Myths and Clarifications
In the week since my now-infamous-and-slashdotted blog post, I’ve had a lot of discussions with a lot of people, and read a lot of uninformed and baseless assertions. Such is life, but hopefully this goes a long way to correcting a lot of false impressions people have built up.
And now, the myths:
- We’re dooomed!
Nope, sorry. We’re going through a typical growth readjustment, and life in the fishbowl has actually focused us a little more. Having something to prove is generally motivational, and I believe that we’re making a lot of moves in the right direction now.
-
The absent peers are a bunch of slackers who don’t care about Firefox!
Not true. There’s just other things in the realm of innovation that are pulling their attention.
- Blake is working on something that he can’t talk about, but it does involve Firefox’s future path. Doing long-term R&D of new concepts is only going to help us move forward in the medium to long term (in the browser business that’s still between 1-3 years). As I hear it, he’s getting a lot of unfair flack for spending time on his startup’s new project, but the reality is that he’s jumping on an opportunity to do something innovative, that eventually will benefit Firefox in a big way.
- Vlad is working on the mozStorage APIs and other things related to Lightning. This is his job, and will only serve to benefit everyone using xulrunner, including Firefox.
- Brian (bryner) has been working on XForms for IBM. This is more of a general platform issue, but it does help us compete going forward, especially in the enterprise market.
- Ben recently laid out a number of changes, as well as clarifying his role in the project going forward. While he’s not working 150% of the time on Firefox, as he has in the past, he will continue to direct the project, and will be making more time for managing/driving releases, and building up new resources.
- There is no one working on Mozilla!
Lots of people are working on Mozilla. Gecko/xulrunner has a lot of contributors, a lot more than Firefox itself, which is an app running on top of the Mozilla platform. This includes around 60 paid hackers spread across various companies, including MoFo itself.
- I’m leaving the Mozilla project and never looking back.
Not true either. While I can’t say at this point to what extent I will be contributing, I have no intent of leaving or abandoning the project. Being the only “core” Firefox hacker who doesn’t stroll through the offices at MoFo I sometimes miss out on stuff that should be getting distributed. And when people aren’t getting certain mailinglist bits, its hard to respond to concerns. Some things are in motion to try to correct this, but it will take time to establish things better. Running a geographically distributed project is hard, and we’re still learning how to do that.
Your contributions are invaluable to the Mozilla Foundation and if I were in charge, I’d hire you right away (I wouldn’t have to hire myself then!).
Thanks for clearing all that up – Things did seem to get a little out of control once you hit Slashdot, but you’ve put down the crazy assumptions very well.
A bit of a turn-round from the accusations of hackers ‘going AWOL’ in the previous post! HINT: look up the meaning of AWOL!
Also a change from “I’m on the verge of just walking away indefinitely” which you claimed earlier!
Maybe more thought, less blogging?
W.
Wally – They’re still AWOL in terms of the review process, being on the verge of something doesn’t mean you actually mean to go through with it, and it’s a blog, not a Firefox press release. Until that blog post this was reaching a limited audience that would have understood that it was the venting of some frustration. I thought the point of a blog was to log your thoughts… but obviously now it would be wiser for Mike to censor anything negative he feels like saying. It’s just a shame that in this day and age we’re not more capable of looking past the sensationalism and taking context into consideration as well, but that would be a discussion for a different blog.
I did my best to Slashdot this post but it appears that they aren’t interested at the moment
Your last post was a good thing. It got many to realise some of the problems with the way things were being handled.
I hope the comments on the last posting, will lead to a more open development structure. You don’t attract professionals by making them jump through hoops before they are aloud to make any real difference to the project.
I would love a system that allowed you to contribute to the project more like a regular developer, until you did something wrong. It would of course need to be able to remove changes made by a certain user and the changes would only be superficial (although still visible to others) until approved.
That way you have people implimenting their own ideas. The reviewers can see exactly what has been changed and why the changes should be made, so their job is much easier. Also if regular users can see suggest changes by other users, then they won’t waste their time solving the same problems and submitting duplicate bug reports. *OK I think I’m getting a little out of control so I’ll stop here*
Anyway, that’s how I believe you build up a community of hackers.
I have read both this blog and your other, ‘infamous’ blog, taking every point you make. Since your initial blog, I’ve been at every forum watching the topics pour in about how you’d ‘obviously quit and give up on everything’. I took it for a grain of salt, and I’m glad you made this blog to dispell the rumors circulating about the internet, frightening some loyal fan of Firefox (myself included).
Even though you are in a currently unrelenting position and what not, I’d still back-up any choice you make in the future with regards to how you’d go about handling and working on Firefox.
~Deat
Sounds like you are a different person now complete with a different view. This episode doesn’t say much about communication across and within the at-large Firefox team, or, maybe it does.
Firefox in trouble?
hi, i am quote astonished to hear that somehow there seems to be not enough money for development. Where does the money come from? Sun, IBM(?)… Or do you mean there is enough money but it is spent in a wrong way? So who does decide? Ok, sometimes hackers have not the full view. The IE is surely a browser where code cleanup is also not very important. Nonetheless they are very successful? But we don’t want a second IE… right! I think as Microsoft will answer some hackers might get encouraged to do more oft their homework. btw: I also could imagine that on some point MS is giving up IE and supports Mozilla. (don’t laugh!
) Thilo
victoria hotel…
…
boca raton hotel…
…
buffalo hotel…
…
st martin hotel…
…
london cheap hotel…
…
hotel in uk…
…
nh hotel…
…
omaha hotel…
…
hua hin hotel…
…
dubrovnik hotel…
…
hotel in berlin…
…
cash+loan++%5BURL%3D+http%3A%2F%2F109%2Dcash%2Dloan.blogspot.com+%5Dcash+loan%5B%2FURL%5D+++%3Ca+href%3D+http%3A%2F%2F109%2Dcash%2Dloan.blogspot.com+%3Ecash+loan%3C%2Fa%3E+++http%3A%2F%2F109%2Dcash%2Dloan.blogspot.com+cash+loan+%0D%0Acash+loan++1