10/09/2003 04:42:00 PM - Highway to heck
I've ranted before about the lack of direction for the Mozilla Foundation. The front page of MozillaZine mentioned that yet another chunk of Mozilla has been forked. This time its the Firebird installer. It is time for Seamonkey to go away. The more things are forked, the more effort it takes to keep both trees patched. It seems as though no-one is being held accountable. At least when Netscape existed there was some structure to things. Seamonkey 1.4.1 and 1.5 are delayed. Firebird 0.7 is delayed because Seamonkey 1.5 is delayed. We're more than a month beyond the "ideal release" of 1.5. The roadmap has yet to be revised. As far as I know, the Eolas patent situation could cause the plugin architecture to change a bit. Has Mozilla.org contacted them? Although if Eolas sued, they would have to go after AOL since the Mozilla Foundation doesn't have a whole lot of money. Right now I don't have a high rate of confidence that Mozilla will survive another year in its current state.
Lately I've been hanging out in IRC and getting to know some of the people better. There are strong feelings from a lot of developers about what has been happening. But they keep working on Mozilla, so for now it will keep plodding along until there's no money left.
