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Mozilla The Internet IBM Programming The Almighty Buck IT Technology

IBM to Hire Firefox Developers 187

Posted by CowboyNeal from the pays-to-know dept.
ta bu shi da yu writes "According to news.com, IBM has placed an employment ad for a developer who would be responsible for 'enhancing the Mozilla Firefox Web browser with new features complimentary to IBM's On Demand middleware stack.' IBM might possibly be interested in FireFox integration with their Workplace software. The job is not for just anyone, however, as those who wish to apply for the job should have some cred with the Mozilla development community."
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IBM to Hire Firefox Developers More

IBM to Hire Firefox Developers

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  • Too Cool (Score:5, Funny)

    by ackthpt ( 218170 ) * on Thursday April 14, 2005 @06:06PM (#12239602) Homepage Journal
    Firefox==IBM's Browser?

    Years ago many of us would cringe at the thought, but these days Big Blue has taken on a certain cachet with their cozying up with Tux, sharing the wealth (IP, source and application contributions) and profit(!!!)ing (which many of us don't mind, because it helps promote the cause.) Sounds like a dream job, I just hope between Google and IBM they don't deplete the Mozilla development team. Maybe IBM would be friendly to the development and effectively underwrite some of it in this manner.

    The job is not for just anyone, however, as those who wish to apply for the job should have some cred with the Mozilla development community."

    For sure. Don't expect a successful interview to go like this:

    IBM: "What experience do you have with Firefox?"

    Interviewee: "I've installed it on my computer and read all Slashdot postings about it and I know how to block ads and pop-ups!"
    IBM: "Have you contributed to development?"
    Interviewee: "I've donated $10 through the mozilla.org site!"
    IBM: "Why do you think you're qualified for this position?"
    Interviewee: "I hate Microsoft, I bad-mouth IE at every chance and overlook any bugs in Firefox!"
    IBM: "We'll be in touch." [Picks up phone, hits a button, whispers, "Security. Please come to my office and escort my visitor off the premises!"]

    just a heads-up, ya know

  • Just imagine... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by elid ( 672471 ) <eli.ipod@g m a il.com> on Thursday April 14, 2005 @06:07PM (#12239618)
    ...if Firefox starts making it into those IBM On Demand commercials!

    • Re:Just imagine... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by ackthpt ( 218170 ) * on Thursday April 14, 2005 @06:10PM (#12239638) Homepage Journal
      ...if Firefox starts making it into those IBM On Demand commercials!

      What are you saying? Because Big Blue endorses it the PHB's of the world will embrace it?

      Sorry man, that paradigm died in the 90's. It used to be "Nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM" Now it's "Nobody ever got fired for choosing Microsoft."

      IBM is still out-earning Microsoft, but they're getting further away from hardware and are competing with the monopolist in some market segments.

      • Yes, but it will get a lot of free advertising

      • Re:Just imagine... (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward
        "Nobody ever got fired for choosing Microsoft."

        Who ever says this is an idiot. If I ran a serious business starting today, I'd be using GNOME/KDE and OpenOffice, not Windows and MS Office. Why pay money in licensing when I don't have to? It's fallacy to claim people would be less productive on OpenOffice than MS Office in any degree to make up for the thousands of dollars in licensing savings. Yes, OO.org and MS Office are close enough for that.

        • Re:Just imagine... (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 14, 2005 @06:37PM (#12239814)
          What he means is that if a "decision maker" (ie someone who doesn't have a fucking clue about IT, but is put in a position of choosing what to spend money on) picks for example Gnome/KDE+OpenOffice or Macs, and for some reason or another it all fucks up, he/she can get fired.

          If however, the same retard goes with an exclusively Microsoft solution (as all people who don't know their job will do without hesitation), then they will NOT get fired, because for some reason it's OK for Microsoft products to fuck up because that's the way all computers behave, and it's the industry standard.

          (yes, I've seen it happen a few times)

        • Re:Just imagine... (Score:3, Interesting)

          by secolactico ( 519805 )
          Who ever says this is an idiot. If I ran a serious business starting today, I'd be using GNOME/KDE and OpenOffice, not Windows and MS Office. Why pay money in licensing when I don't have to? It's fallacy to claim people would be less productive on OpenOffice than MS Office in any degree to make up for the thousands of dollars in licensing savings. Yes, OO.org and MS Office are close enough for that.

          You might be missing the point. WHoever said that didn't say that Free alternatives to MS are less producti
          • If MS product fails, they'll point the finger at MS.

            Sun, Novell, SuSE, Red Hat, and several others are more than happy to have fingers pointed at them in exchange for letting people buy their Linux desktops. Sun will even shoot the lawyers for you (indemnification). Okay, they won't really shoot the lawyers, but, still, the legal risks are low.

            • Re:Just imagine... (Score:3, Interesting)

              by secolactico ( 519805 )
              Sun, Novell, SuSE, Red Hat, and several others are more than happy to have fingers pointed at them in exchange for letting people buy their Linux desktops

              Probably. But then you are not "buying linux". You are "buying Sun, Novell, etc...".

              I remember the original saying as "Nobody gets fired for choosing IBM". IBM re-sells Redhat.

              Also, "Nobody gets fired for choosing Cisco".


          • WHoever said that didn't say that Free alternatives to MS are less productive. What they (he/she?) meant is that when something fail, they are likely to blame whoever chose the alternative. If MS product fails, they'll point the finger at MS. Not that it's going to do them any good.

            That's what I meant (assuming you are referring to my comment - and I seriously doubt that I'm the only person to notice this phenomenon). http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=14 5 831&cid=12218996
          • So let me get this straight.

            There is a CIO someplace who chooses software based purely on the fact that he can blame MS. This CIO knows full well blaming MS will not solve the problem. He does not have the resources to sue MS. He does not have the power to make MS do anything. And yet based 100% on the ability to say "your document got lost and it's the fault of MS" he chooses to pay $400.00 per desktop.

            Furthermore this CIO is so stupid that it never occurs to him to pay $50.00 per desktop to Sun and use
            • It's not just in America, friend.

              It also boils down to this: "Everybody else is doing it".

              So if you have a problem, probably are not the only one. "Two in distress make sorrow less".

              Tho personally I prefer a saying we have in spanish: "Mal de muchos, consuelo de tontos". I haven't found an "official" translation for it, but loosely it means "The distress of many is the fools consolation".
        • If I ran a serious business starting today, <snip>

          Except that you aren't. Come back when you've done it. Then, I'd honestly be interested in what you have to say.

          Until then, you're just wishing, and I'm wasting my time if I listen...
      • Do you mean these suckers [itweek.co.uk] kept their jobs? Jobs besides polishing bulkheads that is. I would rather go with IBM - the stuff is unlikely to fail catastrophically and will be so difficult to maintain that I will never be made redundant.
      • IBM is still out-earning Microsoft

        Well you sent me off to gather data to demonstrate how wrong you were. Of course it turns out you're right, so any belittling will have to wait for some other time. What's really amazing is that IBM earned nearly as much as MSFT's gross revenue. (And they both make absurd amounts of money.)

      • Re:Just imagine... (Score:3, Informative)

        by will_die ( 586523 )
        Except that IBM itself has proven that marketing to management works.
        In the late 90s one of there boxes was not selling, so they pulled all tech ads. Instead they just advertised in CEO and management type magazines.
        Sales of that box increased.

    • Re:Just imagine... (Score:5, Funny)

      by EnronHaliburton2004 ( 815366 ) * on Thursday April 14, 2005 @06:22PM (#12239720) Homepage Journal
      But, but... those On Demand commercials are BLUE!

      Firefox is RED!

      Blue! Red!

      It will never work!
    • I wish IBM UK would remake those ads for the UK market. The ads are just SO tacky and look so out of place next to UK ads.

  • And in another area... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 14, 2005 @06:07PM (#12239620)

    Sam Ruby, IBM employee, Apache/PHP/Atom hacker, is questioning the need for middleware completely [intertwingly.net].

  • Please be open minded, open sourcers... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by kangpeh ( 875381 ) on Thursday April 14, 2005 @06:17PM (#12239690)
    One must realize that the fact that IBM is showing the desire to produce technology using Firefox is incredible. When BIG corporations decide to make Firefox specific technologies, we can finally say "Goodbye IE and Hello Firefox." I'm not saying IE is bad, do not get me wrong. However, this will make competition in the browser wars improve SUBSTANTIALLY, as now IE really does have competition. No matter what you said before, 9 times out of 10 a computer you go to will, no doubt, have Microsoft Internet Explorer installed and used as the default web browser. However, with IBM throwing itself to Firefox, this may improve Firefox's race in the browser wars - leading to more competition - leading to both IE _AND_ Firefox improvement. Who knows - we may even see IE for loonix soon, after all, everyone knows Microsoft is the king of business. Maybe not software/whatnot. But, they are the kings of business. They will make sure they have a share in every part of the market. Why do you think they g0t a huge part in APPLE/Mac? =P =P =P
    • But where does this leave gbrowser? :)
    • IBM had a browser that was awesome way before Netscape and IE.
      It was for OS/2.
      • This is the second post mentionin this. I assume you're talking about WebExplorer. I don't remember that browser as being great. In fact, I remember it as being pretty awful. Except for the fact that it was properly multi-threaded and therefore ran smoothly, like most everything else on OS/2, I remember nothing positive from this browser.

        I was a *long-time* OS/2 user up until 2001 or so, but I can't remember using WebExplorer voluntarily if there was *any* other browser on the system. Am I forgettin

    • When BIG corporations decide to make Firefox specific technologies, we can finally say "Goodbye IE and Hello Firefox."

      All the commercial Linux distributions and all the commercial UNIX distributions have been using Mozilla for years. Since when is today the beginning of BIG corpration adoption?

      I think what you are looking for is when DELL and HP start shipping Firefox on all their Windows desktops. Microsoft would probably incinerate those companies before allowing that. Thus the rise of the GNOME/OO.
      • my bad my bad huhu i think i was a little bit unclear... unix/linux/etc. are tiny when it comes to the actual demographical data. when it comes down to it, all the *nix companies and so forth are tiny too. not all people heard of 'sun'. but they have definitely all heard of ibm. not all people have heard of linux. but they have definitely all heard of ibm. etc.
      • An interesting point. It could very well be cheaper for Dell and all to bundle OpenOffice with their machines instead of MS Office, and include Firefox by default simply because it's a better browser.

        I wonder how long it will be before Microsoft start only giving discounts to companies that don't bundle Firefox/OpenOffice, and it all ends up in court (again)?
    • >I'm not saying IE is bad, do not get me wrong.
      As a web application developer that's fed up with having to work around IE-ism (particularly the Mac version, but also problems with file uploads in the Windows version), I'll say it's bad :)

      • The other day I discovered that my version of IE doesn't support the full HTML character set (e.g., ). I could have had a really nice text-based left arrow, but, no, I guess that's too much to ask. A while back when I was toying with CSS (version 1, even), all my kludgy work-arounds were for IE. Why is it that a spin-off browser from a failed company maintained by a relatively small team of developers can do so much better than Microsoft?
      • There's no reason this should be rated down, it's all quite true. I'm currently studying web-design, and half of what I have to learn is about how to get around the stupidity of various versions of IE. I only hope longhorn will properly support CSS, the last thing I need is to learn how to cope with another version of stupid IE psuedo-CSS rules.
      • Probably a little late to appease the mods, but the most significant issues we've had with IE for Windows (copied out of our FAQ they're so frequently an issue):

        Filename supplied when uploading a file includes the full path of the file, and is incorrected escaped (does not conform to RFC 2045 and RFC 2183).

        MIME data sent when uploading a file sometimes doesn't conform to multipart/form-data MIME type (HTML 4.01, section 17.13.4).
      • You're still coding for MacIE? Why?
    • Hello XUL !!!

      I for one welcome our new multi-plattaform-xml-interface-builder overlords!

      http://www.xulplanet.com

      • Re:Goodbye ActiveX... (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Daengbo ( 523424 )
        I sincerely hope that IBM gets on the XUL train, because I would like to see more documentation come out of it. The last two times I tried to learn XUL (admittedly over a year), the language had drifted from the documentation enough that most of the example code I found to learn from produced errors when the new tag name or options didn't match the docs.

        I'm just a part-timer, though, so I understand that you programming "hosses" have no problem with this.

    • Re:Please be open minded, open sourcers... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by rve ( 4436 ) on Friday April 15, 2005 @12:12AM (#12241652)
      IBM has invested a lot of money in websphere based thingies to make their Big Iron less tied to dumb terminals, only to make it more tied to Wintel PC clients running internet explorer, because it just won't work with other browsers.

      Rather than fix their middleware, I'm betting they want to try and fix firefox to work with deliberately IE-only websites.

    • Why do you think they g0t a huge part in APPLE/Mac?

      Microsoft has sold [wikipedia.org] all their Apple Computer stock a long time ago - and they gained quite a lot with it, IIRC.

  • The Best Open Source Model (Score:5, Insightful)

    by 99BottlesOfBeerInMyF ( 813746 ) on Thursday April 14, 2005 @06:22PM (#12239726)

    This is the ideal situation for an open source project. Big companies who use the software all pay developers to add features that they need or want. It results in more development, more developers with experience, and ultimately makes the software better. Now, if we can just get a dozen more major companies to each hire a developer.

  • Loathsome Notes (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Salo2112 ( 628590 ) on Thursday April 14, 2005 @06:30PM (#12239773)
    Good - currently, Lotus Notes doesn't work so well with FireFox, which forces my users to have to use Explorer. Maybe we'll have another good reason not to use MS Explorer.

  • in other news.... (Score:5, Funny)

    by mangus_angus ( 873781 ) on Thursday April 14, 2005 @06:33PM (#12239787)
    Microsoft followed suite by placing the following ad:

    "Wanted, anyone who is currently or is wishing to be part of the firefox team for immediate interrogation and death. Email names, addresses, daily schedules, to Not.Microsoft@gmail.com.

  • Celebrity *programmer*?? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by heroine ( 1220 ) on Thursday April 14, 2005 @06:42PM (#12239835) Homepage
    So the current darlings of slashdot, IBM, Apple, and Pixar, are on to doing the professional services thing and hiring celebrity programmers to win the contracts, just like VA I.O.U. and Redhat did.

    In the last round VA I.O.U. and Redhat had developers who were also celebrities and hiring celebrity programmers was the way they got contracts.

    Now all the celebrities are executives and programmers are fairly anonymous. There aren't many AOL programmers making headlines the way Rasterman and Mandrake used to. Today the headlines are always made by executives.

    Are they really looking for a celebrity manager to come from AOL and saying the word developer to get on the blogs, or are they still thinking programmers are going to make headlines today just like they did in the 90's?

  • A Switch from Opera? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Devil's BSD ( 562630 ) on Thursday April 14, 2005 @06:45PM (#12239858) Homepage
    It makes sense to me. IBM Rapid Restore & Recovery, at least on my boxes, uses Opera as the browser. It makes good business sense to switch to an open source browser with reduced licensing costs, and it's good for their developers because they can customize the browser in the recovery partition specially for recovery needs. By using Firefox, IBM can also score points with the open source community... evidenced by this posting on slashdot.
    • Uh I'd say that you hardly can draw any conclusions from the fact that some IBM product happens to use Opera and that now some other product is going to use Firefox. They're pretty big company, you know. AIX ships with Netscape Communicator 4. OS/2 ships with its own in-house made browser, whatever it's called (probably just IBM Web Browser for OS/2 or something, forgot it now, but it's supported nevertheless). I'm sure they've got some Windows-only stuff that depend on Internet Explorer. So you can safely
    • IBM's big enough to deal with both and it seems that IBM and Opera still have a healthy relationship.
      Their co-operation [opera.com] on xhtml+voice [ibm.com] stuff seems interesting. The voice control in the latest Opera beta [opera.com] for Windows is pretty cool. It might not replace the good old mouse and keys for most of us anytime soon but I'm sure there are circumstances where it can be a real boon.
  • This can only be a good thing for Firefox. First Google is hiring FF developers and now IBM, this means more sites/companies are going to start making pages compliant with standards and this will help move people away from craptiveX for websites. Thus making the world a safer and more happy place(at least online)

    Like Anime Pron [sexchasm.com]

  • does "brain drain" impact Firefox development? (Score:5, Informative)

    by scupper ( 687418 ) * on Thursday April 14, 2005 @06:48PM (#12239874) Homepage
    It struck me reading this headline that the Firefox dev team is under tremendous recruitment pressure, and it makes me wonder how all this cherrypicking of developers from the Firefox team, by the likes of Google and Big Blue, will impact the project's future development cycle [mozilla.org].

    Is this brain drain going to cripple the project eventually or contribute to the problems we've read in March about the Firefox development review process?

    A little refresher....
    The Mozilla Release Process [slashdot.org]
    Posted by CmdrTaco on Tuesday January 18, @06:25AM
    from the every-time-you-ask-we-delay-it-one-hour dept.
    David Gerard writes "Asa Dotzler from the Mozilla Foundation invited questions on his blog on the Mozilla release process. The answers are up."

    Firefox Lead Now Working For Google [slashdot.org]
    Posted by michael on Monday January 24, @03:50PM
    from the speculate-all-you-want-we'll-make-more dept.
    zmarties writes "In a very low key announcement on his blog, Ben Goodger, lead developer for Firefox, has announce that effective from a couple of weeks ago, he has become a Google employee. In practice his day to day job won't change that much, in that he will still lead Firefox through its forthcoming releases, but with Google paying his wages, we can be sure that new and interesting overlap between the Mozilla Foundation's browsers and Google's services are sure to develop."

    Firefox Developer on Recruitment Policy [slashdot.org]
    Posted by michael on Monday January 31, @03:05AM
    from the cathedral-or-bazaar dept.
    wikinerd writes "A Firefox developer talks about the project's controversial invitation-only developer recruitment policy and explains why Firefox will never grow up."

    Problems With the Firefox Development Process [slashdot.org]
    Posted by Zonk on Sunday March 06, @11:39PM
    from the eyes-on-the-prize dept.
    An anonymous reader writes "Mike Connor, one of the core Firefox developers, is raising a flag concerning the Mozilla Firefox methodology of development. From his blog: "In nearly three years, we haven't built up a community of hackers around Firefox, for a myriad of reasons, and now I think were in trouble. Of the six people who can actually review in Firefox, four are AWOL, and one doesn't do a lot of reviews." In an earlier entry, he raised concrete concerns about the community involvement. Asa Dotzler recently elaborated on the process, as previously covered on Slashdot."

    Mozilla Foundation in More Development Trouble [slashdot.org]
    Posted by samzenpus on Thursday March 10, @07:44AM
    from the who-will-get-the-kids dept.
    sebFlyte writes "After the reports of problems with Firefox' development earlier this week there are now rumblings about more serious problems with the Mozilla Suite. Some developers want to spin the suite out as a community project that the foundation has no responsibility for, and others want to create a Firefox Foundation to deal with the success of the standalone browser."

  • how about a white-on-yellow marquee across the top (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    "IBM OnDemand is too cool for words"

    Maybe an Easter Egg: you check a certain weird combination of properties under Tools | Options, and a list of OnDemand developers appear.

    I've got some other ideas as well.

    Oh wait, the ad says complimentary to OnDemand...
  • It seems hireing Firefox developers is the new fad. Google just picked up a few, and if I rember correctly, there's no shortage of other companies who have one or two.

    I know alot of slashdotters are scared of big companies trying to grab up peices of open source - but I for one think that this is an entirely good thing. It removes some of the nesesity of the end users to contribute (We alwas should, but some of us aren't skilled enough to code, or fiscaly stable enough to donate).

    I'm just waiting for the news to break that Apple is looking for some firefox developers. I know they're using KHTML for Safari, at least at the moment, but Mozilla is, in many ways, a better browser - it just needs alot of polishing for the Mac. For example, Safari with 10 tabs, over 3 windows uses just over 30MB of ram, while Firefox eats up nearly that much with just about:blank open, and once you begin to actuly surf the web, it climbs sometimes 100MB of use.
    • It seems hireing Firefox developers is the new fad. Google just picked up a few, and if I rember correctly, there's no shortage of other companies who have one or two.

      I doubt it, considerting that there are less than ten dedicated mozilla developers. I want to say there may only be five.

  • XRE - XUL Runtime Engine/Environment? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by centinall ( 868713 ) on Thursday April 14, 2005 @07:18PM (#12240071)
    Might IBM be creating a XRE? We all know that eventually Firefox/Thunderbird/etc will run off a global (to the system) XRE, right?
    or are they just going to be developing a suite of applications that use XUL?

  • I always pick the wrong project (Score:3, Funny)

    by bluGill ( 862 ) on Thursday April 14, 2005 @10:11PM (#12241083)

    I was refused an interview for a linux kernel development position because I hack FreeBSD. Now IBM isn't interested in me because they want FireFox and I hack Konqueror.

    Many people made lots of money in the .com boom, while the company I worked for kept going downhill. Get a job I like, and they go bankrupt in 3 months.

    If this trend continues much longer, companies are going to refuse to allow me to work for them because I'm bad luck. Then I won't be able to earn money and I'll starve ...

    Sorry, I got little carried away. Its all true up until that last paragraph though.

  • Payback? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by MSBob ( 307239 ) on Thursday April 14, 2005 @10:46PM (#12241266)
    It is becoming clear that IBM is betting the farm on Open Source. It is in our interest that IBM doesn't lose this bet. I wonder whether there is anything that Open Source developers (and users) could do to pay IBM back for their support. By "paying" I'm mostly talking about indirect support such as writing software that plays nice with IBM's offerings...

    Now, if one is inclined to buy a Thinkpad as a "thank you" note to IBM then I'm sure IBM would have nothing against that.

    Is it even worth conciously debating the forms in which we could "reward" IBM for helping OSS so much over the last few years?

    • Re:Payback? (Score:3, Informative)

      by eraserewind ( 446891 )
      If IBM is betting the farm on open source, tell me why their IT infrastructure consultancy business who run the (extremely big) network where I work are the reason we are upgrading to Windows XP? I think IBM see open source as valuable for what it can add to IBM's portfolio, but it's certainly not the only option they push.
      • I think IBM see open source as valuable for what it can add to IBM's portfolio, but it's certainly not the only option they push.

        It's posts like this one that make me long for a moderation option of "stated the bleedingly obvious"

  • The big + for firefox (Score:3, Interesting)

    by MemoryDragon ( 544441 ) on Friday April 15, 2005 @02:52AM (#12242222)
    And this has been heavily overlooked, Microsoft basically will try push stateful guys with xaml in Longhorn, Firefox has had that for years with Xul, in fact the whole old Mozilla guy just was a set of Xul scripts and templates.

    The main difference is, Xul is an official W3c spec, while Xaml again will be Windows only and patent plastered (while heavily borrowed from Xul anyway).

    Given the current really awful and sad state of affairs, where you have to try to make complex GUIs with a limited set of elements which break on the market leader most of the times anyway, a move towards a real platform independend solution instead of splitting again the html standards even more than they already are, is heavens sent for all of us who have base applications upon that "dreck" which is the current state of affairs.

  • Firefox IBM "Branding" (Score:2, Interesting)

    by vicbay ( 875370 )
    A bit off topic but......I do some local IT support for my local community and every time I say, "Firefox is better than your current browser...safer, bla bla and you should use it......" they say "fire..what...."?. I am helping people that are almost IT illiterate and for them the internet is the big "E" icon on their desktops. However, if I could say that "IBM recommends it and uses it for its products" and "Google recommends it instead of..." it will be a different story. There is no doubt that Firefox
  • So in 2010 when an SCO-type firm claims they wrote it IBM will do the legal defence?

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