Firefox Developer on Recruitment Policy 300
wikinerd writes "A Firefox developer talks about the project's controversial invitation-only developer recruitment policy and explains why Firefox will never grow up."
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Firefox Developer on Recruitment Policy
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Always try to do things in chronological order; it's less confusing that way.
Then what exactly is Open ? (Score:5, Interesting)
Hopefully firefox will not go into that Elitist arena which blocks out young developers...
All that said, I had to work for 3 months almost full time to get commit access on what I work on . But we've had a guy who would steam roll the patch database with useless patches and report all kinds of pedantic bugs to pester us into giving commit access (and for his notice, that doesn't get you anywhere).
A single strategy doesn't work for all types
The great thing about open source (Score:3, Interesting)
Only if the developers think you're good enough of course.
Re:They set themselves up in a Catch-22 (Score:3, Interesting)
Well they're not gonna give every single person out there commit access to the repository, are they? If you want to be able to directly change a section of the code, you need to prove your abilities. Which is fair enough.
Devs do not care for enterprise features (Score:4, Interesting)
What about plugins? (Score:3, Interesting)
Not sure if plugins are included in this apparently elitist policy - I can't RTFA because it's slashdotted naturally.
Re:Devs do not care for enterprise features (Score:5, Interesting)
The extension system is integrated into Firefox and designed to be used. The real problem with the Kiosk mode is that that extension looks like it hasn't been kept up-to-date/has ceased development.
In the future (maybe 1.1), I think the Firefox developers will probably include the most popular extensions in the Firefox installer to make it even easier to do additional stuff like this.
Re:They set themselves up in a Catch-22 (Score:4, Interesting)
Openness, huh?
I always thought open source meant the source was free to be used, modified, imnproved and adapted. It does not, to my recollection, mean that those maintaining a given heap o' code have to take "all comers", or even have to have a formal mechanism in place to consider adding to their number.
I don't know what kinds of projects y'all work on, but where I come from, when someone comes up asking to join a project, or asks for collaboration, in the name of "The community", "the open source ideal", or other high-falutin' sounds, it usually boils down to one of a series of options:
A) Can you give me lessons?
B) Can you spend time working on my project?
C) Can I boost my own social position by claiming to work for you guys?
If you have the luxury of an abundance of people who want to work on your free project, you pick the ones who are most capable of doing work with the least amount of management. Going through a list of submitted applications is not the most efficient way to do this. You find who's doing good work, and talk them into working for you.
If someone has a brilliant vision for OSS, that person is usually better served realizing that vision in a dedicate project. Giants on the shoulders of dwarves.
Open Source? (Score:5, Interesting)
Why then, after 5 (almost 6) years, is the outline property in CSS not supported? Why is there no one able to fully implement this? Yes, I know about -moz-outline, but it's -moz-outline because they don't trust their own code enough after 5 years.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6647
pet peeve (Score:5, Interesting)
It's bug 188285. Have a look if you're interested.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
What's up with the link? (Score:2, Interesting)
Openness on the BSD side (Score:3, Interesting)
Did you miss the OpenBSD forking because the rest of the previous BSD team
http://www.netbsd.org/People/core.html
I humbly submit that no one needs to learn anything from the BSD process. Next time, don't make such clueless statements. On Slashdot, people who know the history of Unix are a dime a dozen.
In fact, if you knew anything about the BSD approach, you would realize that the Firefox group seems to be approaching the exact same level of arrogance. I only hope we don't end up with three pointless forks..Open Firefox anyone? The pointless infighting and forking of BSD was the reason they were hasbeens instead of competition to Linux.
Re:Other groups (Score:4, Interesting)
After all, not everyone in Debian are the smartest coder.
Firefox actually want the 'smartest coders' that work with their codebase.
While it is certainly elitist, it makes sure that only the elite (dedication plus skill) get to work on their branch of the browser. If that ends up making it work faster, more robustly and more efficiently, then all to the better.
A small team of highly skilled individuals can often achieve more than a large pool of medium skilled people, and usually far more than a huge team of mediocrely skilled people.
Everyone they compete with (corporate entities, such as MS and Opera) is pretty much guaranteed to be elitist (they'll hire the best coders and designers they can at interview), so why shouldn't the firefox team?
Of course, as has been noted, if you think you can do better with your choice of team recruitment, then fork the project, and see which one survives.
Word and Deed (Score:2, Interesting)
People sometimes ask why we work on Firefox for free. It gets hard to keep a straight face at work. Give me another project that touches the lives of millions of people worldwide and still has public codenames like The Ocho which get published in the media.
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I find it hard to keep my lunch down when I read such self-aggrandising bullshit.
Then they lock out other developers so they can't fucking choose a fucking codename just in case it dilutes their moment in the media spotlight.
So they seem arrogant both in word and deed.
Re:Open Source? (Score:1, Interesting)
I'm starting to believe that some people view the OSS movement as an excuse to be lazy. Why bother writing decent code if you can just bullshit everyone else into doing it for you? Of course there are lazy assholes in every crowd that make the whole group look bad.
FF has been way too overhyped and now it can't live up to it's expectations. It is a new fledgling browser with minimal functionality and minimal stability. It is nowhere near a replacement or competitor for IE, Opera, or Netscape. Honestly I don't think it was anywhere near ready for a full page NYT ad, especially if I can't do my online banking with it.
Debian (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Word and Deed (Score:3, Interesting)
-- LarryWall, ProgrammingPerl (1st edition), O'Reilly & Associates
In the second edition of the book (which sports not only LarryWall as author, but also Tom Christiansen and Randal L. Schwartz as co-authors), there is a glossary which has pithy definitions for each of these terms:
Laziness
The quality that makes you go to great effort to reduce overall energy expenditure. It makes you write labor-saving programs that other people will find useful, and document what you wrote so you don't have to answer so many questions about it. Hence, the first great virtue of a programmer, Also hence, this book. See also impatience and hubris. (p.609)
Impatience
The anger you feel when the computer is being lazy. This makes you write programs that don't just react to your needs, but actually anticipate them. Or at least pretend to. Hence, the second great virtue of a programmer. See also laziness and hubris. (p.608)
Hubris
Excessive pride, the sort of thing Zeus zaps you for. Also the quality that makes you write (and maintain) programs that other people won't want to say bad things about. Hence, the third great virtue of a programmer. See also laziness and impatience. (p.607)
Re:They set themselves up in a Catch-22 (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:obligatory link (Score:3, Interesting)
What the hell is WRONG with a community where the basic CONCEPT of "karma whoring" can be regarded as a "bad thing". Yes, some people copy and paste an entire article for some moronic moderator to pump them up to +5, but
argh, I can't even express it adequately
It's just karma. It's a little point scale. It does not validate your existence. Stop putting so bloody much importance on it.
criminy. end rant.
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:They set themselves up in a Catch-22 (Score:4, Interesting)
Then the next bug I simply file the report, ask if its valid, and if so submit the patch to bugzilla again. Once this happens a few times it becomes more time consuming to manage my contributions than to let me contribute directly, and I usually get requested to commit directly to cvs. I actually prefer not to have that burdeon/responsibility
Re:XFree is still at it? (Score:4, Interesting)
The Cygwin folks already had to fork XFree because of the orgainization's refusal to accept patches. And Cygwin was far from being the only ones annoyed with XFree. It was just easier for distros to stick with XFree instead of maintaining their own, and causing a political mess.
The license change was merely the last straw, and was very indicative of how XFree operated. By unilaterally changing the license, then refusing to work with the people who ship their product on fixing it, they showed an even higher level of elitism than before. By this time there was a large enough group X11 developers that were doing great work, but not part of XFree (mainly Keith Packard), that the distros had somewhere else to turn.
So it was more than a simple license change I'm afraid. They kept some of the best developers doing the most innovative work outside of the group, and alienated the very people who distributed their product. Their own elitism made them completely irrelivant in the development of X11, which was supposed to be the entire purpose for XFree's existance.
It is not impossible that this could happen to Firefox too, but right now they are the main drivers in the browser market, and generally are keeping their use base happy. No reason to worry quite yet.