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Linux Magazine / June 1999 / IN THE TRENCHES
DALE GLADSTONE
April 1, 1999, April Fool's Day. It was supposed to be a celebration of the one year anniversary of Netscape releasing their browser code as Open Source. Code maestro and Mozilla project leader Jamie Zawinski again rented the Sound Factory in San Francisco for a party. Strobe lights flashed as projectors spewed scrolling Mozilla source code across the walls. Mozilla CD ROM's mixed with pumping music. But amid the festive atmosphere Jamie Zawinski played a cruel joke on us. At least we hoped it was a joke. We hoped with our hearts that it couldn't be true.
Jamie Zawinski was giving up. Mozilla had failed.
One year ago when Netscape released the code, Marc Andreesen spoke at the Silicon Valley Linux Users Group to a cheering standing room only crowd of over 400 people. Wannabe contributors asked the common question that night, "How can I contribute?" Earlier that day, within four hours of the code's release, Australian cryptographic wizards contributed strong cryptography into "free" Mozilla. Netscape had validated the OpenSource model. Other software vendors would soon see the results of Netscape's bold, visionary move marking the imminent demise of proprietary software.
What Went Wrong?
Mozilla never achieved the success of the Open Source projects that inspired it. The contributor base has remained largely Netscape employees. The "Open Source Community" never really embraced Mozilla and the project has stalled. Unfortunately, many of us in the Open Source community made a point of making Mozilla a test case. Netscape was the first major company to release a significant project as Open Source. As Jamie says in his resignation at http//www.jwz.org/gruntle/nomo.html.
"My biggest fear, and part of the reason I stuck it out as long as I have, is that people will look at the failures of mozilla.org as emblematic of open source in general. Let me assure you that whatever problems the Mozilla project is having are not because OpenSource 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."
Frankly, Netscape released the code in part because they were desperate. They had lost the browser war. Does that make Open Source the last gasp of the dying and desperate? I don't think so. As Jamie says, Open Source does work, but not everywhere. That's something we have to be honest about. You can't fix every piece of software just by making it Open Source. We do ourselves and the world a disservice when we preach the Open Source model as a panacea for all software development.
Eric Raymond's "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" gave us the first organized attempt to codify what makes an Open Source project successful. In that paper, Eric listed 19 lessons he learned about Open Source development. Let's take a look back at two of the lessons Eric taught us in that paper:
