FW: NSPR: Mozilla post-mortem?

[Bill Jones]

On the Jax.PM jacksonville-pm-list 1.94.4;
"Bill Jones" <bill at fccj.org> wrote -

Attached is an interesting read, to say the least.

________________________________________________________________________
Bill Jones  |  FCCJ Webmaster  |  http://www.fccj.org/cgi/mail?webmaster
FCCJ  |  501 W State St  |  Jacksonville, FL 32202  |  1 (904) 632-3089

         Jacksonville Perl Mongers
         http://jacksonville.pm.org
         jax at jacksonville.pm.org

----------
>From: TOKILEY at aol.com
>To: new-httpd at apache.org
>Subject: Re: NSPR: Mozilla post-mortem?
>Date: Tue, Apr 6, 1999, 3:18 PM
>

>
> Looks like (G)othra may have gotten (M)ozilla...
>
> Here is Jamie's resignation letter as of a few days ago.
>
> Interesting read. He has not soured on
> open source ( read last paragraph ) but
> there may be some lessons here for Apache...
> especially with regards to recent discussions about
> 'incorporating Apache'.
>
> Sorry about the length of the post but this comes
> directly from Jamie's site and he put a (C) Copyright
> symbol on it which means any reproduction of the
> document should/must not be altered.
>
> Source URL: http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nomo.html
>
> TOP DEVELOPER LEAVES MOZILLA...
>
> resignation and postmortem.
> (c) 1999 Jamie Zawinski <jwz at jwz.org>
>
> April 1st, 1999 will be my last day as an employee of the Netscape
> Communications division of America Online, and my last day working for
> mozilla.org.
> Netscape has been a great disappointment to me for quite some time. When we
> started this company, we were out to change the world. And we did that.
> Without us, the change probably would have happened anyway, maybe six months
> or a year later, and who-knows-what would have played out differently. But
> we were the ones who actually did it. When you see URLs on grocery bags, on
> billboards, on the sides of trucks, at the end of movie credits just after
> the studio logos -- that was us, we did that. We put the Internet in the
> hands of normal people. We kick-started a new communications medium. We
> changed the world.
> But we did that in 1994 and 1995. What we did from 1996 through 1999 was
> coast along, riding the wave caused by what we did before.
> Why? Because the company stopped innovating. The company got big, and big
> companies just aren't creative. There exist counterexamples to this, but in
> general, great things are accomplished by small groups of people who are
> driven, who have unity of purpose. The more people involved, the slower and
> stupider their union is.
> And there's another factor involved, which is that you can divide our
> industry into two kinds of people: those who want to go work for a company
> to make it successful, and those who want to go work for a successful
> company. Netscape's early success and rapid growth caused us to stop getting
> the former and start getting the latter.
> In January 1998, Netscape hit one of of its blackest periods -- the first
> round of layoffs. It was quite a wake-up call. Netscape, darling of the
> computer industry, the fastest-growing company in the world, was not
> invincible.
> More concretely, this was when we realized that we had finally lost the so
> called ``browser war.'' Microsoft had succeeded in destroying that market.
> It was no longer possible for anyone to sell web browsers for money. Our
> first product, our flagship product, was heading quickly toward irrelevance.
> And then the unexpected happened: the executive staff decided to release the
> source code. I won't re-hash the history of the creation of the mozilla.org
> project, but suffice it to say that, coming as it did only two weeks after
> the layoffs, it was a beacon of hope to me. Here was Netscape doing
> something daring again: here was the company making the kind of change in
> strategy that I never thought they'd be able to make again. An act of
> desperation? Perhaps, but still a very interesting and unexpected one. It
> was so crazy, it just might work. I took my cue and ran with it, registering
> the domain that night, designing the structure of the organization, writing
> the first version of the web site, and, along with my co-conspirators,
> explaining to room after room of Netscape employees and managers how free
> software worked, and what we had to do to make it work.
> At this point, I strongly believed that Netscape was no longer capable of
> shipping products. Netscape's engineering department had lost the
> single-minded focus we once had, on shipping something useful and doing it
> fast. That was no longer happening. Netscape was shipping garbage, and
> shipping it late.
> And daring move or no, this was not going to change: Netscape no longer had
> the talent, either in engineering or management, to ship quality products.
> The magic was gone, as the magicians had either moved on to more compelling
> companies, or were having their voices lost in the din of the crowd, swamped
> by the mediocrity around them.
> The Netscape I cared about was dead.
> But I saw mozilla.org as a chance to jettison an escape pod -- to give the
> code we had all worked so hard on a chance to live on beyond the death of
> Netscape, and chance to continue to have some relevance to the world.
> Beyond that, I saw it as a chance for the code to actually prosper. By
> making it not be a Netscape project, but rather, be a public project to
> which Netscape was merely a contributor, the fact that Netscape was no
> longer capable of building products wouldn't matter: the outsiders would
> show Netscape how it's done. By putting control of the web browser into the
> hands of anyone who cared to step up to the task, we would ensure that those
> people would keep it going, out of their own self-interest.
> But that didn't happen. For whatever reason, the project was not adopted by
> the outside. It remained a Netscape project. Now, this was still a positive
> change -- it meant that Netscape was developing this project out in the
> open, in full view of the world, and the world was giving important and
> effective feedback. Netscape made better decisions as a result.
> But it wasn't enough.
> 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.
> In my humble but correct opinion, we should have shipped Netscape Navigator
> 5.0 no later than six months after the source code was released. But we (the
> mozilla.org group) couldn't figure out a way to make that happen. I accept
> my share of responsibility for this, and consider this a personal failure.
> However, I don't know what I could have done differently.
> I can come up with a litany of excuses and explanations for why we are so
> late (heaven knows I've been making these excuses to the media for half the
> lifetime of the project.) Some of them are:
> Excuse #1:
> It's a really large project, and it takes a long time for a new developer to
> dive in and start contributing.
> Excuse #1a:
> Because of this, what happens is, someone will try to make a small change,
> find that it's taking them longer than a few hours, and will give up and do
> something else instead.
> 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.
> Excuse #3:
> The code was just too complicated and crufty and hard to modify, which is
> why people didn't contribute. This was a believable excuse for a while,
> which is why, six months ago, we switched from the old layout engine to the
> new layout engine (Gecko/Raptor). By being a cleaner, newly-designed code
> base, so the theory went, it was going to be easier for people to understand
> and contribute. And this did get us more contributors. But it also
> constituted an almost-total rewrite of the browser, throwing us back six to
> ten months. Now we had to rewrite the entire user interface from scratch
> before anyone could even browse the web, or add a bookmark.
> Excuse #4:
> It didn't contain a mail reader. There is surely a large class of users who
> would be interested in working on Communicator that are less interested in
> Navigator, but we never really found that out, since we never shipped the
> source code to communicator (for a number of reasons, none very good, some
> downright pathetic.) Now, as a result of the Gecko/Raptor rewrite, the
> mail/news reader is being rewritten as well. Maybe it will even ship
> someday.
> 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.
> The worst part about all this is, for the last year, I've spent much of my
> time striving to convince people that mozilla.org is not netscape.com. I've
> told people again and again that the mozilla.org organization does not serve
> only the desires of the Netscape client engineering group, but rather,
> serves the desires of all contributors to the Mozilla project, no matter who
> they are. And that's certainly true. But the fact is, there has been very
> little contribution from people who don't work for Netscape, making the
> distinction somewhat academic.
> Now, to be fair, in this first year, we did do some very good things:
> * We showed the world how to operate a large software project out in the
> open. Whatever else happened, we did maintain a high level of communication
> between geographically and organizationally separate contributors and other
> interested parties. We transitioned from a secretive and proprietary
> development model to a very public one. We showed that it can be done.
> * Though we didn't get a whole lot of participation in the form of source
> code, we did get a lot of feedback about the directions the software was
> going. And the right feedback at the right time can easily be far more
> valuable than source code. By doing development out in the open, and
> ``living in a fishbowl,'' I believe that Netscape made better decisions
> about the directions of development than would have been made otherwise.
> * We released the source code to a number of ancillary tools, such as our
> bug system, source-control interface, and build tools. These are very good
> (and complete!) tools in their own right. Though they were critical to us in
> the development of Mozilla, and we created them in support of Mozilla, they
> are not tied to Mozilla, and others are finding them useful with their own
> non-Mozilla-related projects. These tools, and the development model they
> represent, are a valuable contribution in their own right.
> * And merely by being who we are and doing what we did, we played a big part
> in bringing the whole open source development model to the attention of the
> world at large. We didn't start the mainstream media interest in open source
> (Linux did that, mostly), but I think we did legitimize it in the eyes of a
> lot of people, and we did tell the story very well. Lending the Netscape
> name to this software development strategy brought it to the attention of
> people who might otherwise have dismissed it.
> 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.
> Perhaps my goals were unreasonable; perhaps it should have been obvious to
> me when we set out on this project that it would take much longer than a
> year to reach these goals, if we ever did. But, it wasn't obvious to me
> then, or now. These are the goals I was aiming for, and they have not yet
> been met.
> And so I'm giving up.
> The Mozilla project has become too depressing, and too painful, for me to
> continue working on. I wanted Mozilla to become something that it has not,
> and I am tired of fighting and waiting to make it so. I have felt very
> ineffectual, and that's just not a good feeling.
> For those of you who choose to continue, I wish you all the best of luck.
> I must say, though, that it feels good to be resigning from AOL instead of
> resigning from Netscape. It doesn't really feel like quitting at all. I was
> the 20th person hired at Mosaic Communications Corporation (All Praise the
> Company), and of those twenty, only five remain. The company I helped build
> has been gone for quite some time. We, Netscape, did some extraordinary
> things. But we could have done so much more. I feel like we had a shot at
> greatness, and missed.
> My biggest fear, and part of the reason I stuck it out as long as I have, is
> that people will look at the failures of mozilla.org as emblematic of open
> source in general. Let me assure you that whatever problems the Mozilla
> project is having are not because open source doesn't work. Open source does
> work, but it is most definitely not a panacea. If there's a cautionary tale
> here, it is that you can't take a dying project, sprinkle it with the magic
> pixie dust of ``open source,'' and have everything magically work out.
> Software is hard. The issues aren't that simple.
> Jamie Zawinski, 31-Mar-1999
>
>
> 

The Jacksonville Perl Monger's Group is operated by -
Bill -Sneex- Jones ( sneex at usa.net ),
to whom send all praises, complaints, or comments...