Mitch Kapor Warns Against Firefox Gloating 257
An anonymous reader writes "Mitch Kapor, Lotus co-founder and president and chair of the Open Source Applications Foundation, says open-source advocates should be relatively cautious and avoid making claims and predictions despite the huge success of Firefox. He also briefly touches on Chandler in a ZDNet interview. Chandler is OSAF's personal information manager which will offer e-mail, calendaring, address and task management. The goal for Chandler, Kapor says, is to make it as successful and popular as Firefox."
Re:irony? (Score:2, Informative)
misleading news again (Score:3, Informative)
He barely talk about cautiousness in ONE sentence in ONE paragraph in a 2 PAGES article!
Nobody knows what's going to happen. It's certainly not inevitable that Firefox's market share will continue to increase. I think open-source advocates would do well to be relatively cautious and avoid making claims and predictions.
He isnt even talking about gloating!!!
Re:Be careful... (Score:3, Informative)
IE for me tends to pause before displaying the page. On broadband, it's an annoying splitsecond wait for no good reason. On dial up, it's an average of 30 seconds staring at a blank screen.
IE also seems to ALWAYS reload a page when you go back to it, or forward to it.
Now, comparing to Opera (which I use far more), I have no white screen display with Opera. SOMETHING is displayed immediately, on either connection speed. And Opera will show most or all of the text of a page, even if the images are still downloading.
Back and forward are instant. I was just there, why would Opera reload the page? It even keeps the dialogue box entries that I've filled in, so if I accidentally click off of the page, I don't lose everything.
Now, with FF I can only comment on the page loading... It seemed similar to Opera. The rest IDK as I'm happy with Opera.
Re:Hey Mitch (Score:3, Informative)
Mitch Kapor started Lotus in 1982; he was Director until 1987, at which point he ceased to have anything to do with Lotus. Notes was brought to market in 1989. The only connection Kapor has with Notes is the relationship between Notes and Agenda, a stillborn product that Kapor was involved with.
Lotus was sold to IBM in 1995. Nowadays, Lotus is little more than a brand name of the IBM software group.
If you have a beef with Lotus or Notes, have the courtesy to complain to the right person. Whinge to IBM, not Mitch Kapor.
And if you think porting to a new platform "is not too much work", then I can tell you have never written any commercial grade client software. Java or no, cross platform support is NEVER just a matter of a recompile.
Russ %-)
Re:What's up with Chandler ? (Score:2, Informative)
Innovation is very much in the eye of the beholder, but Chandler's main "new" feature is its repository. It's there, it works.
Fundamentally, Chandler isn't trying to copy Outlook. It's a lot easier to copy than to create something really new. No disrespect intended towards the Ximian folks, they've done great work. But developing new standards and new architectures is really, really hard work, no one appreciates it until it's too late to change anything.
It would be interesting to compare the first 3 years' budgets of Ximian and OSAF. I expect that while OSAF started with more money in the bank, it wasn't paying that many coders until the last year or two.
While I agree with you that the Chandler team's initial vision didn't start as focused as it needed to get, your examples are really odd.
A once sentence description of Chandler might be, "A PIM that shares data between users with very low barrier to entry and allows data to be any combination of notes, tasks, events, and messages".
My memory is that RDF got thrown out pretty much right away, which is why it seems like an odd example to me. Besides, RDF still makes sense as an export target for a lot of Chandler's data, Chandler and RDF both allow for arbitrarily linked trees of information.
Jabber (XMPP) was (and still is) on the table because it's an IETF standard for instant messaging. XMPP's a very appealing way to do application level message passing.
Full disclosure: I do work for OSAF
Re:who would gloat? (Score:3, Informative)
If you are referring to Gecko (which I believe you are), AFAIK it most certainly does _not_ break the DOM; rather, it is the stupid and poorly written JS and CSS tricks you describe which use proprietary DOM features available from a certain rendering engine...
Re:Sour Grapes but with a cautionary note (Score:3, Informative)
Firefox is just a new version, and a new name, for a product that has continuity going back very far, that used to have 95% market share.