If you'd rather contribute your code under a BSD license, you're in luck. The MPL is basically a file-granularity BSD license, sans advertising clause. Because of that granularity, new code you write in new files can be MPL'd, though changes you make the NPL'd code will still be under the NPL. This means that you could add mynewcoolthing.c under the MPL, and NSCP/AOL would have no special rights to it. And we at Mozilla would happily take that new file into the CVS tree and cherish it greatly.
I understand that people don't like the NPL-takeback clause very much; I'm not a big fan either -- though I understand the reasons for them, and they are good reasons, covered at length in the mozilla.license newsgroup -- and I'm lobbying gently to have more new code be written that is MPL'd rather than NPL'd. We'll see how much progress I can make. (Probably not much before 5.0 ships, perhaps more after.)
As far as whether it's Free Software, both the NPL and MPL were deemed to meet the DFSG, which was then the canonical metric for such things. I'm sorry it's not free enough for you, and I do sympathize with your concerns, but there aren't a lot of other options, unfortunately.
(Note: IANAL, though I was involved in the NPL design discussions pretty much from the start. I'll see if I can get some legal type to follow up, but I'm not confident that I can.)
(You're making a lot of often-made objections, which is actually sort of handy: I can get my responses to all of them in one place.) That the plugins are part of the source tree is not a very damning observation, I don't think. Some build mechanics to permit you to build ONLY select portions of the code would be a nice addition, I agree, but it hasn't been a priority so far. We're taking patches, of course, and people have been discussing a SeaMonkeyBase CVS tag that would allow you to pull without the optional componentry. FWIW, the GIMP source tree also contains a fair number of plugins. (The Linux kernel is even more similar to Mozilla in this area, in that it contains various optional modular bits scattered all over the source tree.)
As far as using third-party components:
Using GTK on non-Unix platforms was something that even the GTK authors counselled against. Making GTK work on the Mac would be a difficult and time consuming thing, and then you get to the best part: GTK widgets aren't suitable for our HTML-display purposes. You can't do all sorts of things that you need for HTML4, like partial opacity, and there isn't complete Unicode support (a major requirement, which is coming in GTK 1.3, too late for our 5.0 plans). So we really had no choice but to render our own widgets. Sorry, but there was lots of discussion about this in the newsgroups months ago, and that's how it turned out.
Using libxml isn't really an option at this point, but we _do_ use an external XML parser: expat existed before Mozilla, and is being used by other projects.
Um, pal, we do use the system libgif and libpng, if they're of the appropriate version: [shaver@loonie:components]$ ldd libnspng.so libpng.so.2 =>/usr/lib/libpng.so.2 (0x4000b000) Again -- research! =) And the JPEG library in Mozilla is actually owned partially by Tom Lane of JPEG Group fame, so if you send patches to the canonical libjpeg people, even those without an appropriate version will be able to take advantage of them. (Similarly with libpng and libgif, I believe.)
There are no cross-platform graphical mail/news readers that I know of, and besides -- you can implement the required interfaces (not many: just a mailto: handler and some logic to get yourself in the menus) and have it call out to mutt or Eudora(tm) or whatever turns you on. (As an aside, you could do that in later 4.0x/4.5 incarnations as well. There's sample code on developer.netscape.com that shows how.) Netscape decided that they wanted to spend resources on developing a cross-platform, standards-based, etc., etc., mail/news client, so they did that.
So, I'm glad we think alike: using suitable existing alternatives is a great thing. But where they're not suitable, we make our own. Not a lot of choice there.
Now, your objection to having a mail/news client at all is a bit troublesome: are you saying that it was a failure of Mozilla that Netscape wanted a mail/news client that was cross-platform and tightly integrated, etc.? Perhaps you'd have had them work on other things, but then perhaps Netscape would rather have had you hacking on Mozilla for the past year, rather than whatever it is you were doing instead.
As far as ``a Java-specific-interface'', I'll agree that OJI is designed to allow pluggable JVMs, yes. I'm not sure why that's bad; the network protocol API is designed to allow plugging network protocols in as well: that's how those things are designed. There are a lot of rather generic and flexible interfaces in the Mozilla client, though -- what would you like to plug in that you can't? We'll almost always take patches to add better modularity.
(Lots of people will say ``you should be doing this instead of that'', but then...they can't help do that because they don't have the time. Kinda frustrating. At the end of the day, the person writing the code makes the call, though Mozilla exerts influence where it can to make sure that the right thing for the code wins the day. If you've got strong opinions about things, come to the Mozilla newsgroups and share them. It's getting late in the game for major design shifts, but there's still time to make your voice heard in many areas. C'mon out!)
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.
Sadly, Mozilla hasn't taken this route.
Happily, Mozilla has taken that route. Java? It's a plugin (OJI). Image decoding? All formats are plugins (libnsjpg.so, libnspng.so, libnsgif.so, etc.). Network protocols? They're all plugins. Bookmarks? You guessed it! Mail and news support. C'mon -- everyone together now: pluggable! Un-pluggable! Re-cross-counter-hyper-pluggable! Editor? Character set converters? History? Cookie and pref editing? Find dialog? You see where I'm going here. (Mozilla puts the ``plug'' in ``pluggable'', or something like that.)
(I find it a little annoying when people make pronouncements about the architecture when they apparently haven't done research. Take a look...you'll like it!)
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.)
Since you honestly want an answer, here it (my version ) goes.
SW(ep4) has never been a great movie. It's a very decent one, nobody claim it to be the 2001. It didn't have the best si-fi battle scene (aliens), The sequels weren't excessing the visual masterpieces of its time (Dark City, Brazil, Fifth Element, Brade Runner or even Matrix) A lot of the movies I mentioned had the chance to become God of si-fi except that none of the creators qualify these requirments: 1) A creator sticks with his work for the reat of his life even though he/she has enough money to afford not doing so. 2) Make endless parade of action figure; actual negative films; Behide the scene specials; SW tour hosted by and Chewie actor and Vader body double; Any cult-related merchandise. 3) Release astronomical number of SW video games.
The very bottom line of it is that as an director, you have to give up your artistic version and stick to your most succesful work for the rest of your life. And George Lucas is the only one who can do it. Why would you, you couldn't, not even George Lazenby. Besides, the most popular cult favorite in any particular culture is always overrated. So why would you care, that who is Jar Jar.
I've got one of the original Pilots, and for me and lots of others it's a tool. And an extremely useful one.
I use it for scheduling and as an address book, but I also manage my finances on it, and used it in Italy to help me converse. To see how much a Pilot can do, check out the apps for it on a site like PilotGear.
My wife however, simply uses it to play tetris. Some people just don't get it. But that doesn't stop me from enjoying my Pilot!
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.)
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?
My problem is, if he's cast as Anakin, I'll spend the entire time thinking "Hey, that's the guy from Titanic! What's he doing with a light sabre?". When I _should_ be thinking "Hey, NOW I understand why Anakin turned to evil!"
I spent the entire (almost) showing of Piano thinking to myself,"Hey that's the woman from Broadcast News...", but that doesn't stop Piano from being a GREAT movie. Sometimes it really depends which one you watch first. I bet a lot of people kept saying,"hey when is Chewie show up?" during the first indiana jones movie. Leonardo DiCaprio is a better actor and picks better script than Harrison Ford though.
mace windu: Whoa...whoa...whoa...stop right there. Eatin' a bitch out, and givin' a bitch a foot massage ain't even the same fuckin' thing.
Jar Jar Binks : Not the same thing, the same ballpark.
mace windu: It ain't no ballpark either. Look maybe your method of massage differs from mine, but touchin' his lady's feet, and stickin' your tongue in her holyiest of holies, ain't the same ballpark, ain't the same league, ain't even the same fuckin' sport. Foot massages don't mean shit...
>Women in CS are brighter than men because they have to be in order to get in in the first place.
This is a much of a sexist statement as when some men say that women aren't as good at math.
>>Computing lessons at school consisted of being sat in front of a touch-typing program and expected to become good little secretaries.
When I started learning about computers only about 20 kids in the entire school had access to computers. It was exclusively for the "gifted" kids in my school. I'm from Pittsburgh, our fathers were expected to grow up to be steelworkers.
Being catagorized is not something that only happens to women. A women only scholarship is as patently discriminatory as a whites only water fountain.
>Women in CS are brighter than men because they have to be in order to get in in the first place.
This is a much of a sexist statement as when some men say that women aren't as good at math.
>>Computing lessons at school consisted of being sat in front of a touch-typing program and expected to become good little secretaries.
When I started learning about computers only about 20 kids in the entire school had access to computers. It was exclusively for the "gifted" kids in my school. I'm from Pittsburgh, our fathers were expected to grow up to be steelworkers.
Being catagorized is not something that only happens to women. A women only scholarship is as patently discriminatory as a whites only water fountain.
When I was a kid, it was a big deal that I knew how to use a computer. As time went on everyone learned how. When I was in my teens it was a big deal that I could write computer programs. Now, it's an elective at most colleges.
And the one thing I had left, the one thing that I thought that only time would take away from me is just about to be made obsolete. Now any jerk with enough money can have a big penis too.
Bill Gates can walk his (I'm assuming) needle pricked body over to a plastic surgeon and get a special deluxe John Holmes model grown up in a few weeks.
This is a dangerous obesession. But the linux guys aren't the half of it. Windows wants nothing less than total global computer domination. Anyone that disagrees is a fool. Linux was started with the notion of putting linux on a PC. Whoo pee. Who cares. Then There was the amazing free policy with linux.
FREE? Since WHEN is software free?!
Suddenly Microsoft aggressivly tries to force Netscape out of buisness, and crushes any competition with IBM OS/2 Warp, and makes macs look like jokes, when both are very capable operating systems. Do you think that this has changed?
I recently saw the "Pirates of Silicon Valley" movie, and I am sure that all of Microsofts NT team is working 90 hours a week, around the damn clock with nothing on thier mind but making this OS faster, faster and more faster? Wrong. They are there to beat linux. To destroy it. As they have the legacy of Netscape and countless other software companys that we never heard of, because they were bought for code, supplies, workers, whatever.
I feel that the Linux people are more comitted to having a goal to show Microsoft that we won't put up with aggressive tactics, false advertizing (case in point) and other things. I'm sure the list goes on and on.
Microsoft is now "The Machine" that Bill fought so hard against back in the day. He stole. Linux will CREATE. That is only my opinion.
Oh, and since I got into college, more and more I find that coding is art, not science. Ecclectic coding artists all over the planet, and I am sure that they are very passionate about thier cause. I hope to be one of them soon.
So next time everyone is yelling at each other about which is better, think of it more like art critics. They can ramble on forever.
A German magazine was outraged by these false claims, got the newest fastest version of German Linux, which I consider to be the best, fastest and most reliable linux, and did real world tests to see what happened. I have to hand it to the germans! Kudos!
But what happens when NT5 comes! AHHH!!!! Get to work open source and freeware guys!
Like most things, this will start out intended for only 'Serious' use, then the floodgates will open and it will become the pop thing to do. Remember, Edison never expected or wanted the phonograph to be used for entertainment. He invisioned it only for business and governmental communication.
@wheeee! you thought piercings were bad, you ain't seen __nothing__ yet!
It's interesting that a more even-handed test at NewMedia rates OS X Server as seven times faster than NT: http://www.newmedia.com/newmedia/99/06/labreport /Mac_vs_World.html
The full review is here: http://www.newmedia.com/newmedia/99/06/labreport /Ready_to_Serve.html
You ask "why should management care"? Well, management cares because of the old fashioned values: money, money and money.
While at a major Silicon Valley company, I set up dozens of PalmPilots for salespeople, various vice presidents, and such and got them to synchronize with the Solaris calendaring system. The IS departments wouldn't help, and I always help out a VP. The short version is that I spent about $10,000 of my time supporting those cheap devices.
So the PalmPilot is an electronic tool. Like most electronic tools, it quickly requires instruction, infrastructure, experts, and time to keep running. It's worth evaluating these tools in terms of the productivity they bring.
And don't underestimate HandSpring! Donna and Jeff made the first round of devices usable. If they can double the rate that a user can use them, and halve the amount of random hassle, then they will succeed again.
Slashdot Mirror
Posted by 2B||!2B:
When many of us threatened to forever pull all content from GeoCities and to never ever use or link to Yahoo again, they changed the terms immediately. My own mail to them included the something to the effect "The customer is always right, and I'm the customer. Respect us, and we will return the favor. Piss us off and you will forever regret it." Oh, how the mighty fall!
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.
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...
(This is the short version of my licensing rant, because I'm tired. Come to OLS and you can hear the whole thing.)
If you'd rather contribute your code under a BSD license, you're in luck. The MPL is basically a file-granularity BSD license, sans advertising clause. Because of that granularity, new code you write in new files can be MPL'd, though changes you make the NPL'd code will still be under the NPL. This means that you could add mynewcoolthing.c under the MPL, and NSCP/AOL would have no special rights to it. And we at Mozilla would happily take that new file into the CVS tree and cherish it greatly.
I understand that people don't like the NPL-takeback clause very much; I'm not a big fan either -- though I understand the reasons for them, and they are good reasons, covered at length in the mozilla.license newsgroup -- and I'm lobbying gently to have more new code be written that is MPL'd rather than NPL'd. We'll see how much progress I can make. (Probably not much before 5.0 ships, perhaps more after.)
As far as whether it's Free Software, both the NPL and MPL were deemed to meet the DFSG, which was then the canonical metric for such things. I'm sorry it's not free enough for you, and I do sympathize with your concerns, but there aren't a lot of other options, unfortunately.
(Note: IANAL, though I was involved in the NPL design discussions pretty much from the start. I'll see if I can get some legal type to follow up, but I'm not confident that I can.)
Posted by Lord Kano-The Gangster Of Love:
His obsession with financial achievement is indicative of a man who feels that he has to make up for something.
LK
(You're making a lot of often-made objections, which is actually sort of handy: I can get my responses to all of them in one place.) That the plugins are part of the source tree is not a very damning observation, I don't think. Some build mechanics to permit you to build ONLY select portions of the code would be a nice addition, I agree, but it hasn't been a priority so far. We're taking patches, of course, and people have been discussing a SeaMonkeyBase CVS tag that would allow you to pull without the optional componentry. FWIW, the GIMP source tree also contains a fair number of plugins. (The Linux kernel is even more similar to Mozilla in this area, in that it contains various optional modular bits scattered all over the source tree.)
As far as using third-party components:
- Using GTK on non-Unix platforms was something that even the GTK authors counselled against. Making GTK work on the Mac would be a difficult and time consuming thing, and then you get to the best part: GTK widgets aren't suitable for our HTML-display purposes. You can't do all sorts of things that you need for HTML4, like partial opacity, and there isn't complete Unicode support (a major requirement, which is coming in GTK 1.3, too late for our 5.0 plans). So we really had no choice but to render our own widgets. Sorry, but there was lots of discussion about this in the newsgroups months ago, and that's how it turned out.
- Using libxml isn't really an option at this point, but we _do_ use an external XML parser: expat existed before Mozilla, and is being used by other projects.
- Um, pal, we do use the system libgif and libpng, if they're of the appropriate version:
/usr/lib/libpng.so.2 (0x4000b000) - There are no cross-platform graphical mail/news readers that I know of, and besides -- you can implement the required interfaces (not many: just a mailto: handler and some logic to get yourself in the menus) and have it call out to mutt or Eudora(tm) or whatever turns you on. (As an aside, you could do that in later 4.0x/4.5 incarnations as well. There's sample code on developer.netscape.com that shows how.) Netscape decided that they wanted to spend resources on developing a cross-platform, standards-based, etc., etc., mail/news client, so they did that.
So, I'm glad we think alike: using suitable existing alternatives is a great thing. But where they're not suitable, we make our own. Not a lot of choice there.[shaver@loonie:components]$ ldd libnspng.so
libpng.so.2 =>
Again -- research! =) And the JPEG library in Mozilla is actually owned partially by Tom Lane of JPEG Group fame, so if you send patches to the canonical libjpeg people, even those without an appropriate version will be able to take advantage of them. (Similarly with libpng and libgif, I believe.)
Now, your objection to having a mail/news client at all is a bit troublesome: are you saying that it was a failure of Mozilla that Netscape wanted a mail/news client that was cross-platform and tightly integrated, etc.? Perhaps you'd have had them work on other things, but then perhaps Netscape would rather have had you hacking on Mozilla for the past year, rather than whatever it is you were doing instead.
As far as ``a Java-specific-interface'', I'll agree that OJI is designed to allow pluggable JVMs, yes. I'm not sure why that's bad; the network protocol API is designed to allow plugging network protocols in as well: that's how those things are designed. There are a lot of rather generic and flexible interfaces in the Mozilla client, though -- what would you like to plug in that you can't? We'll almost always take patches to add better modularity.
(Lots of people will say ``you should be doing this instead of that'', but then...they can't help do that because they don't have the time. Kinda frustrating. At the end of the day, the person writing the code makes the call, though Mozilla exerts influence where it can to make sure that the right thing for the code wins the day. If you've got strong opinions about things, come to the Mozilla newsgroups and share them. It's getting late in the game for major design shifts, but there's still time to make your voice heard in many areas. C'mon out!)
Posted by Mad Paintball Terrorist:
I refuse to read any story that originates from Yahoo or has anything to do with Yahoo until they change their stance on Geocities
Happily, Mozilla has taken that route. Java? It's a plugin (OJI). Image decoding? All formats are plugins (libnsjpg.so, libnspng.so, libnsgif.so, etc.). Network protocols? They're all plugins. Bookmarks? You guessed it! Mail and news support. C'mon -- everyone together now: pluggable! Un-pluggable! Re-cross-counter-hyper-pluggable! Editor? Character set converters? History? Cookie and pref editing? Find dialog? You see where I'm going here. (Mozilla puts the ``plug'' in ``pluggable'', or something like that.)
(I find it a little annoying when people make pronouncements about the architecture when they apparently haven't done research. Take a look...you'll like it!)
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 My_Favorite_Anonymous_Coward:
Since you honestly want an answer, here it (my version ) goes.
SW(ep4) has never been a great movie. It's a very decent one, nobody claim it to be the 2001. It didn't have the best si-fi battle scene (aliens), The sequels weren't excessing the visual masterpieces of its time (Dark City, Brazil, Fifth Element, Brade Runner or even Matrix) A lot of the movies I mentioned had the chance to become God of si-fi except that none of the creators qualify these requirments: 1) A creator sticks with his work for the reat of his life even though he/she has enough money to afford not doing so. 2) Make endless parade of action figure; actual negative films; Behide the scene specials; SW tour hosted by and Chewie actor and Vader body double; Any cult-related merchandise. 3) Release astronomical number of SW video games.
The very bottom line of it is that as an director, you have to give up your artistic version and stick to your most succesful work for the rest of your life. And George Lucas is the only one who can do it. Why would you, you couldn't, not even George Lazenby. Besides, the most popular cult favorite in any particular culture is always overrated. So why would you care, that who is Jar Jar.
CY
Posted by TerryBitts:
I've got one of the original Pilots, and for me and lots of others it's a tool. And an extremely useful one.
I use it for scheduling and as an address book, but I also manage my finances on it, and used it in Italy to help me converse. To see how much a Pilot can do, check out the apps for it on a site like PilotGear.
My wife however, simply uses it to play tetris. Some people just don't get it. But that doesn't stop me from enjoying my Pilot!
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.)
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?
Posted by My_Favorite_Anonymous_Coward:
My problem is, if he's cast as Anakin, I'll spend the entire time thinking "Hey, that's the guy from
Titanic! What's he doing with a light sabre?". When I _should_ be thinking "Hey, NOW I
understand why Anakin turned to evil!"
I spent the entire (almost) showing of Piano thinking to myself,"Hey that's the woman from Broadcast News...", but that doesn't stop Piano from being a GREAT movie. Sometimes it really depends which one you watch first. I bet a lot of people kept saying,"hey when is Chewie show up?" during the first indiana jones movie. Leonardo DiCaprio is a better actor and picks better script than Harrison Ford though.
CY
Posted by My_Favorite_Anonymous_Coward:
mace windu: Whoa...whoa...whoa...stop right there. Eatin' a bitch out, and givin' a bitch a foot massage ain't even the same fuckin' thing.
Jar Jar Binks : Not the same thing, the same ballpark.
mace windu: It ain't no ballpark either. Look maybe your method of massage differs from mine, but touchin' his lady's feet, and stickin' your tongue in her holyiest of holies, ain't the same ballpark, ain't the same league, ain't even the same fuckin' sport. Foot massages don't mean shit...
Posted by Lord Kano-The Gangster Of Love:
>Women in CS are brighter than men because they have to be in order to get in in the first place.
This is a much of a sexist statement as when some men say that women aren't as good at math.
>>Computing lessons at school consisted of being sat in front of a touch-typing program and expected to become good little secretaries.
When I started learning about computers only about 20 kids in the entire school had access to computers. It was exclusively for the "gifted" kids in my school. I'm from Pittsburgh, our fathers were expected to grow up to be steelworkers.
Being catagorized is not something that only happens to women. A women only scholarship is as patently discriminatory as a whites only water fountain.
LK
Posted by Lord Kano-The Gangster Of Love:
>Women in CS are brighter than men because they have to be in order to get in in the first place.
This is a much of a sexist statement as when some men say that women aren't as good at math.
>>Computing lessons at school consisted of being sat in front of a touch-typing program and expected to become good little secretaries.
When I started learning about computers only about 20 kids in the entire school had access to computers. It was exclusively for the "gifted" kids in my school. I'm from Pittsburgh, our fathers were expected to grow up to be steelworkers.
Being catagorized is not something that only happens to women. A women only scholarship is as patently discriminatory as a whites only water fountain.
LK
Posted by Lord Kano-The Gangster Of Love:
When I was a kid, it was a big deal that I knew how to use a computer. As time went on everyone learned how. When I was in my teens it was a big deal that I could write computer programs. Now, it's an elective at most colleges.
And the one thing I had left, the one thing that I thought that only time would take away from me is just about to be made obsolete. Now any jerk with enough money can have a big penis too.
Bill Gates can walk his (I'm assuming) needle pricked body over to a plastic surgeon and get a special deluxe John Holmes model grown up in a few weeks.
DAMMIT!!!!
LK
Posted by Phantom of the Operating Syste:
umm, yeah, that..that is exactly it.
@.@
I really shouldn't be suprised. I am
kinda suprised at what the one twin gave up.
-phantom
Posted by My_Favorite_Anonymous_Coward:
I pretty much 95% sure that AOL has already made their AolToaster/AOLbox/AolOS and silently waiting for the MS anti-trust case to finish.
CY
Posted by viperx2:
This is a dangerous obesession. But the linux guys aren't the half of it. Windows wants nothing less than total global computer domination. Anyone that disagrees is a fool. Linux was started with the notion of putting linux on a PC. Whoo pee. Who cares. Then There was the amazing free policy with linux.
FREE? Since WHEN is software free?!
Suddenly Microsoft aggressivly tries to force Netscape out of buisness, and crushes any competition with IBM OS/2 Warp, and makes macs look like jokes, when both are very capable operating systems. Do you think that this has changed?
I recently saw the "Pirates of Silicon Valley" movie, and I am sure that all of Microsofts NT team is working 90 hours a week, around the damn clock with nothing on thier mind but making this OS faster, faster and more faster? Wrong. They are there to beat linux. To destroy it. As they have the legacy of Netscape and countless other software companys that we never heard of, because they were bought for code, supplies, workers, whatever.
I feel that the Linux people are more comitted to having a goal to show Microsoft that we won't put up with aggressive tactics, false advertizing (case in point) and other things. I'm sure the list goes on and on.
Microsoft is now "The Machine" that Bill fought so hard against back in the day. He stole. Linux will CREATE. That is only my opinion.
Oh, and since I got into college, more and more I find that coding is art, not science. Ecclectic coding artists all over the planet, and I am sure that they are very passionate about thier cause. I hope to be one of them soon.
So next time everyone is yelling at each other about which is better, think of it more like art critics. They can ramble on forever.
Viper-X
Posted by viperx2:
A German magazine was outraged by these false claims, got the newest fastest version of German Linux, which I consider to be the best, fastest and most reliable linux, and did real world tests to see what happened. I have to hand it to the germans! Kudos!
But what happens when NT5 comes! AHHH!!!! Get to work open source and freeware guys!
Viper-X
Posted by Phantom of the Operating Syste:
Like most things, this will start out intended for only 'Serious' use, then the floodgates will open and it will become the pop thing to do. Remember, Edison never expected or wanted the phonograph to be used for entertainment. He invisioned it only for business and governmental communication.
@wheeee! you thought piercings were bad, you ain't seen __nothing__ yet!
-phantom
Posted by ChristianC:
t /Mac_vs_World.html
t /Ready_to_Serve.html
It's interesting that a more even-handed test at NewMedia rates OS X Server as seven times faster than NT:
http://www.newmedia.com/newmedia/99/06/labrepor
The full review is here:
http://www.newmedia.com/newmedia/99/06/labrepor
Posted by The Devout Capitalist:
You ask "why should management care"? Well, management cares because of the old fashioned values: money, money and money.
While at a major Silicon Valley company, I set up dozens of PalmPilots for salespeople, various vice presidents, and such and got them to synchronize with the Solaris calendaring system. The IS departments wouldn't help, and I always help out a VP. The short version is that I spent about $10,000 of my time supporting those cheap devices.
So the PalmPilot is an electronic tool. Like most electronic tools, it quickly requires instruction, infrastructure, experts, and time to keep running. It's worth evaluating these tools in terms of the productivity they bring.
And don't underestimate HandSpring! Donna and Jeff made the first round of devices usable. If they can double the rate that a user can use them, and halve the amount of random hassle, then they will succeed again.