Responses to Mozilla Column in 'The Guardian'Friday July 18th, 2003As many readers will remember, last Thursday's edition of The Guardian newspaper featured a column by Jack Schofield that criticised several of Netscape's and Mozilla's development decisions, prompting a strong reaction from many MozillaZine readers. Yesterday's Guardian featured two letters responding to the piece. The first points out the advantages of Mozilla's cross platform nature (which Schofield criticised) and the second highlights the work of mozdev, which is only possible due to Mozilla's open source nature. Both letters praise Mozilla for being vastly superior to Internet Explorer. Readers of the print edition of The Guardian can find the letters on page 23 of the Life/Online supplement. That's cool :) But the initial article was still... b0rked :) I find it unusuall when an editorial ISN'T overtly inflammatory or insulting. The editorial section is specifically designed to get people fired up so that they tell others about the article (how bad/good it is) so the paper garners more readers. Then, they print response articles to calm the waters (so as to not alienate too many readers) and go onto the next issue and start all over again. I hope nobody actually bought a copy of the paper just to read the original article. You said, "...the work of mozdev, which is only possible due to Mozilla's open source nature." If Mozilla were complety closed source, mozdev could still exist as a place for Mozilla addons. No, most of the addons at mozdev probably wouldn't exist with out open source Mozilla, but that's beside the point. There are tons of addons for IE, and someone could (and probably has) make an IE addon/development site similar to Mozdev. My mozdev project, DailyComics, uses the mozilla activex control (DailyComics is written in Delphi), and I have never touched the mozilla source code. The 7/16 post at http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/doron/ is a great rebuttal to any rejoicing. |