The Mozilla Free Lunch
Oliver White
The captain has abandoned the ship, apparently. I for one miss being flamed by Jamie for my moronic suggestions to the Mozilla team. Jamie has given his reasons, and for the most part they seem reasonable. AOL is a big, uncaring company, for the most part, and it's sad that Netscape couldn't fare on its own. However, there are mouths to feed, and however much the current situation lacks poetry the engineers at Mozilla.org have created something to be proud of.
All religious wars aside, I think Eric Raymond's essay,
"The Cathedral and the Bazaar" was pretty much correct in
its assertions. Perhaps the Mozilla folk should try reading
it again, if their intention is to garner broad support from
the hacker community.
You don't write software from scratch via internet based
development. But it was decided to rewrite the code anyway.
"Ahh", you say, "That's right, that's where it all went
wrong".
But it didn't.
I personally hate politics, and when the decision was made
on the Mozilla newsgroups to rewrite the browser's engine,
implementing as many web standards as was possible, I thought, "what a great idea". The result has been a less slim lizard than perhaps Jamie would have liked, but something that really benefits web developers. I'm very proud of the guys and women at Mozilla, and their efforts.
Building the engine isn't all that much fun for a hacker.
This is a possible reason the hacker community hasn't dived
headlong into the code. The process at the moment is an
engineering exercise, to produce a full-featured, extensible browser. It seems that this new code base is beginning to stabilize.
Now it's your turn. Work with it, or never ever complain
to me about how a feature/bug annoys you. Play with the new
binaries, the milestone releases especially. Report all the
bugs you find. Look for things that annoy you, and change
them, send in patches. Complain! I know you guys can manage
it if you try.
It's your tool, as much as it is AOL's. It's odd that
Jamie left at this point in time, when it might actually
become fun for hackers to have a go. Or maybe I'm smoking
crack; the Mozilla.org folk tell me that a lot.
Well there you go, AOL doesn't owe you a good browser, and you certainly aren't paying them for the privilege. But then they don't own it, it was given away by Netscape long before the takeover started. Jamie has made these points before, and perhaps will again, wherever his travels take him.
Or maybe you really don't like the new browser, from what
you've seen. Maybe it's not good enough. Maybe it's a
failure. In that case, there's an opening for a better
browser. Write it yourself. There's no such thing as a free
lunch.
