Mozilla Dev Team On Firefox's Success 184
Titus Germanicus writes "If you're thinking about open sourcing a project in the near future, Mozilla might be the perfect blueprint to follow. At last week's Mesh 2008 conference in Canada, Mike Shaver, chief technology evangelist and founding member at Mozilla, and John Resig, a JavaScript evangelist at Mozilla — two of the key figures behind the success of Mozilla's Firefox Web browser — listed inclusivity and transparency as two of the top cornerstones of any community-built project. Shaver said in this interview that because the Web is intended for everybody, the level same openness should be shared with Firefox's open source contributors."
The prefect blueprint? (Score:5, Informative)
The original Netscape code was abandoned in favor of a complete rewrite. Eventually the main product was considered so bloated that a lightweight version was needed. Eventually the main product was dropped in favor of the lightweight system, which had to have not one but two name changes, and is now fairly widely considered bloated, despite its original goal.
I'd say that while Mozilla has done quite well overall, it could hardly be considered a good blueprint to follow.
Re:Of course, it's so simple! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Yea right. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Yea right. (Score:3, Informative)
Regarding Standards Compliance (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Yea right. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Yea right. (Score:3, Informative)
http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2008/01/21/compatibility-and-ie8.aspx [msdn.com]
http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/200611/three_reasons_sites_break_in_internet_explorer_7/ [456bereastreet.com]
http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2006/10/why_internet_ex.html [wired.com]
Re:Not our experience (Score:5, Informative)
They make a pretty good browser, but man those developers are a buncha dicks.
Re:The prefect blueprint? (Score:1, Informative)
Re:The prefect blueprint? (Score:5, Informative)
I agree that Mozilla's branding of FF and promotional deals were great for them, and that everyone is copying that, but let's not pretend it was all planned from the beginning.
Re:Not our experience (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Not our experience (Score:5, Informative)
If so:
-- I'm sorry.
-- Looks like Robert Longson slipped up by not copying over contributor information. But I don't see any complaints from your people about that in the bugs. (Note, he's a volunteer, not paid by Mozilla or anyone else.) Would be easy to fix.
-- Tim Rowley got taken off Firefox SVG work by IBM which partly explains why the patch never got final review.
-- Looks like "25% no longer required", not 80%.
-- I don't see any sign of your displeasure anywhere in these bugs. People are busy, timely hurry-up gripes usually help prioritize things.
Re:Not our experience (Score:3, Informative)
Re:The prefect blueprint? (Score:3, Informative)
Netscape's engine couldn't scale -- it was such a horrific mess that probably very few things could be salvaged.
Netscape 3 was great for its days. Then Netscape 4 came and it was simply a pile of shit in terms of stability and bugs (I'm not even mentioning standards compliance - remember the layer and ilayer tags?). There were so many rendering bugs it woulld make IE6 seem immaculate. It's been 10 years since I've had the displeasure of developing for it, but I still remember how I needed to add an invisible border to a div in order for it to be positioned correctly.
So in this respect, they got it right by creating a new, modern rendering engine, one that can scale in the future.
Re:The prefect blueprint? (Score:4, Informative)
BTW, I'm not sure you're aware of this, but Joel Spolsky wrote an article about rewriting software from scratch, titled "Things You Should Never Do": http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html [joelonsoftware.com] Personally, I'm with you, I agree with every word he says.
(He also writes a later article, I can't find it at the moment, where he describes Netscape release schedule:
* Release whatever you have with no cleanup or testing, call it version x.0
* Whenever there's a bug severe enough to get covered in the New York Times, bump the version number up a point
Sadly, far too many open source projects use that same release philosophy.)
Re:"Awesome" Bar (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Not our experience (Score:5, Informative)
It's not clear exactly what you did here, but it sounds like what you did is just start coding, then come to Mozilla a few months later and say, "hey! we have code for you!"
No that isn't what we did.
We consulted with the module owner first before contributing any code. And then we participated in half a dozen reviews after we submitted code, each time adjusting minor stylistic coding practices to match the reviewers arbitrary directives.
And then the reviewer guy lifted 6 other bug fixes from our code body, submitted them in his name without acknlowedging our coders.
And then the reviewer said we have to rewrite our patch to get it considered since it now contains redundant code.
Re:"Awesome" Bar (Score:2, Informative)
It's just a different setting now!
Re:Of course, it's so simple! (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/sharedsource/Licensing/default.mspx [microsoft.com]
You can also have BSD in a closed source, commercial OS/Software. That is why BSD is the choice for companies like Apple or originally Microsoft.
MS is a evil company, not like they can't code a TCP/IP stack. They didn't see TCP/IP and Internet coming though.
Re:Not our experience (Score:2, Informative)
FYI, that bug affected the title text (which is supposed to be displayed in addition to the element it's attached to), not the alt text (which is meant to be displayed instead of the element it's attached to). xkcd [xkcd.com] is frequently cited as a good example of this bug in action, you can examine the page source to see where the title and alt attributes are used.
Re:Fix the GUI (Score:3, Informative)