“Navigator 6 will be Netscape’s first commercial release of a
browser based on open-source code from the Mozilla project. The
Mozilla project, hosted at http://www.mozilla.org, includes an
online bug database, accessible at http://bugzilla.mozilla.org. A
search of this database reveals numerous outstanding bugs that
affect compliance with HTML, DOM, CSS, and ECMAScript (JavaScript)
standards.”
“Reading the discussions of individual bugs provides an
interesting glimpse into the workings of the Mozilla open-source
process, and into the interactions between Mozilla and Netscape. In
a number of cases, Mozilla engineers have fixed
standards-compliance bugs and have had their patches to the source
code reviewed twice by senior engineers. Even when the patches
are extraordinarily simple ones, and the Mozilla engineers are
convinced that they pose no risk of introducing other bugs, their
requests to include the fixes into the Netscape 6 release are
denied by the Netscape Product Development Team (PDT) out of fear,
apparently, that accepting these patches would cause the release
schedule to slip.”
“Indeed, the discussion of bug #53849 includes a definition of a
“must-fix problem” as one that is “defined by marketing and legal
requirements.” Under this criteria, even the trivial correction of
a misspelling in an error message (see bug #57869), cannot be
made.”