By Rachel Chalmers
Jamie Zawinski, Netscape Communications Corp employee number 20 and a driving force behind the creation of the Mozilla Organization, resigned from both the Netscape division of AOL and from Mozilla on April 1 – only hours before Mozilla’s first birthday party. CNet reports that another Netscape veteran, John Giannandrea, has also resigned from AOL. But it was the outspoken Zawinski who took the opportunity to explain just what he thinks went wrong.
Netscape has been a great disappointment to me for quite some time, he writes. the company stopped innovating. The company got big, and big companies just aren’t creative. He describes how, just as he had become disillusioned with Netscape itself, the Mozilla project had inspired him. 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.
What defeated Zawinski in the end was what he sees as the failure of Mozilla. Netscape did not release working code but instead, chose to open the source to a huge, barely-started project. Faced with the difficulties involved, outside programmers have not joined the project in significant numbers. It remains a Netscape initiative – albeit an public one. Worst of all, one year on, not even a beta has been shipped.
And so I’m giving up, Zawinski writes. 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 work out. Software is hard.
News of Zawinski’s resignation zipped around the internet on the holiday weekend, perhaps prompting Mozilla stalwart Frank Hecker to engage in a little damage control. In a status report published on the mozilla.org web site, Hecker reviewed the first year of Mozilla’s life and enumerates the project’s achievements: the creation of the Netscape Public License (NPL) and Mozilla Public License (MPL), developer preview releases of binaries, an XML parser and ActiveX control contributed by external developers, Doczilla and the opening-up of the browser development process to public comment.
Hecker concedes that the project has failed to attract enough outside talent, or to result in a production release of Communicator 5.0. He identifies developer recruitment, small devices, security and cryptography as the main issues going forward. He acknowledges that the Netscape/AOL merger leaves a question-mark over the project’s future. But he concludes with the observation that the Mozilla project now goes far beyond AOL and Netscape: ‘The code is out there’ and in a sense belongs to everyone. Whether anyone knows what to do with it is another question.
