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Open Source Critque in Forbes 106

Posted by Hemos from the why-does-mozilla-not-zil dept.
Anonymous Coward writes "A recent article in Forbes does a decent job of understanding open source and offers some suggestions as to why Mozilla is struggling. "
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Open Source Critque in Forbes More

Open Source Critque in Forbes

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  • A brick of salt (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    /* Can you name anything innovative open source projects going on right now? I sure can't. */

    Perl
    Python
    TCL/TK
    Apache
    Sendmail
    DNS/Bind
    Beowulf

  • A pillar of salt..... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Any example a person brings up (Einsteinian physics for example) can be dismissed as just a modification of a previously existing idea (Newtonian physics).


    Ah, I was thinking about this today, except it was about relativity, Einstein may have pointed it out to a community that cared, but Galaleya pointed out that the earth and all the planets revolved around the sun, in this way the concept of relativity was there.

    Anyway, all that we create is not really innovative and creative when it comes down to it. Even when we think we randomly think up a number, there is always a reason our minds chose that number, it was just not made relavant to our conscience were we came up with that number. So, when we created great planes we copied birds, when the helicopter was created it was probably from a feather or leaf falling. There is no such thing as magicaly being inovative or creative, its about putting things together and figuring out the nature of things.

    To finish (since I'm ranting), inovation does not come from closed source or open source, it comes from people, and it doesn't necesarily mean heavily paid people working for a corperation, it could be teachers, students, or just even the every day average hobbiest. The only reason we tend to think of inovation as business is because businesses are usually leeches off of inovation, Micros~1 is a good example of that, they either steal or buy out inovation.

  • The FUD just keeps on coming (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    It is really interesting to watch the industry. When MS was preoccupied with the DOJ trail there was little FUD from MS friends (PCWeek, Forbes, WUGNET etc). Now since we know that the DOJ trial will do little in changing MS's course the MS marketing masters have started slinging the FUD. (Linux is a small market, OpenSource is following the taillights, etc, etc, etc)

    What is really interesting are the comments like I have been using LINUX since (insert year here), but (insert bad comment here)

    I myself am a Windows dude, but do UNIX for corporates. Like all the others I have done LINUX (insert year here). However, I have to say that many people just do not get the point of LINUX. The news media and other people expect instant gratification. For example if Mozilla does not succeed within a year, its dead. Now Mozilla is becoming interesting with GECKO and NECKO. LINUX took how many years????

    The true innovation of software is not "Push button and watch my icon flap". The true innovation is building systems that work together regardless of the background. There are people from the various OS's working together to solve a problem. For example BSD, Solaris and Linux. Sure they are UNIX's, but they still work together. The folks writing code are united. It is organic development in its coolest form. Sure there will always be binary software. But open source has taught everyone to "think differently"

    The true innovation is LINUX, BSD, Apache, Perl and what it has brought. How do I know that this is true innovation? Simple the youth programmers (19-21) do not think in terms of int main()... But they think in Perl Scripts, Linux Add-ons, etc. Many have looked at Windows and said, cool, but that is for the old-geezers. Smells like Cobol to me.

    Sure Cobol is still around and many people get paid big bucks, but who would really want to do it. Again, a young friend (19) did COBOL for a summer. Made good money, but then took it off his resume. Why? When the corporates saw COBOL they instantly jumped on that and ignored his other skills.

    Sign of the times...

  • Does Linux Tailgate Microsoft? (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    A lot of /. readers tend to agree that Linux does not tailgate Microsoft technologies. Or does it?

    Ok, here is where M$ loses and Linux Wins. Enlightenment and GTK Themes. Without a doubt ahead of everybody, including Mac's Kaliedescope. But wait, is there a situation where M$ wins and Linux loses, and where Linux is tring to catch up? Yes.

    Put away your flame guns and just listen for once, you Linux wanna-be software designer jerks, lets talk software development. Let's talk CORBA development. Let's talk how KDE and GNOME (which sucks, KDE rocks!) are playing tailgate with M$ technologies. Mainly COM, OLE, ActiveX, etc.... Lets talk about visual developments. Well not M$ tools, but lets talk Borland tools (which also rock, big time!). Let's talk "where is the visual development tools for Linux". Let's talk about "how can I make a custom control?" Let's talk about "how can I visually design an application, and to boot wrap it in a custom control. Boom, suddenly you got all that application's technologies in another program?" Let's talk about Accessing objects dynamically on a machine, locally and remotely.

    There are more examples. But the main point is that there are some M$ techonologies that Linux lacks, and those M$ techonologies are not that bad. COM and ActiveX do make increadibly easy and powerful software development on a large scale. And where is this with gcc in an xterm, editing with vi or emacs?? I looked at Glade for GTK, heh, nope, not even close.

    I like Linux, and I am not totally pro M$, there is good parts in both worlds (oh god, I would do anything for Borland tools for Linux). But to hear these newbie Linux users who bring nothing but anit-M$ flame with little, or no facts, and then arogantly state that Linux plays tailgate with no one definitly has their head up their ass!! Before bashing M$ technologies, why don't you try them out first. Not all, I repeat, not all are that bad (try Borland tools though, because M$ Visual BASIC and Visual C++ do suck).
  • Innovation by commercial, proprietary software? I can list quite a few examples:
    Civilization
    Pretty Good Privacy (PGP)
    All the various CAD programs
    Wolfenstein 3D & co. (doom, quake, unreal, etc.)
    Tetris
    Just about any other graphical game
    Java
    BeOS

    There's tons more, but that's a good start.
  • Problems with your analysis:
    1) the original UNIX operating system was not Open Source. That's why the free UNIX clones don't use any code from the original AT&T UNIX. It was innovative software, but innovative proprietary software.

    2) X would qualify, but that's hardly a project of the free software community. It's a collaboration of the major players in the proprietary UNIX software market. It probably was made free because each was scared of the others controlling it. Now XFree86 is a true Free Software project, but it's not really innovative, since it's just based on the X Consortium's specs.

    There are several innovative Free Software projects, but the majority are, unfortunately, clones of proprietary software. Linux, FreeCiv, GNUStep, and GPG, just to name a few of the more high-profile clones.
  • >What is really interesting are the comments like I have been using LINUX since (insert year here), but (insert bad comment here)

    Ah yes, ye old "false sincerity" distraction method. Usually used when you're lying through your teeth.

    The funny part is when these supposed "experts" make newbie factual errors in their so-called "arguments". Then it becomes obvious to any Linux user that they don't know what they're talking about. Alas, a Microsoft user doesn't know any better...

    -E
  • It is also possible that while the trade-rags think a browser is an awe-inspiring masterpiece
    that made the `hard' internet the `friendly' web in one single move most programmers might
    not give a damn.

    quite a few programmers I know browse with lynx, including on slashdot. Most have all the `extras'
    turned off, hate the idea that java assumes you are not running on a shared machine, and find large
    gifs (especially animated) a waste of time. The discovery of a `shockwave' page is like a sort of shock.

    Also, since it isn't really a `core' product reliability isn't as important an issue as it with
    an operating system.

    In many ways the current netscape or old mosaic are simply `good enough'for many people.

    They also, as has been said, made the error of releasing code that was not useful at the start.
  • >Instead of porting our tools (egcs) to uncommon
    architectures developers are expected to spend additional time on writing the program.

    Unfortunately, they want the final thing to run on Windows 3.1. Who wants to port egcs to that? Not me, that's for sure. So apparently some Mozillers have to suffer using Visual C++ 1.5 and Windows 3.1, ick! I believe Borland 4.5 built Windows 3.1 stuff, so I'm not sure what made them choose Visual.

    (I use Visual C++ 5.0 and 6.0 every day (no MFC, wizards, etc), and must admit it's perfectly respectable as a straightforward development platform.)
  • That was a kick ass little demo...

    I realy liked it... all based on metadata (which was what the demo was demoing) there is supposed to be more use of metadata in MacOS X (there was going to be allot of it according to that rhapsody UI guide that was on the web...)

    I hope that someone eventualy does something cool with it, but Im expecting it to go the way of opendoc... cool concept the power of which only a very few people realy understood.

    eh... what can you do... when the worlds not ready... its just not ready :)
  • Yes, I agree with you that the reason fewer people have helped out with Mozilla is not because they dislike the idea of it being controlled by Netscape and that it has a lot more to do with the utility of the existing code. It is critical that developers can get some immediate results when they add something or change something. Aside from the peer recognition that open source development offers, being able to use what you build is a very important motivational factor. There have been several things making it very difficult for developers to use what they build so far:

    • As you mentioned, the code is monsterous.
    • It does not compile into a usable product. What motivation do developers have to add features or fix bugs when they won't be able to use there changes for some unknown and arbitrary amount of time?
    • The Windows version requires Visual C++ (? or some similar Microsoft product to build). When the code was initially released I downloaded it in hopes of adding some features that I had always wanted to see in a browser. At the time I was mainly using Windows for development (I was writing Java so it didn't matter), but I wasn't about to plunk down $300 for something that I'd only be using for what I considered recreational programming (ok, I might have plunked down $300 if it wouldn't have gone to Microsoft). Well, I'm running Linux full time now so I'll probably give it another shot sometime soon, but over at Mozilla.org they're awfully adamant about code working on all platforms (understandably) so I still don't know what to do about testing it in Windows.

    Fortunately, I see the biggest problem going away very shortly. Mozilla seems to be becoming a product which may actually be usable for day to day use within the next month or two. Once it does, I hope to switch over if only to help find bugs. It's critical that it be usable for day to day use so that finding bugs can be a passive experience rather than a chore.

  • "While open source is generally very good engineering, it's also generally poor in innovation," says James Alchin, Senior VP of the Windows 2000 project, "When you're following the taillights, it's easy to make a decision on what to do next."

    Standard "Open-Source-Can't-Innovate" FUD. Excuse me, but can you say "World Wide Web?" Who is following who's taillights, Jimmy?

    This is such popular FUD, I would love to see someone publish a comprehensive refutation of it. I can think of a few open source innovations, I'm sure others can add more: the original UNIX operating system, the IMAP mail system (some will argue that the UW license isn't really open source, but its close enough), the GUI (I think-wasn't the original X open sourceish?), hrmrmmm it's actually harder than I thought to come up with true innovations that are open source, but I'm not that knowledgeable...

  • Yep. It is much easier to contribute new features, bug fixes, or improvements to a working product. The big rewrites and redesigns have to be done by the arcitect or core team, and for Mozilla, the core team is by default Netscape.
  • He obviously read the Halloween document.

    However, I _do_ think standards or reference implementations are more important in free software projects, than in the traditional commercial settings. When there are no real management, standards or references can be used to settle design arguments between developers.
  • I agree that it is easier (lower barriers to entry) to improve something that already works. So Linus (Linux) and Eric (fetchmail) were able to "scratch that itch", then other folks saw features that could be added to their original core. If we had a running Mozilla, then people would flock to improve it, no?
  • A lot of people have said something to this effect -- but actually the original source which Netscape released was more-or-less functional (albeit rather awkward to build). It's only quite recently that the NGLayout-based system has overtaken the `classic' Mozilla in terms of functional features. But realistically, the chances of the average coder coming in and hacking Mozilla Classic without taking weeks to get up to speed were negligable. The new code is a lot smaller and tidier: it may not be perfect, but at least new coders have a chance with it.

    The Mozilla project has now reached the stage where new coders have the choice between hacking existing modules or working on completely new ones (Necko, for instance). Hopefully it can now make good progress, to a 5.0 release and beyond.

  • But, they are right when they say it is crappy. I do understand that writting a browser is a huge task, but, if you look at other projects like KDE and gnome (other HUGE tasks), they are delivering something.
    Once you start looking closely at what Mozilla offers, I think you'll that it's at least as big a project as the DEs, maybe even bigger. Yet it's only been seriously off the ground for six months or so. The DEs took a lot longer than that, and are still getting a lot of polishing done to them.

    Okay, M4 had plenty of bugs. But look a little deeper and there was also plenty of stuff which works great, and works today. It's getting there.

    Anyway, even if they can't get back their old market share under windows, we Unix users still need a decent browser from somewhere...

  • The trouble with "innovative" is that it is a bit difficult to define. Surely we've all heard the famous phrase "nothing new has been done in 2000 years" and in a sense it is true. Any example a person brings up (Einsteinian physics for example) can be dismissed as just a modification of a previously existing idea (Newtonian physics). I'm happy to list open source projects that *I* think are innovative (attempting to list different ones than the other person who replied to your post listed) : Qt, PHP, the ACE library, JPython. All open source, all under active development and all "innovative". Perhaps a more interesting question would be to try and list things that MicroSoft is doing that are "innovative", open source or not. Even trying to be objective the only remotely innovative thing to come out of Redmond that I can recall would probably be ODBC. It is simply ludicrous for them to question anyone else's level of innovation - hell I have a difficult time coming up with a list of software companies with a more dismal innovation record than MS.

  • Your points are good, but it's important to remember that programmers are being paid for Internet Explorer. The standard anti-free argument you're referring to may sometimes be phrased as "no one will work to create something valuable that'll be given away," but what it really means in practice is "no one will work to create something valuable that they'll never be paid for." This can be abstracted further to "in our society people need money to live, and the GNU-ish free software model provides less opportunity for income."

    This is an easy argument to provide counter-examples to, but it's not as easy to refute completely. Richard Stallman doesn't make any money from emacs, but he has a salary from MIT and is allowed to devote a substantial amount of his time to FSF projects--effectively, he is being paid to develop free software.

    We're often told that the way you make money through open source is support, and indeed here are commercial success stories like Red Hat, Cygnus and GhostScript. GhostScript's income comes primarily from licensing to hardware manufacturers under a non-GPL license. Cygnus' GNUPro toolkit adds "features and innovations that won't make it to the free distributions immediately." Red Hat's revenue stream (and Caldera's, SuSE's, et. al.) is based on the idea that most people want someone else to put together a Linux distribution for them and don't want to spend half their natural life downloading it. In other words, all of those examples have practical reasons why they're successful, even to an open source skeptic.

    The $64,000 question is whether this model can be successfully applied to something like Microsoft Word--or any program that's a relatively painless download and install and isn't likely to need much support--if the programmers require an income to continue development and don't have a Microsoft (or even a Red Hat) behind them to provide a salary that's essentially independent of the return the program generates.

  • I remember TurboGopherVR. It was like playing Spectre (which it was a contemporary of, IIRC) but when you drove into a link-block, it would move you around through gopherspace, further down a tree, or to another gopher site.

    Pretty cool. Not all that useful, but cool. (And whatever happened to the similarly useless but cool 3d information system Apple developed about, oh, four years ago?)
  • My guess is that VinodV got it right - a project like Mozilla offers limited noosphere.

    I'm enthusiastic about making my small contributions to Linux (answering newbie questions on Usenet, building binary packages) because it's ours. A Netscape browser is never going to give me that sense of ownership.

    Of course, I would have been glad to at least try the thing out if they had ever released a LinuxPPC build - or a Mac build that remotely worked....

  • Moral: It may be that programmers will happily craft code for open software that doesn't belong to any one company--the Linux operating system or free Apache for Web servers--but they balk at helping the Netscapes of the world get richer.

    As we all know, this is somewhat inaccurate. I, for example, would have been more than willing to help Mozilla were it not for the fact that the code they just dumped on us wouldn't even compile, much less work. The code they released was pure and utter crap. You can't polish a turd. Now, if they'd funded an effort to write a completely new browser from scratch, I think that'd have worked a hell of a lot better for them. Or, at the very least, they could have released some functional sourcecode (i.e. Netscape 4.0 for Linux final build); at least give us something that we can run through gdb and fix the bugs in first before trying to extend functionality, yaknow?


    ---
    "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
  • The Mozilla build process has been changed to use autoconf and automake already.
  • How bout the following weren't these open source?
    TCP/IP
    HTTP

    That's a silly question... a protocol doesn't have any source - only the implementations do. I guess you could say that they are because the RFC's are public, but your question really doesn't make sense.

    It really annoys me how people have to label everything open source or not open source. It's not that black or white. I think it stems from the fact that people want to associate themselves with something larger than themselves, so we manufacture the concept of an "Open Source Movement". I write software and release the source, but I do *not* want to be associated with any "movement". I'm just trying to get my job done, so get out of my face with all of this labelling and political posturing.

  • that's alot of nonsense. M4 may not be perfect but it definitely works
  • and then they'd complain that it was bloated and not standards-compliant and not embeddable in other apps. We'd then have to wait until version 6.0 before we get what we really want from the browser. So they're doing things the right way -not the fast and easy way that gets you no friends in the end.
  • so you'd rather support a closed source browser on a Microsoft OS than support mozilla which can be used in your own commercial applications? That doesn't make any sense.
  • right-it's more interesting to fix bugs that might have been overlooked than to point out "whoa my scrollbar is flickering" But it's getting there...hopefully by July 20 beta things will start to pick up again
  • Now that mozilla.org has a clear roadmap and milestone builds, we're starting to see some pickup.
  • http://floach.pimpin.net/ http://reveal.unpaved.com http://www.customize.org Of course, linux beats MS in more interesting ways than eye-candy. Stability comes to mind
  • the only reason I see it struggling, one of the reasons I haven't contributed much, is that there is no product to make better. That is one of the reasons all the other open source projects have worked so well. eg: linux, fetchmail, etc. I'm sure this has been said before but hopefully this will change with the much more functional milestone builds....

  • Actually, one of the most forgotten pieces of computer lore: Name a screen editor that is proprietary and predates vi (vi is a BSD product, not AT&T and is based on a screen editor from Manchester university whose name I forget, TECO I think). All major unix screen editors are, and to the best of my knowledge always have been, open source including: vi, emacs, jed, joe, pico. This might seem old, but it is a very key inovation. Other major OSS inovations might include the following rarely mentioned: Text adventures (Adventure predates Zork), the Kerberos system (now suffering from adapt and extend from MS), modern email (HoneyDanBear decendant mailers), and a few others.

    Most of these may seem 70's because that was the last big heyday of inovation in OSS. The next one is now. I think the level of inovation in OSS is cyclic (the 80's were often about cleaning up 70's advances and porting to new architectures....with the advent of the workstation everyone needed to move their timeshare unix stuff to their own box).

    The real question is list all advances from proprietary commerical software. Can't include the following: Unix (research and not usable as a product by its ownwer for over a decade), most compiler tools (AT&T research or academic), GUI's (both Mac and Windows draw heavily on Xerox's PARC work which was never a commerical product), compilers (the three earliest I know were MAD, a university product, Cobol, a gov. product, and Fortran, which I believe was university to replace MAD, but may be wrong), multitasking (earliest I know is the MIT system circa 1960), and a lot more.

    If we want to play the inovation pissing game, most inovation is done at universities and research centers. These may not all be OSS products, but they certainly are almost never commerical (but are copied by later commerical products, often by the creators).

    Herb

  • Innovation by commercial, proprietary software? I can list quite a few examples: Civilization Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) All the various CAD programs Wolfenstein 3D & co. (doom, quake, unreal, etc.) Tetris Just about any other graphical game Java BeOS There's tons more, but that's a good start.

    PGP is a commerical implementation of ideas that were first shown in Academic software (the earliest public key system I know of was by Hellman, Merkle and Diffie at Stanford (I've been using it in a Java chat system written for the purpose of learning Java). For those wondering what happened to their Public Key method, it is susceptable to linear time attacks.

    I always thought the original Tetris was public domain, but I admit to probably being mistaken.

    CAD may have had some academic beginnings (wouldn't be suprised).

    Civ is one of my favorite games, but I don't know if I'd call it a direct inovation, but a linear improvement (their were graphical strategy empire building games prior to it...Cosmic Balance II anyone?)

    What are the precise inovations of Java and BeOS. BeOS I don't know enough to say no outright, but I will on Java. Compiling to an intermediate form runable on many systems is again an academic idea (UCSD p-system anyone). The syntax is what Object oriented C should look like. Java's best claim to inovation is that it combined several ideas.

    Maybe it's just a definitions problem. To me, most things that are inovative according to marketing literature are really advances in the state of the art.

    Still, my original point is valid, the principle form of new things in software isn't companies or hackers, but academics who are paid to make whatever new stuff they want. They do so more than companies because companies need to make money and more than workday hackers because they have more time.

  • Do you think that about all pure OO interfaces,
    or just CORBA? What do you dislike most about
    CORBA?

  • Mozilla is a MONSTER (Score:3)

    by mcelrath ( 8027 ) on Monday April 19, 1999 @07:09PM (#1926167) Homepage
    The reason Mozilla is failing is that it's a MONSTER! Have you tried to compile it? It's got the full code for libgif, libjpeg, and tens of other libraries included as PART OF IT! And then the true mozilla code itself is huge, poorly documented, and not commented worth a crap. It's no wonder no one wanted to jump in and fix their bugs. I looked it at and figured it'd take me two weeks just to get up to speed on what the hell it was doing, so I could fix any trivial bug.

    Open Source is based on the premise that any person can take a WORKING piece of software, add a small piece or bug fix, and end up with a WORKING piece of software. If the source isn't working, or is too complicated to add a feature quickly, most hackers will toss it aside.

    Word to OSS projects -- always make sure your "current" developers release runs, and keep an arcitecture that is simple and easy to understand and pick up. Unfortunately, none of the ambitious web browser projects (Mnemonic and Mozilla) have followed either of these. Thus, they are failing.

    -- Bob

  • Hey, so that is why Enlightenment is such a boring GUI, why PERL is such a dry language, why the ever-so commonplace themable widgets weren't previously implemented as open-source (gtk), etc, etc, etc.

    Overall a good article, but the innovation comment kind of got to me :).
  • Put away your flame guns and just listen for once, you Linux wanna-be software designer jerks, lets talk software development
    Many posters here are at /. post intelligent comments. Many free-software programmers create excellent software. I find the tone of your comment derogatory and offensive.

    Let's talk how KDE and GNOME (which sucks, KDE rocks!)
    I have been contributing to KDE for a few months now, and there is nothing I hate more than hearing "GNOME sucks". You discredit both projects with such mindless and destructive advocacy.

    Let's talk "where is the visual development tools for Linux".
    You may be interested in KDevelop http://www.cs.unipotsdam.de/~smeier/kdevelop/ "an easy to use IDE (Integrated Development Enviroment) for Unix/X11". Perhaps contributing to such a project would do more good than destructive criticism.

    Let's talk about "how can I make a custom control?"
    You may be interested in OpenParts http://developer.kde.org/openparts/html/openparts. html, again contributing OpenPart components would be of infinitely more benefit than ignorant babble.

    Let's talk about... locally and remotely.
    Again see the above technologies.

    COM and ActiveX do make increadibly easy and powerful software development on a large scale
    Incorrect, COM is not suitable for large scale deployment. Hence the development of COM+ and MTS, for more information I suggest you read "How Microsoft Transaction Server Changes the COM Programming Model" by David Chappell in the January '98 edition of Microsoft Systems Journal (a good mag) which states "it's arguable whether COM makes creating software a whole lot easier. In particular, building powerful COM servers can be daunting."

    Before bashing M$ technologies, why don't you try them out first. Not all, I repeat, not all are that bad
    Though it may seem suprising, despite the fact that I develop free software for *nix my day job is as a Windows Programmer. I expend considerable effort to ship products on time in an enviroment that is closed and hence hostile towards productivity.

    The prettiest IDE is not substitue for the source.
  • Oh yeah, anyone who runs any microsoft software is in bed with microsoft. no wonder you don't have the guts to put a name behind that. if this is the state of critical thinking skills of so-called "nerds", the entire industry is sunk.
  • > Let me tell you why no real software developer will use any visual product to code!

    I take it you have evidence to back up this wild assertion?
  • > Finally, I think it is cool that you contribute to KDE. I don't see why GNOME opinions should affect you. They deserve the criticism they get.

    Perhaps, perhaps not. They're just sick of hearing it. As a linux user myself, I am sick of being associated with the general lack of maturity that goes with the screeching voices of advocacy for either environment. You have a right to your opinions. The developers have a right not to listen and the right to decline to associate with people who don't respect that right.
  • Any statement to the contrary is garbage. You can slice it any way you want, but in the end you are simpling doing AOL's corporate development for them.

    AOL HAS MOUNTAINS OF CASH.

    Why on Earth would I donate my time to them?

    The code is a beast - they'll have to do this the old-fashioned way - they're going to have to throw money at it.

    MOZILLA IS AOL.
  • but if you don't understand the software engineering process or the way businesses
    look at the open source model, then please just stay quiet.

    Spare us. Netscape didn't have a clue on either of these counts. Yes, a browser is complicated. But in over two years, Netscape has really only revved the browser once, with a buggy version at that.

    Even Microsoft has revved two stable browsers out since then.
  • Its called the market economy pal - someone will make a browser if there is a market.

    This is a total red herring- the notion that unless I work for free, I won't have a browser.

    Firstly, I can get by with v 4.x for the forseeable future.

    If things get really bad - I'll dual-boot with NT. Its easier than wasting hours of my life slaving away for a company that has so much money they don't know where to put it (and even more thanks to free labor).
  • Apache rocks. Developers to Apache are not replacing paid work at a company that already has mountains of cash.

    Look at AOL's market cap! Look at their cash hordes. They can certainly afford to pay for any work done. Either you get it or Steve Case gets it. He doesn't have a problem taking it so far.

    You people have to quit being suckers.

  • You can use Microsoft's rendering engine as an embedded object.

    This is arguably better for programmers anyway. Most programmers would rather deal woth component interfaces than source code.
  • You can do this with Mozilla too

    Only if it compiles.

    You obviously haven't been paying enough attention to the project

    Obviously you don't program for a living if you think Mozilla is useable in production software.

  • Allchin would rather steer the industry than have a love-in with rivals. "While open source is generally very good engineering, it's also generally poor in innovation," he ays. "When you're following the taillights, it's easy to make a decision on what to do next."

    I get it! Taillights. Kinda like Apple was to the Microsoft gui.

    :)

  • It is more like a big freeway full of taillights. Hehehehehehehehe.
  • Though Mozilla has been disapointing, as JWZ mentioned, there have been successes:

    1: Lessons learned. All the reasons mentioned in the article and JWZ's page will hopefully be heeded in the future by corporations.

    2: More importantly, build tools. Bugzilla is cool. The win build tools were worked on.

    There are other positives, but before everyone rags on Mozilla, reflect. Minix never took off, Linux did. I wasn't around at the time of Minix, but the lessons learned from the OS prob. helped Linux. There are predecessors to all great projects, and if the lessons from Mozilla are heeded, hopefully the next company that goes OS will be better.

    Erik
  • .. one of his biggest disappointments was the failure to inspire a large community of developers to join up, and that having so many Netscape full-timers on the project may have violated the dynamics of a culture that thrives on volunteer programming ..

    In my opinion full-timers are a great thing. I'd rather say that unusual methods of development make it hard to participate.

    Please have a look at the Portability Guidelines [mozilla.org] on mozilla.org. Instead of porting our tools (egcs) to uncommon architectures developers are expected to spend additional time on writing the program. That's not globally efficient from my point of view.

    It's nice that mozilla.org wants do have a port on every system, and I'm sure they're on the right way, but the typical hobby-developer works for his OS, and not for "planetwide" portability. Blaming the full-time-hackers doesn't help us.


  • The stuff at PARC never took off, it was apple that MADE it a reality after getting permission from Xerox. Two fundamental components of real innovation: Risk and Effort. While Xerox spent a fair sum on their R&D they were afraid to move on the fruits it bore. But none of the projects were anything close to marketable. It was apple that put it all on the line and -WORKED- to make the GUI a reality for the consumer.
  • I think there's a fair amount of truth in what it's saying about open-source not working for companies. After all, if the open-source community can develop for these companies (who all distribute code under their own versions of "open-source" licensing), then why wouldn't they just do it themselves, without the prodding of some major software developer?

    But there's a bigger point here- the concept and the goals of companies who want more programmers for free jibe with the idea of free software. The open-source model of software development works best when it belongs to the open-source community. Licenses like Apple's or Netscape aren't really all that helpful (and in the case of the Apple license, insulting).

    The way these major companies are handling the open-source momentum is just plain exploitative. But then, is anyone really surprised?

  • Seriously, some great open source products came out years ago, but has there been anything original during Linux's lifetime? The number of inferior products directly ripped off from others (Harmony, KOffice, GNUstep, Stampede, Gimp, Linux itself, etc., etc.) is almost limitless, but any fresh ideas seem to have dried up. Just another good reason why Linux could never do the world domination thing -- it breeds a follower, rather than a leader, mentality.

    Cheers,
    ZicoKnows@hotmail.com

  • Yeah! Bring back gopher!!!
    I liked gopher, it was simple and fast.
  • It's too bad that both KDE and GNOME are going down the CORBA primrose path.

    Take it from me, that way lies madness. It's only a matter of time before people understand that.



    -------
  • What about TeX?
  • This is at least somewhat on topic, and it's been on my mind, so I'll mention it.

    Ever notice how one of the standard anti-free software arguments is that no one will be willing to work for something that's going to be given away. When Microsoft makes this argument, they usually include some statement such as, "And even though OSS may work for little things like pong (or something), it can't work for something big, like a web browser" (I know they've said web browser before.)

    But Micrsoft effectively killed anyone's chance of making serious money selling a web browser when they released IE for free (I know--Opera--but I doubt they're raking it in). And yet, Microsoft and Netscape continue to make software that they give away (ok, IE has a whole lot of strings attached to their version of "give away").

    It just seems a little contradictory. On the one hand, they keep saying no one will work for something that they'e no going to get money for. On the other hand, they say that OSS doesn't work for big projects, like web browsers. But there's an example of an OSS web browser right under their nose and another example of software that people don't get paid for right in their own company.

    I may not have thought this out right, and maybe it should make sense. I just chalk it up to MS tending to be hypocritical.
  • But then why give IE for Windows (and Solaris?) away for free, too? I know why, and I know you have a point (I did mention the gobs of strings attached to their "giving away"). It just doesn't look like they're living up to their word. (big surprise there).
  • A gui is hardly an ``innovation''. It's obvious. How to implement one is the question.

  • All I have to do is look at many mathematical proofs to see this isn't so.

  • I've tried to try it, but NSPR just comes up with 2 undefined symbols: PR_StackPush and PR_StackPop.

    This is on Solaris 2.6/X86 BTW. I've looked, and sure enough, there's no definitions in the SunOS.c file.

    I guess I could attempt to fix it, but seeing as I'm too lazy and I don't have the C/C++ expertise yet, I've given up. I sent a message to Netscape's public.mozilla.nspr, but no reply.

    So now I have glib and gtk wasting a bit of my HD space. *sigh*
  • Hmm, ok, you're right. People shouldn't call Mozilla a faillure YET.

    But, they are right when they say it is crappy. I do understand that writting a browser is a huge task, but, if you look at other projects like KDE and gnome (other HUGE tasks), they are delivering something.

    I also think that the reason nobody wanted to contribute is that the sources they first gave us where awfull. And, it is true, they didn't even compile. I even remember a comment explicitly saying they've made a deliberate mistake and they wanted compilation to fail for a particular file.

    Now, I don't know what good this did, but it sure violates a lot of coding style rules.


    Papi
  • The article was incomplete, in that it failed to mention JWZs lamenting the fact that Nutscrape didn't provide the sourceware community with a working product from which to base its efforts.

    Linux, Apache, and (F|N|O)BSD, GNUtils, and the like weren't put together in a day, and didn't face the hurdles of tons of legacy cruft to wade through, incomplete subsystems (okay, in the case of 4.4BSD a lot had to be re-implemented), and a general glut of poorly designed and poorly documented spaghetti to wade through. JWZ was correct. Software is hard. Starting from scratch is sometimes easier than maintaining/patching an incomplete, non-working codebase.

    --Corey
  • Depends on what you mean by many people. According to my server log, lynx is "good enough" for less than .1% of people.
  • The article is rather dull, nothing new...but what bugged me the most is their reasoning on why Netscape's Mozilla is failing. It's not because programmers don't want to participate because a large company is behid it. It's because what Netscape released as OSS is a very limited (barely working) body of code. They didn't release their code for the 4.5x browsers. They released something new. That is their problem. I have a feeling that had they released the code for the browser most of use are using right now that their experiment would have faired better.
  • I never stated that by releasing all new source code was wrong. I agree fully that it was time for the entire thing to start from the bottom up again. I was just simply stating this as a reason that hundreds of people haven't joined up to work on the source code. Those hundreds that didn't sign up want to work on something that's working, tweak it, improve it, not start from the begining.

  • speedy? (Score:1)

    by tomk ( 20364 )
    2. The rendering engine is blazing fast.

    I just don't see it. I tried M4 on Linux and it's still about half the speed of IE4 rendering freshmeat. Plus it seems really unresponsive trying to click the back/forward buttons. Also, I thought it did progressive rendering? It still seems to have to load all of freshmeat before it will display any of it.

    Yes, it's faster than Netscape 4.0, but not "blazingly fast".
  • Check out the latest release of Mozilla. They've started to add in mail and news, and the browser is functional. I think there's enough base functionality that people can start playing around with it.

    Please note, IANAPPAIKATOT (I am not a professional programmer, although I know a thing or two), so I don't know how _easy_ it would be to play around.

    ywwg
  • Anyone else taken a look at Mozilla M4. It's an impressive piece of software that stands on its own.

    Open source has done well.

    1. Mozilla complies to standards better than its predecessors or IE.

    2. The rendering engine is blazing fast. Can't wait to see the networking scheduler redone! This thing will eat all other browsers for lunch in terms of speed.

    3. Netscape is committed to creating a fine browser that will be unlik any of their previous products in terms of quality.

    4. Multiple Platforms: OS/2, Unix, Macitosh, and Win32 are all supported. It is important in an era of open standards to support multiple systems.

    If you are curious about Mozilla, I urge you try it.
  • What innovations has MS given us anyway?
    1) A reasonably easy to use GUI (although not ground breaking in usability and pretty boring)
    2) Some quite sophisticated office apps.

    BIG DEAL!
    Gnome is not just copying MS, they have got some true innovations there. Themes are something MS doesn't have. Virtual desktops and remote GUI built in.
    Guile, and TCL - extension languages, something MS has never done.
    scwm - Extensible window manager.
    Apache - Beat MS before they even had a server.
    Emacs - Extensible editor, something MS has never caught up with.
    24x7 OS - all the MS OSes require rebooting for certain re-configurations. Linux et al never absolutely requires a reboot.
    I could probably go on and on, but hey
  • OK, well, when you can't have a competitive browser for your platform, you'll have no one to blame but yourself.
  • You can do this with Mozilla too. You obviously haven't been paying enough attention to the project to have developed any coherent, rational opinions.

  • Geez, it'd be nice.... (Score:4)

    by Obsequious ( 28966 ) on Monday April 19, 1999 @07:27PM (#1926205) Homepage
    ...if people, /.-ers included, would know what they're talking about before they pipe up.


    Yes, it's been a year since the Mozilla project began, and no, there's no Mozilla 5.0 yet. Yes, Netscape was horsing around in the early days, and released 4.5 before comitting to Mozilla seriously and wasted 6 months. Yes, there are only around 30 people outside Netscape who work on Mozilla.


    So what? That's a 1/3 increase in the developer base, for free. It's still a success in terms of money, even if it hasn't taken off as a major open source project.


    As for you idiots spouting off about Netscape releasing "crap", try looking at the code recently. Mozilla IS a brand-new browser; very little of the code remains from 4.x at this point. The reason Mozilla 5.0 is not yet released is because Mozilla 5.0 has only been in the works for 6 months!


    The first 6 months were, granted, wasted. That was a mistake, and an acknoledged one (by jwz at least.) The days when you can write a modern respectable web browser in six months went out with Navigator 1.0, however, so give them some time. They're moving quickly with it, and for what Mozilla 5.0 offers they're moving damned fast.


    I know this is probably too much to ask, but if you don't understand the software engineering process or the way businesses look at the open source model, then please just stay quiet. You can't run around calling things like Mozilla a failure until they bust.

  • Same with the internet, B.G. didn't believe in the internet until he saw the big $ in it.

    Great attibute for a business man, shitty for a likeable kind of geek.


  • You can't call it a failure at all. Doczilla already works using the old code base. The makres of Cold Fusion, cna'tremember the name, already have mozilla working as the internal rendering engine. Crap just go to mozillazine.org, at least 4 things have support for or are based on mozilla.
  • I would like to know what those TWO stable broswers are. Having used IE 1-5 I can't seem to find one.
  • Just download the nightly build it has the components already compiled for you.
  • I think this article is much less a critique of Open Source than a critical look at how well business can exploit it. Thankfully, from my perspective at least, the consensus in this article seems to be: "Open Source works, for the most part, but don't expect to be able to somehow magically use it to make a lot of money for yourself"

    This is great. I think that if business wants to use OSS techniques to be more profitable, thats fine, but they should be dissuaded from simply trying to profit-monger.

  • Who in hell uses Visual Studios?

    Tell me of one major software developer that does this!

    NO ONE! Except some very small shareware programmers who hope to get a job!

    People like to use nice developing environments, but no one actually uses ACTIVE X or COM for any kind of development! No one that matters that is.


    People need syntax highlights and debuggers! Period.

    Let me tell you why no real software developer will use any visual product to code!

    Most big programs require libraries (you should know) that are not necessarily implemented correctly in those environments! Even MS one!

    So, most big companies end up writing their own header files even for basic operations so that all their code can work on Win95/98 and NT4.0

    Most big software developers make software for for multiple platforms, so they also need to write everything from scratch again even some very simple header files!

    So please don't give me no crap about Borland etc... They have nice syntax highlight and debuggers. If you really develop anything serious, you certainly don't use any of their non-standard "cookies". Which means, you could use Xemacs with ddd, or just Cygnus stuff if you really need nice interfaces!

  • > Let's talk "where is the visual development tools for Linux".

    I've been looking for OS/free VisDev tools lately. Haven't had the time to try & evaluate, but you might find the following interesting:

    * Code Crusader (Code Warrior-inspired): http://www.cco.caltech.edu/~jafl/jcc/
    * Code Medic (GUI for gdb): http://www.cco.caltech.edu/~glenn/medic/
    * ddd (GUI for GDB, DBX, JDB, WDB, XDB, the Perl debugger, and the Python debugger, maybe more): http://www.cs.tu-bs.de/softech/ddd/

    You'll find a list GUI/IDE links at the bottom of the ddd web page. Feast.

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