NewsForge: Learning from Mozilla’s mistakes

“When the Mozilla project started, it immediately
became the number one poster child for Open Source software
development. Now its luster is tarnished to the point where closed
source advocates point to Mozilla as an example of how Open Source
cannot compete one-on-one with proprietary software, in this case
with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Is this true? Or was Mozilla’s
development process, not the fact that it was Open Source, to blame
for its problems?

Netscape was one of the first examples of dot-com excess, with
liberal work rules that allowed employees to bring dogs to work,
Nerf gun battles at all hours, and a generally quirky corporate
style. From all reports, working at Netscape during the glory years
was so much fun that some employees spent all of their waking hours
there.

Sadly, while Netscape employees were engaging in
company-sponsored play that liberated their creative juices,
Microsoft’s developers were grinding on, perhaps without passion,
making Explorer a little better and more usable, one step at a
time, day after day, month after month.”

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