Jamie Zawinski, described as the gestaltmeister for the Mozilla open source web browser, believes the modularity and extendability of Mozilla will be its competitive strength. He says that Mozilla is so neatly compartmentalized that a developer named Adam Lock was able to plug its new layout engine into Microsoft Internet Explorer. Zawinski also talked up the layout engine itself, describing it as extremely standards-compliant, small and fast. In an interview with Linux Power magazine, Zawinski said that the Mozilla team’s new policy of using cross-platform code as much as possible should take the pain out of ports to alternative platforms such as BeOS. Zawinski describes his own role as loose cannon, provocateur and spokesmonkey. He seems to spend a lot of his time explaining the difference between the Mozilla Organization and Netscape Communications Corp, which pays the salaries of around two-thirds of the core Mozilla developers. A good analogy I heard recently is that mozilla.org is a farm, and Netscape is a market, he said, periodically, Netscape will go to the farm, pick up the most recent harvest, package it, and put it on shelves. Is the open source model working for the development team? It’s very hard to measure such things, Zawinski admitted, but I think that by being out in the open like this, we’re making decisions better, and reaching the right decisions more often. Secrecy is the enemy of correctness. That’s not to say that Zawinski is a blind devotee of the open source model. On the contrary, the Mozilla guru had some scathing words for the Linux operating system. It’s like a love-hate relationship, but without the love, he said of his experience with Linux. Linux’s greatest strength is its development model, and the cooperative nature by which progress is made. Its greatest weakness is that you still have to be a god among sysadmins to use the damned thing.
