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JWZ resigns from mozilla.org 131

Posted by sengan from the wonder-what-he'll-be-doing-now dept.
jsr writes "News.com is reporting that JWZ resigned today from mozilla.org. No word yet on why he is quiting. Expect to see something on his site soon though."
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JWZ resigns from mozilla.org More

JWZ resigns from mozilla.org

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  • Software development is hard (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    The main things I read in JWZ's message on his site are:

    • Software development is hard. Mozilla is a huge project, and just getting it off the ground has taken much longer than he wanted. The sheer size of the code base made it hard to make small changes or even understand what was going on, which confounded and discouraged new developers coming on board (or trying to). This is a problem I'm sure many developers can appreciate. As a product ages, its code base tends to grow, which makes both understanding and modification more difficult.
    • Distributed software development is really, really hard. Mozilla/Netscape found it necessary to do a sginificant amount of work on the problem, and as a result developed new tools like Bonsai [mozilla.org] and Tinderobx [mozilla.org] as well as the methodologies surrounding them. Why? Existing tools available to support distributed development are woefully inadequate, and most people don't even know what a development methodology is.
    • It's hard to get contributors if they can't get quick gratification. It has to be possible to download the code, see it work, poke at it, change it, and see the effect of your changes. Quickly. One of the major problems he pointed out was that people couldn't do this to Mozilla, so it wasn't worth their effort to contribute. In other words: Just because you open-source something proprietary doesn't mean people will jump on your bandwagon. You have to make it easy for them to do so, which takes extra effort.
    Ken Schalk
    xorian@tiac.net [mailto]

  • About (Saving) Face (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    You've got to be effing kidding.

    Listen, JWZ isn't the only person who tendered his resignation at Netscape on April 1st. And if you took a careful look at the kinds of people Netscape's management hires these days, and who those managers are, you'd not be saying that people like Jamie or I were in any danger of being fired - a highly unlikely proposition. Good people are hard to find.

    The problem is, the better you are, the more dedicated to a cause you want to be. There's nothing at Netscape which is left to be dedicated *to*. They outright LIED to us in November at the annual conference, they've killed off project after project which had good technical merit and ideas, only to lose those people to companies like Microsoft after having done so. They've done everything in their power that they could have possibly done wrong already.

    I, for one, have the same opinion JWZ does. It's nice to know I have the same resignation date, too. I didn't let Netscape down, Netscape let me down.

    When I was growing up, I had three dreams. One of those was to work at Commodore Amiga's R&D department along-side Dave Haynie, Ultimate Kewl Hardware Guy. The second was to work for Xerox PARC, and do cool research stuff.

    Commodore is dead.

    Xerox PARC is dead in all but name.

    And now, Netscape has become that which I most despised in other companies. Commercially, bottom-line driven, without vision or direction, a company who saw fit to lie directly to its employees, who ate itself and its own visions, becoming empty and hollow, a shell of its former self.

    Two long years are now over. I've found another company, another vision, and another goal in life outside of Netscape; they can't use me anymore.

    Greg Block, Senior Consultant, Netscape Communications

  • Psychology... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    One of the more fascinating parts about human psychology is the way that many people tend to give up just when things seems to lighten up...

    It's a long time since it became evident that the Mozilla project would take quite some time before a release. Extensive rewrites of most of the code take time.

    But jwz chooses to resign now, when the timetables set seems to hold, when the browser starts to get usable, when the codebase is starting to get clean enough and understandable enough that it's getting feasible for people outside Netscape to work on it, when there finally is some immediate reward to hacking on Mozilla: it's working well enough that you can start using it, and can start adding features and fixing bugs, and see the results.

    And this isn't unique to jwz resigning from Mozilla... Some people seem to be able to hold on indefinately as long as there's no end in sight, but once the goal becomes visible, and within reach, they give up and resign...

    Maybe it is suddenly seeing that the goal is still some months away, while when there's no end in sight they can keep fooling themselves to believing everything will be okay tomorrow?

    I don't know. But it's damn frustrating when people give up when things are looking up.

    I would have understood it if jwz had given up a half year ago. I don't understand why he give up now.

  • One has to wonder whether this is a joke or not...

    -Pez

  • I've been a big fan of Apple in the past, but their latest open source move gives me this "pixie dust" feeling....

    I'm curious as to why you think that that Next/OpenStep/Rhapsody/MOSXS/Darwin is a dying project. It's certainly not spritely, but rather quite stable. It's more of a project that needs maintenance than any real push towards anything. I don't think apache has done anything truly stunning recently, yet it continues to be updated with little fixes; however, few would term apache a dying project.

    Now, as an open source project, Darwin is far from dying. All the code hasn't even been released!

    Of course, that's not to say that Apple's open source efforts resemble and/or could learn a lot from Netscape's successes and failures in that arena. It's not like Steve Jobs just woke up one morning and said, "Hey, let's free the code!"



    -Andrew
  • Pay-per-view?! rms would never allow that! Because, uhh... he's rms! He's a zealot! Yeah! ...ah, nevermind.

    do the obvious if you want to email me ...
  • He must be causing a raucous stench by now. :/

    - A.P.
    --


    "One World, One Web, One Program" - Microsoft Promotional Ad

  • hmmm.. (Score:1)

    by drwiii ( 434 )
    Isn't this about the point in the script where Microsoft swoops down and finishes off the rest of the Internet?
  • It is not, unfortunately.

    I want to die peacefully in my sleep as my grandfather did...
  • ... that this is going to put a bit of a damper on the Two dot oh party this evening.

    Good luck in your next venture, Jamie.

    I want to die peacefully in my sleep as my grandfather did...

  • Then again, jwz doesn't seem like the april fool type to me.

    ----

  • Except that JWZ is actually resigning, while ESR was just pretending to as a publicity stunt (read his follow-up, he has no intention of quitting any time soon).
  • Posted by Geocrawler:

    All I can say is I'm sorry I haven't contributed to Mozilla.

    I've become what I used to hate most: A Windows User. An IE user.

    In November I discarded my Mac and caved into the Windows mentality, and now I'm successfully converted to NT. I hated it at first, and I was embarrased whenever someone asked me about it. But now it's comfy.

    Then in January I caved in and started using IE, because it really is a better browser...

    Tonite I'm getting a copy of Red Hat and I'm going to blow the microsoft stuff away.

    And I'm going to start in full-force on Mozilla.

    I wish everyone else would do the same. If we don't contribute to Mozilla - in a real way - then we're all going to become IE and AOL users.
  • Sengan's research is fine. He posted the article before jwz released the two new gruntle pieces.

    OK?

    --

  • exactly (Score:1)

    by pohl ( 872 )
    I'm not surprised he's leaving. The open-source culture is heavily geared towards doing things the Right Way, largely because the participants are sick of crappy software. Jamie seems driven by shipping the veneer on time. His motivations are mismatched with the position.
  • >Primarily, he brings up what I think will be the most disappointing issue for companies releasing open source software. You probably wont *get* that many contributors.

    If you take "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" as a good explanation of the process under which open source works, then the problem isn't related to being corporate at all: it's related to not having a reasonably functional program to start with. If I have to wait at least a year before my mods are of any use to me, that's a long time to wait for my itch to be scratched.
  • I'd like to see a Slashdot poll asking which of the 6 excuses Jamie listed for the lack of outside development was the most plausible. I'd have to vote for Excuse #2 since it takes the immediate gratification out of writing code if you can't use what you write.
  • My initials are 'JWS'...It comes out pretty quickly:
    Jay Dub-yuh Es
  • If the Mozilla Project is falling apart the fault is all theirs. They've done some totally stupid things. 1) Not supporting Win 3.1 A lot of people still aren't running Win 95/Win98. 2) Trying to force people people to use GCC 2.8 to compile mozilla, especially Linux users. How many people actually have bothered installing it when you still can't really use it under Linux? There are other examples of this kind of short-sighted stupidity within mozilla
  • Oh really? Take a look at Lynx. Here's something that was never intended to run under MS-DOS but guess what? You can compile the Lynx source code using DJGPP (the msdos version of GCC ) and get the same version of Lynx running under DOS that you can under Linux or any other Unix. The DOS version has a couple of bugs in it's Wattcp-based socket code, but for the most part everything still works. In the process of making Lynx run under DOS, the Lynx code as a whole was improved. The Lynx source code in general got cleaned up, memory leaks were discovered and fixed that would otherwise have gone unnoticed...you get the picture. You comment concering GCC 2.8 is really laughable. GCC 2.7 works fine under linux and other Unix's. There's *NO* real reason to code something that requires a compiler most people *DON'T* have installed on their machines other than plain stupidity. It's that simple.
  • I thought he said more along the lines of "Linux sucks less."
  • Well, that quote doesn't imply Linux is the hardest to use OS on the planet. It simply implies that the real cost is in the time you spend getting it up and running.... time that is a factor for every other operating system out there.
  • That doesn't explain why he resigned from mozilla.org. That doesn't make sense to me unless he really was feeling demoralized.
  • There is a large bridge in Milwaukee, WI that goes over Jones Island. I think the highway is 794. The bridge was being repaired and would now require a computer program to operate (its a dream, remember). jwz wrote the sw to run the bridge. I was in the server room underneath the bridge with jwz and the sw had crashed and I saw jwz slyly try to restart the software. Then I realized it wasn't jwz, but an imposter. The imposter and I were then driving up the bridge for the inaugural crossing and I had a sinking feeling.
  • ...is for everyone out there with the skills and a little time to get their arses over to mozilla.org and help out. Even if you only fix one bug you would have helped. I dont want to EVER be using IE5.0 for linux...

    cmon people, lets help get 5.0 out.

    Gav
  • >I've kissed Netscape goodbye a long time ago when I saw how much faster IE was.

    Strange, I can't even run it on any of my OS:es because it doesn't even exist. Have they released a Linux or an OS/2 version that I haven't noticed?
  • This letter reads almost like one of those trolls who whine that the software wasn't out three days after the source release, with the one exception that it is very well-written. However, he also realizes that good software does in fact take time, and says as much in the article. Yet he denies the progress of the project he was heading, and because they couldn't get something out in the absolutely ludicrous time frame of six months (when he thinks they should have shipped) he quit.

    Something's up here. I don't claim to know what it is and I won't be the first to put forth wild theories, but sonething isn't right about this.
  • Jamie's got some stuff on his site. See the following urls:

    Resignation and Postmortem [jwz.org]

    Netscape and Aol [jwz.org]
  • After looking at his page, I realized he had worked on lucid emacs. Anyone else see any parallels between lucid and netscape/mozilla?
  • can't find it no more...
  • > Linus has the right idea for Linux

    You're confusing "C++" and other "OOP Languages" with "OOP." In fact, Linus usually holds up the Linux file system interface as a good example of OOP while using C.

    > Now that JWZ has hit the road, maybe NS can be rewritten.
    This is just plain silly.

  • What a journey: twentieth employee at Mosaic, then part of the fastest growing company ever, then an employee of the AOL juggernaut.

    Read jwz's resignation [jwz.org] if you haven't since it's a fascinating read. I found his explanation of why mozilla has failed to ship in a years time facinating. And I especially liked how he ended the paper by saying that mozilla's failures haven't been because of it's going open source, but mostly in spite of it (except he uses the word pixie).

    It's easy to understand why he finally quit. Anybody who is there at the beginning, who works best when the pressures are highest and the excitement is greatest, is unlikely to fit in later on when a company grows large and boring.

    I just hope he continues to write great code and the occasional gruntle prose and occasionally liven up the mozilla newsgroups [mozilla.org].

  • Oops, screwed up a link on my last comment. I swear this one works.

    I just hope that JWZ occasionally still posts to the mozilla newsgroups. Not that I read them just to catch his posts [dejanews.com]. Just like I don't read the newspaper just to read the comics.


  • I really hope they do a good job on 5.0. I DO NOT wan't to use Explorer ever.

    I wonder if the gecko engine could be used in KDE.

    Ken Broadfoot.

  • Appearantly he hates UNIX in general, and hates Linux specifically. I'm a bit surprised; ran into the comment while skimming his 'links' page.

    Oh well, to each his own.

  • I think that NEED TO KNOW was kidding when they wrote that "good luck in your new job" bit -- a sly reference to all the Netscape firings by AOL that occured during the week.

  • BFD (Score:1)

    by Tack ( 4642 )
    He looks nothing like Yanni.

    And Jamie is as good a hacker as Yanni is a musician.

    Don't flame me for my musical tastes! [Yeah, like my plea is going to make any difference :)]

    Jason.
  • He didn't say he exepcted to be able to get anything out in 6 months; what he said is that ideally Netscape should have done so - in order to maintain it's mindshare, I suppose, if nothing else. If you read the letter thoroughly you will see that he acknowledged that this was never practical.
  • Please man. Come on. Let it happend.
    :-|
    Oliver
  • yes, but probably posted on the first. if jwz had dated his resignation as 1.4.99, no one would have believed him. hence the 31.3.99 date.
  • This should serve as a wakeup call not for AOL but for the free software community; if we don't contribute, we're never going to have another decent browser to use.
  • OK....

    I had a look.

    The reason is the Debian build.

    I "alien"ed the RPM packages, installed them onto my Debian machine, ran them, and they are just as quick as running them on a Red Hat distribution.

    The problem is with the debian package made. Maybe the person who packaged it used the "debug" version, not the "opt" version? I don't know.

    Anyway, this is beside the point. You're talking about extremely Alpha code at the moment, not a fully functioning Beta release. There is NOT an issue with GTK, as was implied in an earlier post.

    *ting* next please!
  • I have used Mozilla on Red Hat, and on Debian.

    I do not see any difference in running speed OR stability on either platform.

    Anyway, what exactly are you trying to say?

    Enthrall us with your acrimony, troll.
  • JWZ has been around a long time as a good code hack. Anyone remember alt.fan.jwz, from about 6 years ago? I remember when MCOM hired JWZ, thinking "oh, maybe that company will go somewhere". He's a talented guy. His comments about the problems with Mozilla are worth reading and taking to heart. A lot of companies are experimenting with open source now; we in the community can help open source by understanding how it works, when it doesn't.
  • and then those two will have to duke it out!
    I want the pay-per-view rights on that one!

  • One !bug (Score:1)

    by atw ( 9209 )
    This is not a bug. Linux started from zero, slowly adding up and polishing modules of the project. If Linus team had a mess like mozilla they released in April, 98 they wouldn't make much too. I wanted to contribute to the mozilla, but hell, I want to program features, I am not going to work 10 hours a day to look for someone else's bugs. They have made a big mistake releasing that mess. But they didn't have choice did they?

    AtW,
    http://www.investigatio.com [investigatio.com]
  • All the comments seem to be around the [incorrect] idea that this is another April fools joke, or that this is a sad day. I am thinking more about jwz who has just made a decision it seems like he should have made some time ago. If you visit his web site and read his essay, you will understand. Becides, this could be a good thing for the entire community. He is a great coder, and now he has the opportunity to work *living* projects without the
    restrictions it seems like he had been faced with for some time. I wish him luck in where ever he decides to go, and ask that people realize this could be a very good thing for our community
    and jwz. Thanks.
  • JWZ resigns from mozilla [jwz.org]

    Reading this paper was a very interesting experience. Its a wake-up call with some obvious clues.

    Firstly, open source projects don't happen unless people contribute.

    Secondly, no one really wants to spend their free time digging through cruft in order to figure out how to contribute. Most developers appear to prefera clean slate to cruft. JWZ seems to think that this was a mitigating factor to getting more outside help on Mozilla.

    I can't say any of this astounds me - I program for a living, and its only fun some of the time. Other times its a pain in the rump - its work. Most people don't want to dig through mountains of cruft pro bono, and I can't say I blame them.
  • If you want the government to actually be able to go around and make cavalier decisions like that.

  • One bug (Score:1)

    by kels ( 9845 )
    See JWZ's Excuse #1 (and 1a). The project is too big for someone to just come in and contribute something useful and small in a short amount of time. I think this has a lot of truth to it. It takes a while to figure out what's going on in even a medium-sized program, and Mozilla is huge.

    One might say the same about the Linux kernel, but it's got a much longer history of being open.
  • How sad. Maybe we can go for the conspiracy theory and think that AOL is up to no good...

    Actually just wanted to beat an AC. :)
  • I was wondering when you were going away anyway. I guess it won't be hard for you to find a new place where much more innovation is taking place. Or are you going to do the open source deal and live off donations, kinda like Alan Cox does?

  • I realize I should feel bad for jwz since he was the baddest motha over there, but I can't help but laugh at him when I go his site and see that picture of him on the first page. He looks like one of those crappy tv magicians in it.

    I think he's quitting to go work a casino in Las Vegas.


    Cody -- http://www.howstrange.org [howstrange.org]

  • BFD (Score:1)

    by Lx ( 12170 )
    You take that back! Dissing Jamie, sheesh.
    :)
    -lx

  • BFD (Score:1)

    by Lx ( 12170 )
    Whatever, he's a hottie. ;)

    -lx
  • Now THIS kind of humor I could deal with all year round.
    Keep it up!

    -lx
  • What about Konquerer? It isn't too bad.. you can use it without loading the rest of the KDE desktop.. It's GPL..

    I think Opera is making a port to linux also. Although I really don't think we need another binary-only web browser.

  • Just for the record...

    Cheers,
    ZicoKnows@hotmail.com

  • I'm sorry, but I just have to call bullshit on your post. You've been comfortably using a single OS for months now, but now you're going to just up and erase it all--I don't buy it.

    I won't even go into at length how disgusting I find your hatred of people just for using Windows or IE. I'll just say this: Go ahead and blow NT off your system, but don't install Linux--get your Mac back. I'm a Linux and NT (among others) user, and neither OS has any need for users like you.

    ZicoKnows@hotmail.com

  • 1) Not supporting Win 3.1 A lot of people still aren't running Win 95/Win98.

    And you seriously think that a 3.1 user would WANT to use a program of this size? There would be no way to support 3.1 users and still make a product worth using for the rest of us. You can't go on supporting legacy platforms forever, that just results in worthless programs.

    2) Trying to force people people to use GCC 2.8 to compile mozilla, especially Linux users. How many people actually have bothered installing it when you still can't really use it under Linux?

    Just because you have problems getting gcc 2.8 to work for you, don't generalize for the rest of us!

  • I don't know what to say, it's depressing. jwz says open source works, but to have jwz resign from a big open source project like mozilla kinda makes you think.

  • BFD (Score:1)

    by vead ( 19024 )
    Horse Shit!

    JWZ is TEN times the hacker that Janni is a musician. I'm not flaming Your musical tastes. I'm flaming Your deflicted perception of skill.
  • It's easy to get complacent when things are going well, but sometimes, when things like this happen, it makes me think about the negative side of things and about how we've come quite a ways but still have very far to go - Microsoft *still* has 90+% of the (desktop) OS market; if we're not careful, they may soon win the browser war and hence the HTML protocol.

    I think overall the positive signs are there, and we will ultimately resolve these issues in favor of the good of the community, but there will inevitably be bumps along the way - and we just hit one.
  • That doesn't mean he prefers Windows, DOS, or Mac. He's an old Lisp machine hacker, and he's written some nostalgiac stuff about them.
  • Gotta love Walter Slovotsky. :) I like the one that goes something along the lines of "It ain't over till it's over, and maybe not then, either." It's been true for me so many times. :)
  • Do they really have the resources to do that? Don't forget that adding more programmers to a late software project very commonly will only serve to make the project even later.

    Somehow, I doubt Steve Case has ever heard of Frederick Brooks, much less read MMM.

    At this point, I think that the best thing for Mozilla would be to keep it as it is; it won't get better by having AOL become more involved with it. It'll get better when more people see a useful product and want to start hacking on it. I think their best move is to just keep moving along as they are. If they (the people actually doing the coding) persevere, things can and will get better.

  • Man, I am relieved to hear jwz admit that the Mozilla code is ugly. I downloaded it and worked with it when it was first released. My gut feeling was, if mozilla is this disgusting, I can only imagine how fscked-up IE's code must be. Oh, well. Hope he moves on to do something cool....
  • I think Netscape/Mozilla is falling apart, it's sad, I also don't think enough people contribute to the mozilla project. Netscape 5 probably won't be out for at least 3 months most likely longer. *sigh*
  • ... many of the readers on /. promulgate the tenets of open source.

    Many get all wrapped up in flame wars over ESR and RMS and Bruce and Apple and M$.

    Many advocate an OS that is difficult to use, but use it for the same reason; demonstrating their technical abilities.

    Many are programmers, or much more so than your average joe.

    And... many complain about the lack of a good browser for Linux.

    And now JWZ resigns from an open source project which has the ability to demonstrate to the rest of the world why open source matters and what it can do. JWZ basically says over and over that only about 30 people contributed to the _code_ in Mozilla that were not NS employees. Then apparently to assuage the OS advocates and to fend off the naysayers, he says that open source works.

    So how can a critical open source project lose its leader due to the projects' inability to ship a product when there are so many /.ers who daily flame each other over the virtues of open source, but who obviously have not backed up their words by writing code for such a critical open source project?

    Yo!
  • jwz's final lines seem to have extra significance for Apple's Darwin project:
    If there's a cautionary tale here, it is that you can't take a dying project, sprinkle it with the magic pixie dust of ``open source,'' and have everything magically work out. Software is hard. The issues aren't that simple.
    I've been a big Apple fan in the past, but their latest open source move gives me this "pixie dust" feeling...
  • I dont want to EVER be using IE5.0 for linux...

    You won't. Unless they release just one or two working versions to prevent us from writing our own browser, then destroys the whole open source threat by removing IE, thus removing our access to the common web.

  • In addition to your points, you have the following:

    • Mozilla is just not an innovative product. What you get is basically a Mosaic clone with a couple of thousand of bugs to fix. It is not the way I want the future to be at all.
    • It requires nearly 1 GB of hard drive space for compilation. Personally, I do most of my development on the university, where resources is limited. The times I compiled it, I had to use several /tmp directories which worked after doing a lot of symlinking.
    • It is not an easy project to work on. Most of the small parts (like the libs, expat and stuff) works, it's the glue that has to be patched. That requires that you know a lot about all the stuff that should be glued together.
    • Testing has been hard. The project is not build with a minimal working kernel on which features is connected. It is a mess of features which is patched together.

    I guess all of that above is not quite true, but that's the way I see it, and that's why I have made just minor contributions.

  • A damn shame, Netscape is definitely losing a giant today. I've been following jwz for a couple years. I wish him luck in all his endeavours. Ces't la vie.

  • Yeah, right. Thanks for that useful tip. Having watched that little lizard since it got free, even trying a small patch here and there, hoping real hard that she'll be the greatest browser ever, the one built by us for ourselves and everything... I was getting kinda sad and depressed right now, you know? But, thankfully, you came in and said just what I needed to hear.

    We're so lucky that we still have Microsoft on our side, aren't we?

    Now please go away.

  • JWZ seems like he may have a little free time on his hands. He is now wealthy after becoming fully vested in NSCP. He still seems to believe in the open source movement (based on the article on his webpage). He has no problem generating controversy in the press (has the right amount of attitude). He is easily identifyable by his 3 initials.

    I think we have a winner.
  • guess it's not a joke... there's an awfully long
    writeup on his site about the situation. Long
    enough to be whining, actually. He goes off on
    aol and remarks on the good ol days... Is mozilla
    doing that badly, or is this a pr stunt?

    d

  • THIS JUST IN: jwz still dead! (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    When contacted for comment, jwz explained his retirement as a result of his death last year on slashdot.org. "Now that I'm dead, I have to re-evaluate my priorities," the late programmer remarked. "I need some time of my own, primarily to push up daisies."

    Apologies to those already on April 2.

  • it's (sort of) depressing (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    jwz says open source works, but to have jwz resign from a big open source project like mozilla kinda makes you think.

    Yeah but he does point out that it's not a cure-all. A lot of things work, but that doesn't mean that they can't be screwed up.

    In some ways, I think this can actually be a good thing in the long run. Mozilla always struck me as a questionable project from the start; not that the goal is unworthy but it was starting from a bad point. The Gecko base was a good idea but was too long in coming. An open browser project is a good thing and I hope that such a project continues in one form or another.

  • sn't this about the point in the script where Microsoft swoops down and finishes off the rest of the Internet?

    If jwz's words can function as some sort of wakeup call to AOL, then maybe that script goes out the window. I guess it's a little too late to release any 4.x code (see Excuse #2), but how about a Manhattan Project to ship ASAP a 5.0 that's as great as Gecko is supposed to be? Presumably AOL has the resources to do this. Do they have the will?

    --

  • Yep, I was just going to say that. Now I'm depressed. I personally think he picked a crummy time to retire. For April 1st, I want either all fake news, or all real news. On most days, lying isn't fair. Today, the truth isn't fair. At least it's April 2nd now, I can sort it out tomorrow.

    "All the great themes have been used up, [and] turned into themeparks". -- HHH, Pump Up The Volume. Heck, I could quote that movie for pages, and they'd all be appropriate.

    I know the feeling, but fortunately, there's no way JWZ can stop programming. Oh, I'm sure he could, but lets face it. Although there's a lot we could do, there isn't always a lot we want to do. I look forward to his next project. I love netscape. (It was so much better than Mosaic, but lately it's just been slowly loading pages and not displaying them until it finishes, just like Mosaic used to. Sure, the WWW is a more complicated place now, but computers are faster, compilers are better, and Mozilla is *way* faster. (Albeit not yet entirely stable, but neither is Netscape, or IE... IE hardly ever runs on Solaris, in my experience. It runs better in WINE on Linux.)) I love dadadodo, and I like xscreensaver. (It's a good concept. I'm more used to xlock, but xscreensaver has more display hacks, and an open, incredibly simple interface for adding them.) ...and everyone knows about xdaliclock. Say what you will about Netscape, JWZ has made his mark.
  • The first line of last week's Need To Know [ntk.net] reads
    *** STOP-PRESS TRIBUTE ISSUE: GOOD LUCK IN YOUR NEW JOB, jwz! ***

    I assumed at the time that this was their April Fools joke. But did they really know ahead of time, or was it just life imitating fiction?

    --

  • I really didn't think he would last. JWZ has authored some world-famous quotes, such as that writing programs in Java is a waste of time; GNU/Linux is the hardest operating system there is to use; and that Netscape is the [crummiest] browser.

    I wonder what he'll do next. He's probably feeling stifled in his new home with AOL. I wonder who will replace him? AOL/Netscape needs to hire around 100 new software engineers for the browser division--methinks that AOL wants to move from their current, dated user client to a Mozilla-based solution.

    I'm just glad the Mozilla code is out there. And quite frankly, while I respect JWZ and ESR and their accomplishments, I disagree strongly with their philosophy of things.

    We can all take refuge in the fact that RMS is not going to go away. Nothing short of death will bereave him from us (as did it to my beloved --jon.).

    Cheers,
    Joshua (a GNUite)

  • Well, I believe that it's one thing to start a project as open source and a different thing to successfully open a huge, closed source project. I think one of the major reasons for the lack of success in this case was that the source that was released wasn't usable, in addition to being huge. If they had released the source to Netscape 4, which at least is usable (if barely), it might have had somewhat more of a success.

    I don't know though. The whole browser thing kind of sucks. We have Netscape - slow, bloated, buggy, bad with standards. We have IE - rather fast, but also very bloated, buggy, full of security holes and available on a limited amount of platforms. Then we have Opera. Small, fast, but still only available for Windows. Also not a full featured browser. Lynx is nice for some things, but worthless for many.

    That's about it. All the other attempts are often less usable. It's a sad thing, really.

  • Hmm, wonder what he's planning to do. Fork the mozilla code, join the IE effort, start up something entirely new? It's hard to imagine that he left on good terms, since this had to put somewhat of a damper on the 2.0 party, if for no other reason than because of all the questions they're sure to be asked. The above is complete speculation--I certainly have no idea what he's doing and, ever since reading it on news.com hours ago, have been waiting for someone to tell me "April Fools!"

    Cheers,
    ZicoKnows@hotmail.com

  • Releasing Mozilla 5.0 is not enough. A couple of weeks after the Mozilla release, Microsoft will release IE 6.0, containing all Mozilla features, and breaking a few new standards in ways Mozilla can't handle. Then we're truly fucked. Mozilla 6.0 will, if it ever is released, be released a couple of years later than that, probably in time for IE 8.0.

    This should serve as a wakeup call not for AOL but for the free software community; if we don't contribute, we're never going to have another decent browser to use.

    That's right. The whole open source movement is actually in danger.

    Unless Mozilla 5.0 get released (or Opera does something drastic), there will be no MSIE competitor on the Windows platform. That means that Microsoft controls the web. And when there's no Windows Netscape users to protest, and the trial stuff is gone, they will have no problem shaking us off and make most of the web directly inaccessible for us.

    Who, other than me and other hardcore techies, will use free operating system when that means that they will loose access to the web?

    I guess what really happened was that Netscape tried to beat Microsoft in their own game. NS 2.0 to 4.5 has been far from inovative, thei're just patched feature-filled bloatware.

    What was really needed (but that's a luxury Netscape can't afford now) was to rethink the whole browser stuff and build another browser built on a better concept, not just a new set of features. That would have been both good for the world and the best way to beat Microsoft. MS have always been concept followers, feature leaders.

    Although it's too late for Netscape, it might be time for someone else. That's our only chance. If that does not happen, I truly believe Linux and FreeBSD will be finished as end user desktop systems.

  • it's official (Score:3)

    by ekool ( 25857 ) on Thursday April 01, 1999 @10:02PM (#1952616)
    http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nomo.html

  • Scary! Microsoft Predicted It! (Score:3)

    by SuperAnt ( 26444 ) on Friday April 02, 1999 @04:02AM (#1952617)
    This is exactly what MS predicted in their "Halloween I" document. This is really scary! Quoting them:


    Small Noosphere

    An interesting weakness is the size of the remaining "Noosphere" for the OSS browser.

    The stand-alone browser is basically finished.

    There are no longer any large, high-profile segments of the stand-alone browser which must be developed. In otherwords, Netscape has already solved the interesting 80% of the problem. There is little / no ego gratification in debugging / fixing the remaining 20% of Netscape's code.

    Netscape's commercial interests shrink the effect of Noosphere contributions.

    Linus Torvalds' management of the Linux codebase is arguably directed towards the goal of creating the best Linux. Netscape, by contrast, expressly reserves the right to make code management decisions on the basis of Netscape's commercial / business interests. Instead of creating an important product, the developer's code is being subjugated to Netscape's stock price.

    Integration Cost

    Potentially the single biggest detriment to the Mozilla effort is the level of integration that customers expect from features in a browser. As stated earlier, integration development / testing is NOT a parallelizable activity and therefore is hurt by the OSS process.

    The contention therefore, is that unlike the Apache and Linux projects which, for now, are quite successful, Netscape's Mozilla effort will:

    Produce the dominant browser on Linux and some UNIX's

    Continue to slip behind IE in the long run

    Keeping in mind that the source code was only released a short time ago (April '98), there is already evidence of waning interest in Mozilla. EXTREMELY unscientific evidence is found in the decline in mailing list volume on Mozilla mailing lists from April to June.

    Mozilla Mailing List
    April 1998
    June 1998
    % decline

    Feature Wishlist
    1073
    450
    58%

    UI Development
    285
    76
    73%

    General Discussion
    1862
    687
    63%

  • Here's why (Score:4)

    by heroine ( 1220 ) on Friday April 02, 1999 @06:25AM (#1952618) Homepage
    In case you couldn't figure it out as it leapt like a blatant Microsoft promotional ad from every single one of his interviews: JWZ didn't agree with the direction Netscape was going. JWZ is foremost an end user guy. He doesn't care about toolkits, licenses, clean code, and programming languages. The only thing driving this guy is how well the user interfaces with the program.

    Netscape on the other hand had this huge PR campaign which relied on toolkits, licences, clean code, and programming languages. When you look at it, the result of a year of hacking on this campaign looks really horrible to the user but to the programmer its a dream come true. All GTK in ANSI C licenced under something with the word "public" in it. Obviously JWZ wasn't interested in all the politics and wanted to take it back to the end users.

    His last interview was like a battle, with the interviewer from a Linux site constantly pressing him about GUI toolkits and choice of languages and "But wasn't motif really badly engineered?", with JWZ constantly changing the subject to usability and "But motif worked".

  • The difficulty of corporate Open Source. (Score:4)

    by Znork ( 31774 ) on Friday April 02, 1999 @05:18AM (#1952619)
    JWZ brings up several interesting points in his excuses for Mozilla.

    Primarily, he brings up what I think will be the most disappointing issue for companies releasing open source software. You probably wont *get* that many contributors. There are a number of reasons for this:

    Licenses; most OSS licenses that have emerged from corporate lawyer departments are biased in favour of the originating company in several ways. That is fine. That will get you bugfixers when you ship your product and people start getting the bugs. But it wont get you any major contributors. Most Open Source hackers are either of the BSD or the GPL crowd, and something they both have in common is the level playingfield. For Mozilla, had it been GPL, it would probably have garnered a much higher level of support from the Linux desktop projects, and likely from commercial Linux distributors too. They might have gotten some code forks, but most work would be sharable.

    Corporate code stinks; Anyone involved in major corporate programming projects is aware of the problem. Since corporate code is made of much tighter groups compared to most free software projects they can communicate in a closer fashion. Free software has to embrace modularity and sane abstraction simply to survive and be able to go forward. This makes it possible to work in a much more detatched fashion, where people can work on code without being able to talk to the other members about the changes they do.

    Tools and portability; Corporate software is often built using commercial tools. Those tools are similarily not geared towards the issues that surround worldwide collaborative portable projects. Compare, for example, the usual project tools used for Windows applications with gcc, autoconf, CVS and company. The Windows tools are entirely geared towards being a monolithic application development environment, and you work around the bugs in the environment in your code. The free software development tools are geared towards modularity and portability. And there is an interchange between the tools development and the application development.

    All these factors and more will result in bitter disappointment for corporate source code releases if they want a free ride.

    Mozilla has several advantages by now tho. While JWZ may be tired of it, it *has* come a long way. The NPL and MPL are, as far as the commercial licenses go, among the better ones. They've worked through a lot of the codebase, and I think they'll get more active outside participation as it gets closer to a working product. They've made some hard decisions that will eventually pay off.

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