Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.
Re: jwz resigns
Author: Eric Kidd Posted: 4/3/1999; 2:56:06 AM Topic: jwz resigns Msg #: 4768 (In response to 4765) Prev/Next: 4767 / 4769
I think the lure of freshmeat is too much for Mozilla to ever attract a big developer base. When Joe Developer puts out GFoo or KBar, their name and app gets plastered over the web. Nobody but their friends will know that they worked on Mozilla -- that's a Netscape project.Well, lots of people contribute to the Linux kernel, and that's a pretty monolithic project, recogniation-wise. Seeing your name on Freshmeat probably isn't a good motivator in the long run. Everyone always confuses "fame" with "peer recognition". Recognition by a small number of smart people in your field is probably more important to most people than seeing their name in lights.
To really contribute to a project, you need to like the code and like working with your fellow developers. You also need to find a niche where you can meaningfully add something without getting burried.
Even more importantly, you need to trust the people running the project. Strange, complicated licenses that mention the parent company a lot do not help that trust.
This separation not only is good for rapid development, but it is good for allowing people to feel ownership of their "own" code. No one piece of Gnome has a substantial number of people working on it.
Does a web browser need to be monolithic? Couldn't you start with an Opera-like core and a small team of smart people, and modularize all the extensions?
This is a delibrately stupid question. ;-)
That's exactly what Netscape is trying to do with XP-COM, JavaScript and their whole "portable interface" setup. If all of that worked right, Mozilla would be like Emacs or the GIMP--you could write portable features in a scripting language, and never touch the core at all. By allowing scripters to modify the browser interface, you could really speed up evolution.
The question is, when will I be able to run Mozilla as my day-to-day web browser on Linux? I still have a lot of hope for Mozilla, but it needs to become usable as a web browser before I get really excited.
I'm an early adopter with a vengence--I've been running Gnome as my primary desktop since version 0.10 (when my icons and panel disappeared more often than not), I own a BeBox and I program in strange, obscure languages. I don't care about documentation, support or lots of crashes.
But I don't believe in software I can't run. This is what soured me on OpenDoc, Copeland and Java, and what got me all exicited about Linux. Out of all these technologies, Linux was the only one that actually worked.
I'm willing to give Mozilla a bit longer--they've followed a long, winding path, but they're finally starting to have a product. When I can run Mozilla as my primary browser on a day-to-day basis, I'll believe.
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