By Rachel Chalmers
The Mozilla Organization has responded to questions about its future with a strong affirmation that the open source browser is here to stay. At a conference in Burlingame, California on June 30, Sun Microsystems Inc executive Alan Baratz said: We’re not sure Mozilla.org is working all that well. We’re looking at what the options are. His words sparked speculation that Sun would use its clout with America Online Inc to shut down that company’s crucial contribution to the project. Mozilla developers say that won’t happen.
We at mozilla.org want to clear up any misconceptions, they write. Our contributors and staff are responsible for the management of all browser development. As a major mozilla.org contributor, AOL completely supports our efforts. Commercial open source software development is in its early stages, and Wednesday’s comments demonstrate that it is still regarded with skepticism by some in the industry. We would like to stress that Sun was not speaking for mozilla.org or for AOL.
Mozilla was born in 1998 when Netscape Communications Corp released an alpha version of its web browser software under an open source license. When, after twelve months of intense development, the project had failed to deliver much beyond the next-generation layout engine NGLayout, founder Jamie Zawinski quit both Netscape and Mozilla in disgust. Zawinski blames Netscape’s decision to release a huge, barely-started version of the browser for what he sees as Mozilla’s failure to thrive.
Even so, Zawinski echoed the Mozilla developers’ insistence that Mozilla’s problems are specific to the project, not part and parcel of commercial open source software. Let me assure you that whatever problems the Mozilla project is having are not because open source doesn’t work, he wrote. 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. á
