Rather than wait to see Mozilla.org into beta, one of its key project leaders is throwing in the towel.
Netscape engineer and Mozilla guru Jamie Zawinski posted a resignation letter Thursday night that slammed the performance of what he says was a once-bold Netscape and lamented the "failure" of the Mozilla open-source development project.
"In the last year, we did not accomplish the goals that I wanted to accomplish. We did not take the Mozilla project and turn it into a network-collaborative project in which Netscape was but one of many contributors; and we did not ship end-user software. For me, shipping is the thing."
"And so I'm giving up."
Zawinski wistfully noted that he was the 20th person hired at the pre-Netscape "Mosaic Communications Corporation" and "of those 20, only five remain. The company I helped build has been gone for quite some time."
In his letter, Zawinski also said Netscape had lost the browser war to Microsoft by early 1998, and that despite an enlightened move to an open-source development model with Mozilla, mismanagement failed to get critical outside developers to contribute to the project.
"For whatever reason, the project was not adopted by the outside. It remained a Netscape project." The Mozilla project used about a hundred full-time Netscape developers, he said.
Zawinski's letter followed his resignation Thursday, which came on the one-year anniversary of Netscape's release of its source code for open development by outside contributors. But the anniversary was marred by the fact that no software was shipped based on Mozilla code -- and the news of 850 lost jobs at Netscape and its new corporate parent, America Online.
"The worst part about all this is, for the last year, I've spent much of my time striving to convince people that mozilla.org is not netscape.com... But the fact is, there has been very little contribution from people who don't work for Netscape.
"And here we are, a year later. And we haven't even shipped a beta yet."
He said he bears part of the responsibility for Mozilla's failure but doesn't know exactly what he could have done differently.
In addition to offering a postmortem on Netscape and Mozilla, Zawinski identified his view of the beginning of Netscape's commercial demise.
"January 1998 ... was when [Netscape] realized that we had finally lost the so-called 'browser war.' Microsoft had succeeded in destroying that market. It was no longer possible for anyone to sell Web browsers for money. Our first product, our flagship product, was heading quickly toward irrelevance."
"Netscape has been a great disappointment to me for quite some time," Zawinski wrote. "... What we did from 1996 through 1999 was coast along, riding the wave caused by what we did before."
Following layoffs during the same period, Zawinski saw the February 1998 plan to release the underlying source code -- the browser's software brains -- as a "beacon of hope" amid disheartening internal management.
"At this point, I strongly believed that Netscape was no longer capable of shipping products. Netscape's engineering department had lost the single-minded focus we once had ... Netscape was shipping garbage, and shipping it late."
The necessary decision to overhaul Netscape Communicator with a new, Mozilla-built rendering engine (code-named Gecko), was smart but by then, too time-consuming.
"It constituted an almost-total rewrite of the browser, throwing us back six to 10 months. Now we had to rewrite the entire user interface from scratch before anyone could even browse the Web, or add a bookmark."
The company had dropped the Mozilla ball by then, Zawinski said.
"Netscape failed to follow through on their own plans. During 1998, Netscape sunk a huge amount of engineering effort into doing the 4.5 release ... This was a huge blow to the Mozilla project, since for the first half of the year, we weren't even getting full-time participation from Netscape."
"This isn't even so much an excuse as a stupid, terrible mistake."
Zawinski nonetheless sees a silver lining to the failure and emphasized that the failure of Mozilla so far does not signal the failure of the open source development model.
"Whatever problems the Mozilla project is having are not because open source doesn't work. Open source does work, but it is most definitely not a panacea."
"If there's a cautionary tale here, it is that you can't take a dying project, sprinkle it with the magic pixie dust of "open source," and have everything magically work out. Software is hard. The issues aren't that simple.
He concluded with his relief to be resigning from AOL not Netscape. "I must say, though, that it feels good to be resigning from AOL instead of resigning from Netscape. It doesn't really feel like quitting at all."
