Date: Fri, 2 Apr 1999 18:05:48 +0200 (CEST) From: Marc van Woerkom <van.woerkom@netcologne.de> To: freebsd-mozilla@freebsd.org Cc: jwz@jwz.org Subject: jwz resigns from mozilla.org Message-ID: <199904021605.SAA01325@oranje.my.domain>
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Sad news, folks:
http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nomo.html ("resignation and postmortem")
Certain quotes that hit the nail:
> The truth is that, by virtue of the fact that the contributors to the Mozilla
> project included about a hundred full-time Netscape developers, and about thirty
> part-time outsiders, the project still belonged wholly to Netscape -- because only
> those who write the code truly control the project.
>
> And here we are, a year later. And we haven't even shipped a beta yet.
I myself was very excited when I heard about the opening of the source
at that time, and was certainly interested in sinking my teeth into it.
But this never happened, because for some reason I felt uneasy with the
idea.
And I never had the impression that there was something like a FreeBSD related
effort that could be joined -maybe it showed up somewhere at mozilla.org,
but it did not show up here, where it matters to me- at the same time I
have neither knowledge nor time to dare ignite something myself.
Compare this situation to the JDK porting effort. The source was from a big
company too and not trivial. Why did this went off the ground?
Compare it also to egcs. General egcs stuff is done in the proximity of
Cygnus, now that egcs has reached a certain critical quality the import
into the FreeBSD-current source tree took place. Now there will be a
general focus and an OS specific focus of developement. For my part it
is more attractive to start the OS focus, because I have immediate rewards,
I have a working app on my OS, maybe later, when more familiar with
the thing, it might be possible for me to participate in the general,
harder development, now rooted in secure soil.
> Excuse #2:
> People only really contribute when they get something out of it.
> When someone is first beginning to contribute, they especially need to
> see some kind of payback, some kind of positive reinforcement, right
> away. For example, if someone were running a web browser, then stopped,
> added a simple new command to the source, recompiled, and had that same
> web browser plus their addition, they would be motivated to do this again,
> and possibly to tackle even larger projects.
>
> We never got there. We never distributed the source code to a working
> web browser, more importantly, to the web browser that people were actually using.
> We didn't release the source code to the most-previous-release of Netscape
> Navigator: instead, we released what we had at the time, which had a number
> of incomplete features, and lots and lots of bugs. And of course we weren't
> able to release any Java or crypto code at all.
>
> What we released was a large pile of interesting code, but it didn't much
> resemble something you could actually use.
How else should one try to make one self familiar with a huge code base?
Of course you try to make it run, then try to fix little bugs, then try
too make smaller improvements, then larger and larger ones.
In a similiar situation at my work, where I was faced with a huge client/server
project, it took two months until I had the understanding and techniques
together to hunt down simpler problems (i.e. ones that needed only understanding
of several of the hundreds modules). Exponential learning curve so to say.
Yes and indeed the JDK is much more complete than Mozilla. The holes in the
release were depressing.
> Excuse #5:
> Netscape failed to follow through on their own plans. During 1998, Netscape
> sunk a huge amount of engineering effort into doing the 4.5 release: working
> on a dead-end proprietary code base, the source of which would never be
> released to the world, and would never benefit from open source development.
> This was a huge blow to the Mozilla project, since for the first half of the
> year, we weren't even getting full-time participation from Netscape.
>
> This isn't even so much an excuse as a stupid, terrible mistake, considering
> we should have learned our lessons about doing parallel development like this
> in the past, with the abortive ``Javagator'' project.
This expressed not much trust from Netscape.
I can understand that pressure is extreme. The first Navigator release that
is based on open code must show that is of comparable quality than the previous
commercial releases, to demonstrate that the decison about going open was right,
plus it must have improvements.
Again I see a similarity with my job, where we took over development and
promised not only to keep the quality but to do it better and this under a very
ridicilous time frame.
In this situation you need a very good relationship of trust with management
because it is clear that with normal encouragement deadlines will never
meet - but who puts in 60-80 hours a week for months when he has not full
backup by management? (So you can guess what similiar step I took :)
> But despite all this, in the last year, we did not accomplish the goals
> that I wanted to accomplish. We did not take the Mozilla project and turn
> it into a network-collaborative project in which Netscape was but one of
> many contributors; and we did not ship end-user software.
> For me, shipping is the thing.
I don't know the present state, but maybe it would have been more wise to
release something that remotely works with a 5.0 label. Just to ensure the
world that you seriously do the development process this way.
Jamie,
I thank you and wish you the best - you will be missed!
Regards from Cologne,
Marc
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