Mitchell Baker Joins OSAF Staff
Monday November 18th, 2002
Mitchell Baker, mozilla.org's Chief Lizard Wrangler, has announced that she is to join the Open Source Applications Foundation (OSAF). Chaired by Mitch Kapor (founder of Lotus Development Corp. and co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation), OSAF has recently hit the headlines with its project to build an "Outlook killer" codenamed Chandler. Mitchell will be joining OSAF to guide its community and partner relations. Her role will be part time and she will continue to serve as Chief Lizard Wrangler for mozilla.org. OSAF will also fund a portion of the time that Mitchell spends working on the Mozilla project as part of their general commitment to open source development. Read the OSAF announcement for more details. We at MozillaZine would like to wish Mitchell the best of luck for her new and exciting position.
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#1 Mozilla?
by jedbro
Monday November 18th, 2002 1:11 PM
Why don't they grab Mozilla's calander and go from there? That way;
1) They have a code base they know works
2) They have an initial userbase
3) It can be stand-alone (not dependent on mozilla)
4) A big part of the initial work is already implemented
Can Mitchell talk to them about this?
#2 Just Calendar?
by schapel
Monday November 18th, 2002 1:49 PM
They wouldn't want to start with just Calendar. The combination of Mozilla Mail, Address Book, and Calendar sounds like it's a long way towards what Chandler will do. But Chandler will also have additional features that are included in Outlook, such as handling the scheduling of meetings at small companies. It would be great if they could start with Mozilla and add these additional features into Mozilla's components.
#3 Re: Just Calender?
by Racer
Monday November 18th, 2002 2:35 PM
Do you mean that instead of an "Outlook killer" they are really looking to designed something like Lotus Notes (ala NotesZilla)?
#9 Design
by leafdigital
Tuesday November 19th, 2002 9:19 AM
They want to design something good, from scratch. If your priority is good design, rather than fast release, you're much better off doing a design and then code - rather than trying to come up with a coherent design based on existing code.
--sam
#10 I suppose...
by bmacfarland
Tuesday November 19th, 2002 11:35 AM
...to some degree you'd want to design from scratch or at least build a blueprint as if nothing existed. My guess is that once the blueprint is designed you would look and say, "you know we have 80% of the code written and written well, so let's see what we would have to adapt to make it work." I'm guessing that some apps change very little. Look at what Phoenix is compared to Mozilla, which came up very quickly. They didn't need to rewrite Gecko. How much different would a mature (read 2.0+) mail application be for Mozilla and Outlook? It basically has to integrate with the Calendar application to set meetings and a couple of other things. I would think Mozilla would do this anyway, eventually. Calendar/Meeting/Email combo (kind of like a PDA) makes more sense to me than Browser/Email (the only synergy I can think of is HTML e-mail).
#4 I hear some people thinking, huh, what?
by bugs4hj
Tuesday November 19th, 2002 2:16 AM
1) What the heck is "Chief Lizard Wrangler"?
2) What exactly does Mitchell Baker for mozilla?
3) How many hours is she going to work on her mozilla tasks at OSAF?
Note: partime can be anything from 15 minutes up to 39 hours!
#6 Re: I hear some people thinking, huh, what?
by Gerv
Tuesday November 19th, 2002 3:22 AM
> 1) What the heck is "Chief Lizard Wrangler"?
It's the (slightly jokey) title given to the person who leads mozilla.org. Mitchell has held it since the very beginning.
> 2) What exactly does Mitchell Baker do for mozilla?
See http://www.mozilla.org/about/stafflist.html .
> 3) How many hours is she going to work on her mozilla tasks at OSAF?
You'll have to ask her that.
Gerv
#11 Re: Re: I hear some people thinking, huh, what?
by bugs4hj
Tuesday November 19th, 2002 11:59 PM
Gerv, I know all that but wou can't expect all visitors here to know everything, so why wasn't that link part of the full article?
#13 Well, it's already mentioned before
by tseng_mike
Wednesday November 20th, 2002 4:32 AM
Well you can't really expect full reference for every article. Mitchell's role has been discussed before. While it's not your fault that you didn't hear about it, you can't seriously expect every post to include the full reference. Esepcially since Mitchell Baker has been with mozilla.org since the begining as Blake mentioned.
#14 Re: Well, it's already mentioned before
by bugs4hj
Wednesday November 20th, 2002 12:39 PM
What is wrong with people here? Can't they read or what? I know all this, but what about new visitors? How the hell should they know who Mitchell Baker is?
#5 Not an "outlook killer"
by Gerv
Tuesday November 19th, 2002 3:20 AM
Mitch Kapor has specifically stated that one thing Chandler is _not_ is an "Outlook killer".
Gerv
#7 Hence the quote marks (n/t)
by AlexBishop
Tuesday November 19th, 2002 4:36 AM
This space has been intentionally left blank.
Alex
#8 Re: Not an "outlook killer"
by sphealey
Tuesday November 19th, 2002 7:23 AM
> Mitch Kapor has specifically stated that one thing Chandler is _not_ is an "Outlook killer".
Well, the last software developer out there who touted their wares as a "Microsoft application killer" was Netscape, and we all know how well that turned out.
In order for the OSAF's communication system to succeed, it must eventually take on Outlook. But probably not wise to say so at the moment!
sPh
#12 Whatever
by Tanyel
Wednesday November 20th, 2002 12:08 AM
I think this site needs articles more people can relate to. It seems to be drifting increasingly further from the mainstream. Something has to change.
by gwalla
Thursday November 21st, 2002 12:50 AM
The "mainstream"? I doubt that any news/discussion site specializing in a specific open source project could ever really be considered "mainstream". What do you want, movie reviews?
If you mean the mainstream of Mozilla news & advocacy, well, MozillaZine and MozillaNews are it.
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