An Open Source Pitfall? Mozilla Labs Closed, Quietly 112
mikejuk writes with this excerpt: When Google Labs closed there was an outcry. How could an organization just pull the rug from under so many projects? At least Google announced what it was doing. Mozilla, it seems since there is no official record, just quietly tiptoes away — leaving the lights on since the Mozilla Labs Website is still accessible. It is accessible but when you start to explore the website you notice it is moribund with the last blog post being December 2013 with the penultimate one being September 2013. The fact that it is gone is confirmed by recent blog posts and by the redeployment of the people who used to run it. The projects that survived have been moved to their own websites. It isn't clear what has happened to the Hatchery -the incubator that invited new ideas from all and sundry. One of the big advantages of open source is the ease with which a project can be started. One of the big disadvantages of open source is the ease with which projects can be allowed to die — often without any clear cut time of death. It seems Mozilla applies this to groups and initiatives as much as projects. This isn't good. The same is true at companies that aren't open source centric, though, too, isn't it?
what is this even talking about? (Score:5, Informative)
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Stagnation is death.
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Is that why nobody even remembers Windows XP nowadays, let alone uses it?
This doesn't apply to WinXP of course, but for many kinds of applications lack of (security) updates isn't a big deal.
Re:what is this even talking about? (Score:4, Insightful)
How can open source software die? the source is there! Anyone interested in the software has had ample time to get the source.
This, right here. Even if it goes stagnant for years? If you can get (or already have) the source, you can resurrect it.
By contrast, if you wanted to resurrect, say, WinCE? Well, good luck with that.
Re:what is this even talking about? (Score:5, Funny)
By contrast, if you wanted to resurrect, say, WinCE? Well, good luck with that.
Which just goes to show that sometimes closed-source is truly for the best.
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WinCE still exists and is active. It's just been rebranded to Windows Embedded Compact [microsoft.com]
In spite of the re-naming, I bet it still makes people wince...
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Indeed. And quite often even dead FOSS projects can be cannibalized. The difference between dead open source and dead closed source projects is that the bones of one sit in an open pit that anyone can pick at, and the other sits in a concrete bunker twenty miles underground.
Re:what is this even talking about? (Score:5, Funny)
By contrast, if you wanted to resurrect, say, WinCE?
Have you ever considered a career pitching horror movies to Hollywood studios?
Re:what is this even talking about? (Score:5, Funny)
"The revenant's eyes were a deep, cold blue. As it shambled ever closer, he could smell the rot of outdated drivers and decaying DLLs. As its cold unfeeling fingers closed around his throat, he could just make out the secret truth written inside those dead blue eyes..."
"A fatal exception OE has occurred at 0028:C02A0948 IN VXD VWIN32. The current application will be terminated."
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Well... if you can resurrect something then it must be dead because that's what resurection is right?
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But it's not just about the source... it's about the community, the support from the original authors, the available knowledge and comprehension that transcends wiki docs, as well as having a team large enough to be able to realistically continue its development in the foreseeable future. To lose these things abruptly doesn't mean that all the source code was deleted but rather that the virtual ecosystem was.
Feh. Those things you mention (the original authors, the development team, the community, website and other resources) aren't guaranteed regardless of how badly one would like them to persist. The source and the freedom to do something with it are what the licence grants. Everything else is gravy. Without the source the virtual ecosystem is useless; with the source one person can continue the project, even if only for personal use. The virtual ecosystem can be recreated by anyone who wants badly enough
Re:what is this even talking about? Debian! (Score:1)
Have you looked at most of the Debian packages, for example? 75% of them are crap for the one reason that developers get a head of steam, no pun intended, write 70% of what would be a complete project and lose interest, and what is left off is the most important part, decent docs. There ARE good projects with decent docs in Debian, but most are poorly documented. That is because developers do the worst job of writing in any clear language what their packages do. So, open source dies not because source goes
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I wish every native English speaker could communicate as well in English as you do. There's no need to apologize.... ... unless, of course, one of your first two languages is Klingon.
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Slight difference (Score:5, Insightful)
There was an outcry when Google Labs closed because people actually used stuff that came from there. Mozilla Labs, on the other hand...
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Exactly - if it took 9 months to notice it closed down, it probably wasn't that used.
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Also, Google labs included services that ended, not just software projects.
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Mozilla Labs projects is for experiments.
Things they've started which seemed like good ideas always moved on to be their own projects.
For example the Rust language:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v... [youtube.com]
Now almost at 1.0:
http://blog.rust-lang.org/2014... [rust-lang.org]
If there is a problem, it might be that they haven't started any new projects.
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For example the Rust language:
There seems to be some confusion here.
Rust was started by and continues to be maintained by Mozilla Research. Mozilla Labs had other projects like PDFjs. As far as I can tell, Mozilla Research is still around.
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Ohh, I see, thank you for explaning the about Mozilla Labs and Mozilla Research being 2 distinct things.
No suprise... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Not much different from a proprietary project, except that instead of "sexy/ugly", the factor is "profitable/unprofitable".
No suprise... (Score:2, Interesting)
Depends on the project. Many BSD and Linux nuts and bolts get fixed by very qualified and talented people. For some reason, Mozilla projects seem to relish letting the most aggravating bugs languish for decades. Not always because of a lack of patches or reviewers, but because of giant egos coupled with Napoleon complexes.
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This. You should read some of the threads on Bugzilla. Wontfix wontfix wontfix. Someone pops in to mention/submit a patch and some process-nazi autist (or 10) goes apoplectic. Meanwhile, Mozilla cranks outs 28 new "versions" that do little more than rearrange the UI 28 times. You couldn't pay me to play on a team like that.
captcha: useless
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Postbox: Windows and OS/X only, apparently.
http://postbox-inc.com/ [postbox-inc.com]
Re:No suprise... (Score:4, Insightful)
Mozilla's resources are going to mobile. They don't want to be caught dead if the dominant platform really does changes from desktop to mobile. So it's all about the Firefox browser for phone, and FirefoxOS.
All this groaning about them spending resources on UI misses the point. You're just complaining about what you see! The real $ is not going to UI it's going to mobile, and to technical parity with Chrome.
Wonder if they feel the same way about Email - that it's dated technology! Some of the technical issues they left hanging when they took away all the paid developers are significant.
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They broke the filters quite awhile ago, and have shown no intrest in fixing them. If I could find a decent replacement I'd use it. Unfortunately, KMail isn't any better. (It's worse, but with different problems...don't use it these days so I don't remember quite what they were.) Seamonkey doesn't seem to work well on a 64-bit system. And every test of a new version of email package means that a bunch of emails aren't searchable. It would be worth doing if I could make one switch to a good program, bu
Pitfall! (Score:5, Funny)
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You're not the only one who had that thought.
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Damn, beat me to it.
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Old games' source codes should be released!
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And here I was expecting an Open Source http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitfall! [wikipedia.org]. How disappointing.
Amen! For a moment, I was really excited too.
Mozilla's losing coolness (Score:2, Insightful)
Its lost the browser initiative to google. I can't imagine it will still be around in its current form in a decade.
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Come on, I still use Netscape.
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Nexus for the win.
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It's getting harder and harder to find Gopher servers.
sdf.org to the rescue!
gopher://phlogosphere.org [phlogosphere.org]
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Mozilla gets most of its funding from Google. Everything is going according to plan.
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Well, I can imagine it if Mozilla magically disappeared, but as things stand right now, I don't see myself switching if foreseeable future. There is much more to the Internet than just Google.
You don't say? (Score:2)
Really? In a recession companies cut down on pet projects?
I'm taken aback, really!
Closed source projects die slow deaths too (Score:2)
And that doesn't happen with closed source projects? Sure it does, you just don't hear about it when some PHB slowly takes a group of developers and has them put everything on the back burner for some pet project. Then years pass, the old project isn't officially dead, but nothing has gotten done. On and off new business requirements are analyzed, and eventually a mysterious mandate from far higher up comes
Why is that an Open Source pitfall? (Score:4, Insightful)
Is that because closed source enterprises never get shut down?
Gee, if it is Open Source, you can even branch it and continue on your own, if you feel like... now, with closed sources....
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I thought they were talking about Pitfall the game where your block-shaped character jumps over crocodiles. Open source version? Yes please.
Proprietary project die, too (Score:5, Insightful)
In my professional career, several projects I have worked on have been canceled despite a good state - not behind schedule nor over budget, or even ahead of schedule and/or under budget. The reasons were usually variations from "marketing has decided to change direction" to "after management re-org, the new managers decided the risks were too high". The latter happened to one project despite us having 5 fully and correctly operating prototypes, and having invested 3 person-years of effort and over half a million US dollars in development tools and licensing of third party libraries. Another project was canceled because the primary stakeholder lost interest despite the first two phases being highly successful.
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I've had multiple projects get killed in the middle of a solid Beta. Usually so did the departments developing them. One of them got killed not because of customers or technical issues, but because the CEO's ego wouldn't let him be controlled by his investors. So they pulled funding.
I've had one project get killed after it had been in commercial release for about 2 months.
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I've killed projects* half an hour from full deployment because certain parties refused to stump up their end of the contract.
I am NOT building databases because I enjoy the challenge. I don't, in fact databases are the bane of my existence. I would rather deal with the hardware side of things.
*by killed read: walked away with the entire project source on a flash drive in my pocket and all backups obliterated, all orders for hardware cancelled and a note on my workbench saying "Pay up or you don't see me or
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my project, my code until it's paid for. Contract terms agreed by all parties. When the buyer says "I'm not paying you", are you going to leave your fucking toolbox on his forecourt?? Are you actually fucking INSANE??
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You may find this interesting! [goat.cx]
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Maybe it's just me, but I can never see the goat in those pictures.
Betteridge's Law of Headlines is true again (Score:4, Insightful)
This has nothing to do with open source at all. An organization closed down a unit, and got rid of some projects. That happens pretty much every day in the private sector and in the closed source world. What makes open source special in this regard. Do you expect them to keep supporting things forever even when the organization doesn't want to anymore?
The only difference is that with open source, someone could take that code and keep working on it, if they wanted to. That's it. The rest of this has nothing to do with open source at all and is just a flagrant attempt at drumming up controversy by asking a bullshit question in the headline.
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right on. Mozilla isn't dead, it's been forked to shit and back.
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The summary indicates that the source code is still there. They've just stopped updating.
Others have indicated that some of the projects moved off to their own web pages, so if you want up-to-date software, you should search for it rather than just relying on MozillaLabs.
Blame C++ (Score:2, Insightful)
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I once started to add a feature to firefox in my spare time and still haven't finished it because of it took much time... This C++ mess was certainly part of the reason, layers on top of layers... and horrible long compile times. I know very few people who write good C++ code.
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The question is, what language would they write good code in?
FWIW, C++ has many features that are strong improvements over C. Class encapsulation, e.g. OTOH, it's also full of things that are only worthwhile if you are really interested in run-time optimization. Or maybe they serve some other function that I don't understand. Like the STL. Most of the code in the STL would be far better implemented as libraries, even if it might not be quite as fast. I also strongly dislike their implementation of ite
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The question is, what language would they write good code in?
If Linus is right, C++ attracks bad programmers. So another language would not help. Personally, I stick to C. It is not the perfect language, but all others I tried are worse..
FWIW, C++ has many features that are strong improvements over C.
Well C++ has many features. They are meant to be improvements. But they are basically *all* broken.
Class encapsulation,
This is just syntactic sugar. But even this is broken: You have to put the complete class definition in the header - including private implementation details. How stupid is this? You can actually have much better encapsulation in C by
Thunderbird too (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, they announced what they were thinking. They're focusing on making new versions of Firefox every single month for no reason and causing massive crash glitches, incompatibilities with webpages, and an all out war with Flash player as well as a go-nowhere phone OS project. Great choice! But what would you expect from a company that gets over 90% of its money from Google, who makes a competing product.
Re:Thunderbird too (Score:5, Informative)
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Yeah, but are they ever going to fix the filters they broke with one of those updates? Doesn't appear so. If there were a decent and maintained email program I'd switch to it immediately. Unfortunately the others all seem worse...so far...until they break more stuff and decline to fix it.
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Um, Thunderbird has not been killed. Release notes for current version, released last week: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/31.1.1/releasenotes/ [mozilla.org]
It may not get new features any more, but that's not same as killed. In fact, many people would argue that this is a good thing. There's need for stable software too, and for mail clients, Thunderbird is that. Don't dis it just because you may want something more cutting-edge.
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um, where's the announcement that they are done with thunderbird ?
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thunderbird doesn't need any new features, works fine and only needs patches (which are still done)
That's the ideal kind of living software.
Somehow people have the wrong idea that needless feature churning and color scheme changes are needed and the norm.
Mozilla Foundation not closing... (Score:1)
not important (Score:2)
So it closed last year, but you only just noticed and posted an article? It doesn't seem like it's going to be missed very much, if the corpse can decompose and start to smell before someone sends the police to check on aunt Mozlabs.
big words... (Score:2)
So when was the antepenultimate blog post???
Not necessarily a bad thing (Score:2)
Killing most projects early is considered a good thing in some circles because it weeds out the garbage and makes more resources available to the more worthwhile projects.
Often you can tell how good a company is at managing R&D by how quickly it kills bad projects.
When I was working in R&D portfolio management we found that a bunch of small projects was much less likely to return something worthwhile than a more limited number of big projects.
It really boiled down to the idea that there is a non-lin
R&D (Score:1)
I believe R&D is better off with Crowd Source
You are surprised? (Score:1)
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the last blog post being December 2013 with the penultimate one being September 2013.
"Penultimate" means "second to last." The submitter used the word correctly. You are a moron.
Or to translate that sentence in a form you can understand: Your a moran.
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For Pete's sake, read and comprehend before being incorrectly righteously indignant!
September 2013 comes before December 2013 by any reasonable reckoning. If the last post on the blog was December 2013 and the one from September 2013 is referred to as the penultimate post it's a fairly safe assumption that the author is correctly stating that the September 2013 post was the second to last post made.
Re: Ugh (Score:1)
It's a good thing he used it to mean second to last, then!
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It's not often you get these gems from someone not posting as AC. You should make a game of it.