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What went wrong with Mozilla?Jul 24, 2000, 07:07 (39 Talkback[s])(Other stories by Monty Manley) [ Thanks to Kelly McNeill for this link. ] "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." Related Stories:
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