"If at some point in the future a seminar is ever given on how *not* to
conduct a large-scale Open Source software project, Mozilla would
make a dandy example. A long series of lamentable mistakes, most
of them avoidable, have caused the Mozilla project to languish
unfinished for more than a year beyond its projected release date."
"What happened?"
"Everything But The Kitchen Sink"
"Had Mozilla simply tasked itself with writing the best,
standards-compliant browser on the market, all would have been
well. Gecko, the rendering engine used by Mozilla, has been in fine
working shape for nearly a year. But at some point, the Mozilla team
fell prey to the idea that it had to be a *platform*; it had to provide its
own GUI, scripting language, mail/news client, Java support, on and
on and on. Furthermore, it was to be pervasively multiplatform -- it
should build on Macs, PCs, Linux boxes, Solaris, whatever. And it
had to do this in the face of a huge corporate restructuring and the
defections of several key developers."
