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Mozilla at One: An article by Frank Hecker 45

Posted by CmdrTaco from the thinking-positive-for-a-change dept.
thaths writes "Frank Hecker, the person who wrote the paper that led to Netscape's release of the source code, has written a birthday piece on Mozilla , "
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Mozilla at One: An article by Frank Hecker More

Mozilla at One: An article by Frank Hecker

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  • If the only reason the posters boss directed him to do this was to speed up their webpage, this would be pretty witless. It's clear to me that his company is getting much more out of his particiapation.

    The biggest benefit is the employee gets training and experience on cutting edge software, with minimal expense to the company. Rather than going out and hiring an WWW guru, this startup is growing their own. That's the sort of investment that can really pay off in the long run.

    They also have positioned themselves so that they can have more influence over standards than they otherwise would have. This programmer is presumably on the mailing lists and newsgroups, networking and meeting people that matter as far as such things go. This is another investment that can pay off in the long run.

    Granted, the move is something of a gamble, there is no guarantee that they will realize these benefits, but I applaud them for the attempt. If the programmer went out and dug ditches for fibre, his morale would possibly drop, and the networking and training he would probably not relate to his job very well. Telling him to help out Mozilla sounds like a much better move.
  • A small company should not be altruistic. Focus your few resources on what you need to do to stay alive. If your programmers are inadequate - either get more or replace them. Sending them off to waste away days in the Mozilla source tree is simply ridiculous, especially for a small company.

    The market punishes altruism.

    I fail to see this. Carefully selected, altruism can seriously help a company. Altruism can be used to increase mindshare, a critical and intangible issue that is incredibly important for a startup. Altruism can also help employee morale, and solidify the company culture, both of which will improve productivity.

    The market punishes stupid business moves, but properly thought through altruism is far from a stupid business move.
  • That's what I meant.
  • I've exchanged some email with him in the past and he is intelligent, friendly, and has a good grasp of business issues in the software world. He's not ideologically committed to free software, but he does seem genuinely excited about the free release of Netscape's browser source. He (along with a handful of other great folks like Chris Toshok) are bright lights in a company whose business practices I have in general not liked.
  • Most especially, I missed it under the list of reasons why it hasn't gotten many outside contributions. I personally have a couple of ideas about managing bookmarks that I'd like to add, but the code hasn't gotten to that point yet. I think this isn't a failure of Mozilla/Open Source, just a standard requirement for it to work, and there's nothing that could be done to fix it.

    (The ideas? Have a "delete last bookmark" menu option, for when a website goes away, and a "replace last bookmark" menu option for the various redirects/restructurings. I'd also like to see an IE-like system for filing bookmarks, with the ability to rename the URL and add new directories as the URL is being filed. Also, I'd like to have a way to go "Back" and "Forward" without reloading, and to resize without reloading. Furthermore, I'd like a mode that doesn't load images until requested, either all images at once or per image on request.)
  • His analysis misses the key thing you need for attracting developers: something that (at least to a point) works. It's much harder to get outsiders to get involved in the start-up development.
  • Aaron Renn comments about me: He's not ideologically committed to free software...

    To be more specific about this, I am not ideologically committed to free software in the sense that Stallman and others are. However I do acknowledge that that point of view is worthy of respect and understanding; if "open source" is going to be successful I don't believe for a minute that you can just ignore the political and moral issues behind the reasons that many people develop free software, marginalizing those beliefs (and by implication, those who hold them) as "naive" or "no longer needed".

    After all, political fervor is one major reason why free software/open source is where it is today in terms of a broad-based movement (as opposed to just a media phenomenon). And if a commercial company wishes to do collaborative development with the rest of the world, I can't see any point in pissing off and disrespecting a significant portion of your potential base of helpers, i.e., those who believe in the vision behind the GPL and free software in general.

  • Yes, you are absolutely correct that I did not highlight this properly. I am well aware of this being a problem, and it is implicit in a lot of what I wrote, but in the process of writing I stupidly forgot to address it directly.

    For what it's worth, I think we'll get much closer to having "something working" as we proceed through the set of milestone releases [mozilla.org] coming up over the next few months.

  • ...I tried last year to put together a lean mean Opera style browser for my alpha. I thought "Hey, they've already got working ports for Sun boxes, it can't be that much trouble to strip down and port to 64 bits". OK, it's downloaded. Hmmm, let's scan about the source a bit. Peruse the makefile. Is there anything like an autoconfig? They've gotta have something like that to deal with all of their targets...Little did I know that the near total lack of documentation and the lack of even remotely compilable source, much less a runnable/debuggable binary would stop me in my tracks. Yeah, I could have kept at it, but I figured that by the time I got something together, a better version of Moz' would have been out and about. I dumped it and turned towards other things. It turns out to be a double gotcha. By now I'm sure I'd have been there(I was shooting for later Summer or early Fall).

    Oh well, looking forward to June...

  • When it was first released, I started building Mozilla on a P133 with 16M of memory. It built fine. With so little memory, you just have to make sure that you have plenty of swap space set up.

  • - Like it or lump it, Mozilla's biggest problem is that their competition actually has out right now something that may be superior to most of what they are still building. Like it or lump it, IE is pretty slick. - You'd have a point if you mentioned Opera instead of IE as mozilla's competition. Opera has the best CSS compliance so far and is pretty small to boot. Personally I don't see how IE5 or Opera can compete with mozilla once it ships. I'm willing to be patient
  • Your statement is completely absurd. Mozilla failing will not bring about the death of open source. At worst it will bring about the end of large corporations creating their own license of the week so they can get free help with their code.

    Open source has existed long before the last year or two kids and it will continue to long after many of the current big name companies pull out from using it.

    ---
    Openstep/NeXTSTEP/Solaris/FreeBSD/Linux/ultrix/OSF /...
  • Hmmm, ever worked at a startup? You barely have time to go to the john, let alone go on a training expedition.

    Maybe if you work at IBM they can float the time to send off to train. At a small company, you better produce within 30 minutes or you should be out the door so as to not hinder other programmers.
  • Anyway you cut it, its a dumb business move.

    A small company should not be altruistic. Focus your few resources on what you need to do to stay alive. If your programmers are inadequate - either get more or replace them. Sending them off to waste away days in the Mozilla source tree is simply ridiculous, especially for a small company.

    The market punishes altruism.
  • And yet microsoft is making money so fast they need to burn it outside to keep it from becoming a fire hazard.

    Of all the criticisms I could level against Microsoft, most of them don't have anything to do with money.
  • I really think your boss is whitless if he directs your efforts at mozilla thinking it will get your homepage to download faster. Why not help people dig ditches for fiber optic cable while you're at it? Thats probably an even better ass-backeards way to improve bandwith.

    A better approach is to put your html on a diet.
    There are a number of ways to do this, but the first and best is to actually understand how tables work. Most users nest tables where creating cells is more apporpriate.

    This effort would most likely lead to better results for your company.
  • I completely agree with this. I use Netscape on a near-daily basis (and it's often the main reason why I'll start X), and I sure would have hacked a whole bunch of little cool things in it (you know, itches to scratch), if I had the source to the same Netscape I was using. But I don't; I use 4.0something (never saw the difference with 4.5 anyway), and the mozilla builds are slowly getting there, but I'm not enough of a purist to use them. I look forward to the day when mozilla comes near beta, so I can switch over, and finally get some motivation to do minor hacks on it, esp. in teh area of giving the user much more control about what goes on with the browser.

  • Like it or lump it, Mozilla's biggest problem is that their competition actually has out right now something that may be superior to most of what they are still building. Like it or lump it, IE is pretty slick.



    Except that IE5 is still far from standards compliant, and tries to bite off more than it can chew, like all browsers previous to it. e.g., trying to implement CSS2 before you get CSS1 right, trying to do XSL before it's even a standard. It's more embrace-extend-corrupt, which is why Mozilla will be better, regardless of the "new feature set" hype.

  • In case there are still people here who hope Mozilla will someday "beat" MS' Internet Explorer: it can never "win" the browser war.

    Consider what being open source means. Suppose the Mozilla project does release a top-notch product. What is to prevent Microsoft from grabbing chunks of proven code (say, the layout engine) and stuffing it into their own browser? After all, open source code has to be fairly modular to facilitate wide scale collaboration. Microsoft could add their own features (SSL, for example) to build a more well-rounded product. For all we know, this could be happening right now. With open source, embracing and extending the competition has never been easier.

    The winner will hopefully be consumers in that good, standards-compliant browser code, shared all round, will improve our browsing experience. Web developers may also benefit. However, Mozilla will always be at best a runnersup in the browser wars.

    Chris
  • OK, this is a gratuitous M$ bashing, but relevant to the merits/detriments of developing software under the OSS model (and funny). Putting a bunch of paid programmers together in the same company isn't always efficient.

    I saw a great letter to the editor by James K. Sayre in Silicon Valley Tech Week of Feb 22. In it, Mr. Sayre points out:

    "At the ongoing Federal antitrust trial of Microsoft Corp., an MIT economist testified for the defense that Microsoft spent $500 million to create their Internet Explorer browser. For the sake of argument, let's assume each computer programmer at Microsoft received $50,000 per year, meaning about 10,000 programmer-years of labor was needed to create the Microsoft browser. This must be the most inefficient process of software development in the history of computing."

    LOL!

  • I should have been more specific. I'm a Win32 type, so officially [mozilla.org] my minimum specs should be:
    • Pentium 133 MHz or better
    • 64 MB RAM, 128 MB recommended
    • 250 MB NTFS or 500 MB FAT disk space
    • NT 4.0 is preferred; NT 3.51 will also work.

    Maybe I'm just living in the stone age, but a year ago those specs were far beyond 90% of the machines at work, let alone my home machine.
  • Just like Microsoft "Bob" played a critical role in their success! (hee hee)
  • Yes I completly agree, I like it too; faster reports, I can't understand how /. choose it's links these days, they seem more and more insipid ! I like the new moderation system though !
  • From The Cathedral and the Bazaar:

    It's fairly clear that one cannot code from the ground up in bazaar style. One can test, debug and improve in bazaar style, but it would be very hard to originate a project in bazaar mode. Linus didn't try it. I didn't either. Your nascent developer community needs to have something runnable and testable to play with.

    This is the problem with Mozilla. If I could actually grab mozilla source, compile it, and use it regularly, I would discover and fix all the things about it that I find annoying.

    However, I am just not motivated to hack on some code that I either can't use, won't use, or (putting on asbestos undies) for which I won't get paid. If they get a mostly-running release out, I'll grab it in a heartbeat.

    99 little bugs in the code, 99 bugs in the code,
    fix one bug, compile it again...

  • You're both making good points, but the situation isn't so clearly delineated as Cassius paints it.

    We've already put our HTML on a lean diet, and we expect it to get even slimmer as our HTML guys redesign and publish site updates. The impulse to fix the browser is the official reason, but it's far from the sole reason.

    We've already benefitted greatly from freely available source code (database connectivity, SSL libraries, and the list just goes on), and we have made some improvements to it. Our primary goal is to succeed as a company, and if it so happens that we can do that at the same time that we improve the public codebase, then we're quite happy to do that.

    So, if I were directed solely at working on mozilla, yeah, it'd be a stupid move for my employer. I'm not, though: I'm directed to see what I can do about it as my other projects permit me. I interpret it as a positive indicator of my own competence that I've got that time, and a sign that my employer actually means it when it speaks of giving something back to the communities that helped get the company going.

  • This looks to me like a form of damage control from JWZ and others jumping ship.
  • 1.Having a few concentrated, talented developers, is better than having a million semi-witless volunteers. And guess what, boys and girls, is the best way to conetrate a group of engineers? Thats right kids - pay them and put them in the same building. Oops, I forgot, corporations aren't in style with the /. crowd, are they?
    No one's saying there's anything wrong with corporate development of software. As long as they're concerned mostly about delivering a quality, innovative product to consumers. But big companies seem more inclined to roll out shoddy products and attempt to vendor-lock and price-gouge customers instead. It used to be that the only thing you could do was accept the low quality and pay the high prices due to *certain companies* with their monopoly power. :) Now that free/open source software has become popular, there is an alternative.
    Like it or lump it, Mozilla's biggest problem is that their competition actually has out right now something that may be superior to most of what they are still building. Like it or lump it, IE is pretty slick.
    Like it or lump it, Mozilla's progress is impressive, especially considering that they jumped from an old codebase to an entirely new system midstream and is shaping up to be faster and more streamlined than Microsoft's bloatware can manage. When Mozilla 5 hits the streets, it'll blow the doors of anything out there except for maybe Opera. You should actually download a binary build of the Windows port before making any comments about how far behind Mozilla is.

  • Frank Hecker, the person who wrote the paper that led to Netscape's release of the source code, has written a birthday piece on Mozilla

    I'm confused. I thought Cathedral and the Bazaar was the paper that led te Netscape's release of the Mozilla source. CandB was by ESR. Has the poster misidentified the paper, or is there another paper I don't know about?

    --JT
  • Having a few concentrated, talented developers, is better than having a million semi-witless volunteers. And guess what, boys and girls, is the best way to conetrate a group of engineers? Thats right kids - pay them and put them in the same building. Oops, I forgot, corporations aren't in style with the /. crowd, are they?

    Well, if you only give me the XOR there, I'd also prefer a core group of savvy engineers. But if I could have both, I'd jump at the chance. God knows some of the stuff I've written professionally could have used a hundred extra eyeballs, even though it was good enough for a corporate environment. Most of my early ('96) stuff would have brought me acute embarrassment if the source was freed... and yet, frighteningly enough, it's still being used because nobody's bothered to do better.

    So, yes, I guess corporations aren't in style on /. Perhaps it's because corporations tend to settle for sloppy code where they can, and the average FS developer is something of a perfectionist?

    Or maybe we're all commies. :)

    --


  • I had the 'opportunity' to take a look at the latest version of AOL a weeks back. For the most part, it was exactly the same as the version I ran on my Mac LC (for about 3 weeks) in 1990, except the graphics were bigger. Not very much progress for 9 years.

    AOL's problem for the last few years has been scalablity, and I'm sure that there aware that the only real solution is to junk their current client-server architecture and move to more web-based solution. This is going to take an excellent HTML renderning engine that is very customizable.

    I guess that Mozilla is one of the big reasons AOL bought Netscape. That and a bunch of very smart server software engineers that can help them re-architect their network.
    --

  • Once there is an open Communicator 5 out, I'm sure that people will be all over that code like flies on you-know-what.

    The big problem seems to be (as the Halloween document states), who wants to volunteer to do QA Engineering on things like the rendering engine and the javascript interpreter? However, lots of people want to scratch UI itches or add little features here and there.
    --
  • People seem to forget that AOL is a computer company that survives while making no direct revenues from their software product.

    To AOL, Mozilla will be the equivalent of their AOL software for the Internet user, with one big difference: it will be positioned towards Internet users, not AOL users. AOL knows that to win in the Internet marketplace, you have to be willing to play by their rules. That's why they're taking a hands-off approach to Mozilla.

    Microsoft has railed about how Mozilla is bound to be the default browser in the AOL software sooner or later. I disagree. I think Mozilla, with it's extendable UI, will *become* the AOL software.
  • I note that the essay doesn't address one of JWZ's excuses as to why there isn't more outside work being done: When you finally do figure out how to build all that code, what you get is... a bunch of test apps. Not even a complete browser. To quote JWZ [jwz.org]: "What we released was a large pile of interesting code, but it didn't much resemble something you could actually use."

    Another thing nobody's mentioned is the ridiculous amounts of memory it officially takes to build the thing. We starving programmers don't usually have 128M of RAM lying around in our home boxen. Until recently, in fact, I did all my non-work development on a 486 with 16M. I still only have a K6/233 with 96M of RAM. I'm sure there are lots of very good programmers in the same situation.

  • Remember that the mozilla project isn't just trying to build a better browser - it's building a better development model. There's a lot of work going into the planning and execution of this.

    It's also an experiment in OSS. It's success may be the defining factor in how many businesses see the idea later on.

  • And guess what, boys and girls, is the best way to conetrate [sic] a group of engineers? Thats right kids - pay them and put them in the same building. Oops, I forgot, corporations aren't in style with the /. crowd, are they?

    It's a problem, all right: how do you eat, pay rent, and buy electricity and network connectivity if you're not selling your work? On the other hand, I'm seeing some positive movement in this area. My boss, for instance, has said that he'd like me to see if I can't help get the next version of Navigator to render pages more quickly so that users can see our company's website without waiting for minutes for all the tables to render. So here's an example of a startup (HomeShark [homeshark.com]) directing engineering resources to help out with the open source development.

    The way I see it, though, the documentation is a big problem. I know I'd much rather bang out code than documentation, but in trying to come up to speed on Gecko I'm doing an awful lot of grepping through the source tree, trying to figure out where the hell stuff happens.

  • Yes and no (Score:3)

    by Frank Hecker ( 1123 ) on Monday April 05, 1999 @02:14PM (#1948893) Homepage
    I am not officially part of mozilla.org, and no one in mozilla.org or AOL/Netscape asked me to write this article, whether it be for "damage control" or any other purpose. However I did think it was a good idea to have an independent look on what was up with the Mozilla project, particular as I think Jamie's opinion is not necessarily representative of the true current state of the project. (As to whose opinion is really more in line with reality, don't ask Jamie or me; ask the Mozilla developers themselves, especially those not employed by AOL.)

    In some areas I think Jamie is absolutely right (like it being a bad thing not to have a working release yet), in other areas I think he is in effect objecting to technical decisions that were made for what other people consider good and sufficient reasons (like dumping Mozilla Classic for NGLayout), and in other areas I think he had unrealistic expectations (like speed and size of developer contributions to Mozilla).

    But in any case, if I really had wanted to try and put a "happy face" on the Mozilla project then I could have skipped writing a large chunk of the article.

  • Commercial Open Source Software (Score:3)

    by ketan ( 3574 ) on Monday April 05, 1999 @08:25AM (#1948894) Homepage
    This is probably a better sort of guideline for commercializing open source software than the article posted yesterday. It should give pause to those who think that it's practical for corporations to open source everything immediately. The JWZ comment about open source not being "pixie dust" comes to mind. On the other hand, that there are significant positive developments strengthens the position that commercial software can also be open source. If nothing else, it should serve as a mini-case study for others that are planning to do something similar so they can avoid some of the problems that Mozilla encountered.

  • He pretty much got it straight (Score:4)

    by Cassius ( 9481 ) on Monday April 05, 1999 @08:20AM (#1948895)
    The author pretty much nailed it.

    Highlights, in my opinion:
    1. Having a few concentrated, talented developers, is better than having a million semi-witless volunteers. And guess what, boys and girls, is the best way to conetrate a group of engineers? Thats right kids - pay them and put them in the same building. Oops, I forgot, corporations aren't in style with the /. crowd, are they?
    2. No one really wants to volunteer for what is perceived to be a corporate effort at sloshing through a cruft forest. Its just not fun!
    3. Documentation and tools are as important as code. This is probably obvious to a lot of engineers working on distributed projects.


    Like it or lump it, Mozilla's biggest problem is that their competition actually has out right now something that may be superior to most of what they are still building. Like it or lump it, IE is pretty slick.

  • Paper -- which paper? (Score:5)

    by Frank Hecker ( 1123 ) on Monday April 05, 1999 @11:33AM (#1948896) Homepage
    kzinti writes: I thought Cathedral and the Bazaar was the paper that led te Netscape's release of the Mozilla source...is there another paper I don't know about?

    The short answer is yes; as is often the case, reality is more complicated than the sound-bite. To be as brief as I can without distorting history: Over the years several people at Netscape floated the idea of releasing source code for Navigator/Communicator; some did so in postings to internal newsgroups (like Jamie Zawinski), and some did so in private lobbying to management (like Eric Hahn, formerly Netscape's CTO). Prompted by two such newsgroup postings by Jamie and Eric Krock (now Gecko product manager), in the fall of 1997 I wrote a 30-page internal paper lobbying for release of source by explaining the business value for doing so; I also addressed various objections to releasing source, either showing how they were not really problems or describing how any problems could be handled. I sent that paper to Marc Andreessen, who in turn circulated it to other senior managers at Netscape. This paper was IMO one, but by no means the only, factor in the decision by Netscape management in January 1998 to release source. (For example, it was also important that Netscape decided to make Communicator binaries totally free at the same time; this removed a major objection to freeing the source code.)

    Eric Raymond and "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" came into the picture as follows: I was finishing up my paper, and was working on a section addressing the problem of coordinating development between Netscape and the net. (A major objection I thought would arise was how this could work successfully, or even if it would work at all.) I asked Jamie for advice, he gave me some, and then also pointed me to Eric's paper; I thought it addressed this particular problem quite nicely, and included a reference to "C&B" and a page or so summarizing its conclusions. Some of the senior managers (like Eric Hahn) liked "C&B" just as much as I did, in large part because of the implication that Netscape could potentially successfully leverage the work of lots of non-Netscape developers, even to the point of their driving the future direction of the product; Eric and others in turn promoted "C&B" within Netscape.

    Once the decision to release source code was made, Netscape management then decided to bring in Eric and other people (Richard Stallman, Bruce Perens, etc.) for advice. However the decision itself was a purely internal decision, in the sense that neither Eric or anyone else outside Netscape (to my knowledge) actually lobbied Netscape management on the source code issue; "outside" input was restricted to that provided by papers like "C&B", the GNU Manifesto, etc., and examples of free software businesses like Cygnus Solutions, Red Hat, and so on. (The Slashdot discussions about Netscape releasing source came in right before the Netscape decision was announced, but I don't know if they were actually a factor or not, because I don't know if the internal decision had actually been made by then.)

    Incidentally, my original paper is not on the net, but I did a public paper "Setting Up Shop: The Business of Open Source Software" [netscape.com] which incorporates huge chunks of my internal paper. In particular, the sections "Making the Business Case" and "Issues and Tactics" are close to what I wrote originally. However the licensing and business models sections of "Setting Up Shop" are new.

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