[ 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.”