Mike Shaver Leaving Netscape 76
Rumours have been floating around for the past week or so that Mike Shaver is leaving Netscape/AOL After e-mailing with Mike yesterday, and reading the recent posting on Mozillazine, I'm sad to confirm it's true. However, while he won't be working on Mozilla as his full time job anymore, he will still be involved with the project, going so far as to say: "Though Mozilla will no longer be my full-time job, I will continue to participate in the community as much as
possible, and my new employer is very supportive of that." In any case, we'll miss you.
Mike Shaver Leaving Mozilla (Score:1)
(First post? Nahhh... I doubt it. But it was fun to think about. ;)
Zontar The Mindless,
Thanks (Score:1)
Again, thanks.
Re:Mike Shaver Leaving Mozilla (Score:1)
Feel free to pitch in (Score:3)
Stop crying in your beer and start coding (or documenting, or testing, or ANYTHING).
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join the club - leave the club (Score:1)
AOL: Can we still dream the Netscape dream in the future?
Outmoded thinking (Score:5)
If you can find someone to pay you to do something you love or if, like JWZ, you can convince your employer that the OSS philosophy is a good way to go, then more power to you.
Besides, you should be applauding Shaver -- once again, he's working on Mozilla in a volunteer way.
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Re: (Score:1)
Re:Shaver and jwz are evil for open source movemen (Score:1)
Re:Shaver and jwz are evil for open source movemen (Score:4)
>Open source and payed developer doesn't work. The only true open source is VOLUNTEERSOURCE.
This is such utter nonsense that its probably not worth responding to, but I feel compelled to, anyway...
Can you just remind me, dear Coward, whether or not Mr Stallman draws his unemplyment checks and codes on the side? Or is he on a salary from FSF? (or rather was he, since I seem to recall him saying he had no time to write code anymore) I could be wrong, but I guess I have to say I think its the latter. Doesnt Alan Cox work for Red Hat? Dont VA Research pay salaries for Rasterman and Mandrake? Wasn't Larry Wall working for JPL when patch, Perl et.c were first written?
You see, Mr Coward, it doesnt actually matter where the money comes from (unless its arms sales, which I personally disapprove of, but is generally minimal as a source of Open Source development funding.)
What matters is the work; what matters is the code, and the license. What matters is what they gave. Mr C., I'd put my money on both these gentlemen ('Shaver and jwz') having contributed more to Open Source last week than you've done in your life.
So what if they got stock options. You think only rock stars and film stars are allowed to make money? Gee, imagine someone having a comfortable life because they did good things for the world at large.
Who steps in now? (Score:2)
Browser war is not over, probably never will be! (Score:2)
The simple truth is that in the software world no matter how much of a lead you may have, that doesn't mean that it's easy to keep. Netscape could take another year to release their next browser, and when it arrives it'll appear on every magazine cover CD, for every platform under the sun and people will try it. If the browser is good then people will use it and the fact that Netscape didn't have a decent product for years and years will mean less and less.
Anyway, perhaps it's a good thing that IE is dominating, with Microsoft broken into three bits and IE opensourced then Netscape-AOL-Time-Warner will be the big conglomerate boogie-man
Mozilla is now "Dogfood" (Score:5)
Mozilla is now unoffically dogfood status according to the latest status report [mozilla.org]. The evaluation of whether it's dogfood or not is if at least 50% of mozilla.org are using mozilla for at least 50% of their browsing time. After that, bugs start getting fixed faster as people are really using the product (and pressuring their peers to make it better).
For those that haven't tried a nightly build - do so. It's incredibly unintrusive (just installs in your $HOME directory - and can be deleted just as easily), real stable, and is great as an every day browser.
Re:Shaver and jwz are evil for open source movemen (Score:2)
This is not quite true. I'm giving Red Hat as an example simply because that's the environment I'm familiar with; I'm quite sure the same holds true of most other paid open source developers:
Virtually all people who get hired have been working on open source projects (as volunteers) before.
I was quite glad I could stop studying and devote ALL of my time to Linux (instead of just my free time) when I got the offer.
Just because we're paid doesn't mean it's just a job for us.
Those people work at nights.
You'd be surprised at seeing how busy the Red Hat offices are at nights or in the weekends.
And no, nights and weekends are not paid overtime. We just want to get it right.
Those people come from different countries.
So who claimed all Red Hat employees are from the same contry?
MS (Score:2)
Thank you Mike (Score:1)
Asa
(posted with 1/11/00 build of mozilla)
Is Mike leaving NetScape or Mozilla? (Score:2)
Based on my read of the article, he is only leaving AOL/NetScape.
Re:Mozilla is now "Dogfood" (Score:5)
Try a nightly build, M12 is a dinosaur.
If you feel like Mozilla is the property of AOL and so contributing to the project is contributing to AOL then I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding of what Mozilla is. Mozilla is the property of mozilla.org. AOL/Netscape will distribute a branded version of Mozila under the Netscape brand (and possibly others) but no one is asking you to work on that branded version. If you're interested in contributing to Mozilla but not AOL then look for peripheral projects that are using mozilla like some of the other web browsers or HTML editors that are utilizing pieces of the mozilla project. Maybe the MathML folks need some help in documentation. Maybe Adam Locke could use some help in his Active X wrapper. There are many places to contribute to the project and many good reasons (I believe) to do so. If you would like some of my reasons, here they are:
1. Mozilla will run on just about any platform and you can't say that for most other browsers.
2. Mozilla is open source so you can expect it to get better faster than conventional proprietary software.
3. Mozilla will be the leader in standards support which means that we'll all have an easier time developing for the web.
4. Mozilla is forcing others (including MS IE) to make standards support a key feature.
5. It's fun.
I hope that you don't decide to withhold your help because some large corporation is spending its money to help develop an open source project.
Asa
(posted with a 1/11/00 nightly build of Mozilla)
Re:Mike Shaver Leaving Mozilla (Score:2)
Re:Mike Shaver Leaving Mozilla (Score:1)
Andrew
Re:Is Mike leaving NetScape or Mozilla? (Score:2)
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Re:Feel free to pitch in (Score:3)
the first couple of times I just downloaded the FAQ, tarballs, INSTALLING, whatever, and I'd plod along following the instructions and after wasting a few hours I discover: no motif, no build. jerkoffs, why didn't they mention that before? The only place that little message was "documented" was in a make error message.
so, things have moved a bit since then, but "fool me once..." ... now when I get the urge to work on it, I go and read ahead as much as possible, last time was last summer. Always, I get this queasy feeling that the people inside the project have carved out a little world for themselves that makes them happy, but an "outsider" is going to have to go through a maze of twisty turny passages to get there. This is a big project, and it's a big maze, so the fun of contributing seems way off in the distance ...
OK, I didn't want to shoot off my mouth without checking again. Here's today's report. It's brief because they managed to disconvince me again in a couple of sentences. From the hacking docs [mozilla.org], and my quotes are paraphrasals, not literal.
1. Mozilla has "a great build system that has scaled to 100s of developers, so follow the rules and don't break it." OK? OK! I can follow rules.
2. "Confirm that your code works on all the different platforms before checking it in. Don't break the build!" OK? Nah uh! You guys don't have a build system, you have a makefile called from a shell script. Asking me to build on more than one platform is too much. I actually write code for multiple platforms and I think it's too much. What about all the people who don't? E-mail code to a pal and have them test it? Sheesh, that is primitive, not to mention I don't have any pals on Mozilla... yeah, I could hang around ... Look, build just the tiniest bit of support for it into the source repository, and organize a buddy system for me. If one person breaking something wastes 100*1 man-hours (mythical? :) then spend that time to make the build system deal. That way you won't have to excoriate me for breaking the build before I've even downloaded the source. You could say, happy things like, "come on in and contribute, we'll help you, we'll make it easy for you, we'll show you how"
ok, but forge ahead, Mann, perhaps it'll be ok. ...hmmm, I don't know about this, there are a lot of tools to upgrade. No, not their fault, gotta have tools, but certainly not something I want to contemplate if this isn't going to work out...
Oh look! the instructions for Linux (the largest open OS platform) Redhat (the largest distro) are labelled "out of date". So, I'm going to be on my own here... I think I'll check back in a few months, maybe after the release.
ya know, if it's three guys in a garage, sure, they can't keep it all going and porting is the sort of help they need. but 100s of engineers with a paid staff are telling me that this is a great system? They want me to help them, and contribute under a license that the FUD tells me is suspect to begin with? Fine, then roll out the red carpet for me by making it as easy to get started as the linux kernel. "make config ; make dep ; make bzImage ; make modules " Then, after I've played around a bit, if I have something interesting to say, give me a way to share it. But just 10 minutes of scrolling through their stuff on top of the time I've wasted in the past tells me that they love working on the "cool" parts of the code and don't pay much attention to infrastructure, infrastructure that is by definition huge and important because this is a crossplatform system with hundreds of engineers.
Don't get me wrong, I am not criticizing them. I'm not? No, I'm not. They are writing a lot of code and giving it away, how could I criticize that? I think it's great! I think they are great :) :) But if the shopkeeper wants to know why I came in and browsed around the shop and then walked out without buying anything...
It's not them it's me? Yep, probably that's it, the system is working fine. They successfully sent away somebody who shouldn't be working on it :)
Re:Mike Shaver Leaving Mozilla (Score:2)
Hmm. Actually, it does not seem to me that the reason why he is leaving is clear - at least, not from the article mentioned or from any of the comments that I've been able to read. JWZ left because he thought that Mozilla had been more a failure than a success (source: his web site [jwz.org]) and did not have fun anymore working for a big corporation. At least, that's what I understood from what he said on the subject.
In some sense, the critiques that applied to Mozilla on April, 1st 99 (when jwz left) still more or less apply today: the product is not in a deliverable state. I mean, it's an alpha release, with various degrees of stability depending on the environment you're running it on, and that's definitely not a deliverable. Not yet, at least.
I don't contribute to the project by lack of time (insert your favorite excuse here) and because I'm not a good enough coder to participate in such a big project, where the code base is so huge and complex.
But I have a hard time understanding why Mozilla takes so long to take off when something like Linux or Free BSD, whose source code size is probably bigger than Mozilla's (correct me if I'm wrong), are still very active. It's definitely not the lack of people, or the lack of skills, but I'd like to understand where it comes from.
Complexity/messiness of the source? Communication problems? Lack of support from Netscape (that was one of JWZ's rants)? Or something else?
In short: what I get from this is that Open Source is not the solution to all of our problems. Sometimes, it doesn't work very well. At least, not as well as it could. And Mozilla seems to be an example of that, unfortunately.
Cheers,
Re:? (Score:1)
Re:Is Mike leaving NetScape or Mozilla? (Score:2)
Re:? (Score:1)
score: informational ?)
Re:Feel free to pitch in (Score:1)
I've downloaded and compiled sporadically over the last year or so, and I've even submitted patches. The trouble is, it's just so durn huge. You need an appropriate amount of hardware and bandwidth just to get the ball rolling, and even then, you're best off typing make and reading war and peace while you wait for your one-line change to be built.
I must say that I'm still optimistic. The important point is that the browser will be standards-compliant. If this means that IE adopts gecko, then I think we can say mission accomplished. the xpfe can rot, for all I care, although we might even see it adopted in other projects. There's some good engineering in there which should be taken advantage of.
One interesting thing about the project is that the lack of outside support has given us an interesting view into the internals of a large software engineering business complete with dirty laundry, and some great examples of Larry Wall's programmer's virtues- laziness, impatience and hubris.
Win or lose, the open sourcing of navigator was a pivotal moment in open-source history, and we'll be learning lessons from this experience for some time yet.
Hey - the title of the article changed! (Score:1)
I have no sense of humour... (Score:1)
"I woke up really hungry this morning, but I realised didn't have enough milk for my Shreddies, so I figured: `Why not reheat some Kraft Dinner, eh?' and ate that instead. I sat down to watch Canada A.M., my favourite TV programme on CTV, when the signal got weak and all the colour faded to grey.
This doesn't look like the spelling of someone from Michigan... I expect this archaic, French inhibited language at The Register [threregister.co.uk], since they're British, but not from a real American (someone in the U.S.)...
Moderate as appropriate -- just don't think I'm 100% serious :-)
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Re:Mike Shaver Leaving Mozilla (Score:1)
You are wrong: kernel-source-2.2.14.tar.gz is 16 MB, kernel-source-2.3.39.tar.gz is 17 MB, mozilla-source.tar.gz is 20 MB. So Mozilla is bigger, and it could be argued that it is more complicated: it is cross-platform, has to work with different GUI and system libraries, and has lots of interaction with the user, etc. Ok, the kernel is cross-platform as well, but in a sense its behaviour is simpler, and more modular -- want to add a new device or file system? Write a module that implements open(), close() etc. and you are done. And you don't have to interface with fickle users directly, just with the C library :-)
Besides, how long did it take Linux to come to a usable state? I did not start with version 0.3xx, I started at 1.2.13, by which time Linux was probably five years old or so. Mozilla will be ready in less time than that, I guess.
Jeroen
Re:Outmoded thinking (Score:2)
~luge
Re:Mike Shaver Leaving Mozilla (Score:1)
Mozilla isn't taking so long to take off. Keep in mind that linux was not started last year. The world may have started to catch on last year but Torvalds built the kernal nearly a decade ago. Mozilla is moving at an extremely fast pace. Its early development (since they dropped the classic code base thru the present) has been sheer lightning paced.
Do this for me. Go to the ftp://mozilla.org/pub/mozilla/releases directory ans download an M3 build. Open it and give it a spin. Then go to ftp://mozilla.org/pub/mozilla/nightly and download yesterday's build. Open it up and give it a try. Now tell me that nothing's been accomplished in the last year, or tell me how it's not taking off.
Mozill is moving. If you want it to move faster help out. You don't have to code to help. I made Mozilla better without coding one bit. Use it, report bugs, talk to the developers in the newsgroups and IRC about what works and what doesn't. There is plenty of QA work that needs doing from filing bugs and making test cases to doccumenting the current state of the project.
Asa
(posted with mozilla nightly build from 1/11/00)
Re:Shaver and jwz are evil for open source movemen (Score:1)
He should be applauded for his work, both in the general interest of open source, and with Netscape/Mozilla. It's close-minded thinking like your stock option comment that keep these sorts of people from receiving their due respect.
Just because Shaver and jwz have been rewarded for their insight and effort does not mean that they have made less of a contribution than the rest of us.
As far as working nights goes -- you really should take a look at bugzilla sometime.
meisenst
whoops (Score:1)
this is what i meant. [mozilla.org]
Re:Is Mike leaving NetScape or Mozilla? (Score:2)
Imagine a beowolf... (shouldn't have said that)
Thimo
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Re:Shaver and jwz are evil for open source movemen (Score:2)
If you think I'm not a good open source evangelist, I can't really disagree; I must not have evangelized to you very well at all, though I was certainly trying harder to make Mozilla look good than to make myself look good. (That's the easier task, of course: Mozilla's a lot more lovable than I am.)
As for nights and nationality, people familiar with the project know what hours I work, and from where.
I'm honoured to be grouped with Jamie, though -- he's a fine evangelist indeed. (Even when he makes me cry.)
Re:I have no sense of humour... (Score:1)
That's OK, you don't need a sense of humour once the Canadians take over [aside] Q: How many Canadians does it take to change a light bulb? A: One.
Re:Mozilla is now "Dogfood" (Score:1)
"Tiny window 1/8 screen in size, fonts that ugly that I did not even know that they existed on my box"
Do you have your server resolution (dpi) set right. Mozilla is one of many new (like GIMP 1.2, Konsole 1.1.x) X Windows apps that require your dpi to be set right. On my X Server (Xpmac) that is done using: 'Xpmac -dpi 72' -- other X Servers do this differently. Fonts will look really large in these apps if your DPI is too high, and really small if your DPI is too low. If you are getting blocky fonts then for some reason your truetype or ghostscript fonts weren't set up right.
"buttons and widgets coming from a nightmare..."
You don't like the new XUL? Well, guess what it's really themeable. see Mozillazine for details. Some of the nightly builds (at least for Win32) have an option that caches the widgit pixmaps so they are as fast as your reguluar ones. They will be fast really soon, according to Mozillazine. :)
And yes, Netscape 4.7 works good for me (it's stable and has only minor memory leaks that all web browsers have), I am using it now -- but I would like to be able to upgrade someday.
Why it is taking so long (Was Re:Mike Shaver...) (Score:1)
Why is Mozilla taking so long? Is it because it is Open Source? I don't think so.
I think it is taking so long because it is a huge project. A typical piece of software (Open Source or otherwise) would generally start out small, and in future versions would have increased functionality, performance, etc. And this is how the original Netscape started. If Mozilla was trying to recreate Netscape 1.0, they could have been done long ago.
But developing Netscape 1.0 wouldn't be sufficient. Netscape and Mozilla are trying to compete with IE, which has been around for awhile. The original version of IE pretty much stunk. It took a couple of years after the first version to whip it into shape.
Unfortunately, Mozilla can't really follow the "release v1.0 and then improve from there". Because if the world tried the browser and saw all of its limitations, most would give up on Netscape/Mozilla and decide that it would never be up to the competition. Not only would user support drop, but developer support would drop as well. The comments for this article are evidence with this -- many people have given up on Mozilla being able to produce a good browser, and it hasn't even been released yet. Just imagine the comments if the current Mozilla was labeled "v1.0" instead of "alpha".
So when Mozilla is released, it has to be able to compete with browsers that have been around for a few years...including the old Netscape and IE. Yes, Mozilla was able to build off of the old Netscape source, but the developers decided (correctly in my opinion) that now (or rather, near the beginning of the project) would be the best time to remove all of the junk that had accumulated over the years, and redesign the browser so that it could be more useful, more easily maintained, and more easily extended.
So why is it taking so long? Because the Mozilla developers are trying to write a world-class browser that implements technology that has been developed over a period of years in as little time as possible. Not an easy task.
Re:? (Score:1)
You know you've hit the big-time when your employment status gets reported on Slashdot...
Re:Feel free to pitch in (Score:2)
Back in the day, I downloaded the source. I had the correct compiler VC++ 5.0 (this is really old-school) and I had a fast (for the day) machine: K6-233 w/ 64MB.
So while the download progressed, I watched a movie. And then another.
I unzip the files, to find that they recommend 128MB of memory to develop, and I gotta download some more tools. Fine. I download the extra tools and figure I'll just deal with a 4 hour compile time. 15 minutes into the compile, error. I do some looking around, some tweaking, and try again. Another error. Delete!
Fast forward to more recent history(when even eMachines have 64MB of memory
I'm not saying I require Natalie Portman to come over and cook me some hot grits while I write code, but, damn! I've had an easier time getting source code from companies that require NDAs!
Re:Time Warner Browser (Score:1)
Re:Feel free to pitch in (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Re:Shaver and jwz are evil for open source movemen (Score:1)
wOw (Score:1)
Unashamed Rumormill Grinding (Score:2)
..He'll probably be the next person to disappear into the shadowy halls of Transmeta.. :)
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Re:Feel free to pitch in (Score:1)
Hell, I even advocate for features I want. I mocked up a screenshot for a new OPEN dialog (see http://www.jasperdev.com/mozopen), and it generated a lot of discussion on the UI newsgroup. Maybe I'll try to build the dialog box myself.
Why start with the most complex of the C++ architecture of the project? So much of Mozilla is going to be about creating functionality with XML, CSS, JavaScript, etc. The browser itself is made of these components. Start there. You can work you way into the heavy duty stuff later.
Re:No Shreddies in USA? (Score:1)
Re:Feel free to pitch in (Score:2)
sounds great! if that's all it is, put that in your HowToBuildOnRedHat and it'll be 95% shorter and you can get rid of the "out of date" label! Hmmm... sure sounds easy, doesn't it? :)
If the build instructions bother you, what about filing a bug?
:) I read this as, "if you don't like the way we do A, come and learn how we do B,", meaning, have you looked at your bug-filing system? I have, that's something else I poured effort into. It's pages and pages [mozilla.org] of rules and standards, including the instruction that I review all of the existing bugs [mozilla.org] first. Look at that link! Ouch! Where is the build system? I'm looking to dip my toe in the water, and you are offering me assimilation into a Borg hive.
I'm not saying there is nothing good about the work you've done, you have to meet the needs of the people on the project, I understand. But if there was a vacation package maybe I'd like it enough to come back and buy a home later.
Or not! I freely admit the project may not need people like me.
Re:Feel free to pitch in (Score:1)
I'm going to stop complaining now, nobody wants to hear it :) I just wanted originally to make the point [repeating] if the shopkeeper is wondering what some of the people who walk into the shop are thinking when they walk out empty handed, that help I'm willing to provide. After I tell the shopkeeper, I don't like him to tell me that I'm wrong. I want to hear,
If my feedback is not useful to the shopkeeper, that's cool too, I'll just continue on down the street.
Huh? (Score:1)