AOL, Mozilla lose key evangelist

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Zawinski's departure and criticisms aside, Mozillans gathering tonight for a party in San Francisco's nightclub-studded South of Market district will have much to celebrate. They also have their work cut out for them once the last of the champagne is metabolized.

Mozilla on its first birthday has yet to provide its parent Netscape with a final release product, and rival Microsoft's newly released Internet Explorer browser, version 5.0, is way ahead of Netscape in standards support and componentization.

But Mozilla has made important strides in recent weeks toward its goal of helping AOL deliver a Netscape-branded public beta of Communicator Version 5.0 by July and shipping a product by year's end. Communicator Version 5.0 is expected to be both componentized and have superior standards support.

The most significant of these steps forward was Mozilla's release last month of the M3 build.

This milestone build is the first to bring together the core Gecko browsing engine, released last year in a developer preview; the browser user interface (UI); and the new Extensible User Interface Language (XUL, pronounced "zool") that lets developers customize the UI in a cross-platform language based on XML.

"The M3 version is where you can really start to see the open source effort start to pay off," said AOL's Saito.

Saito also pointed to the nascent but growing trend of other companies implementing Gecko into their products. Citec's DocZilla browser, which supports not only HTML and XML, but also XML's parent markup language Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML), is one example.

Another sign of Mozilla's growth is the online news and discussion site, not affiliated with AOL, called MozillaZine.

One key to Mozilla's ongoing success is ramping up the pace of developer involvement. That will happen, Saito predicts, when AOL finally ships the Netscape-branded, Mozilla-built product.

"We've gotten really good contributions already," Saito said, citing XML inventor James Clark's XML parser, and a trove of 60 bug patches submitted by a single developer. "Interest is really building. But the most important thing that Netscape and Mozilla have to do is get the product out there. When people see it, that's when you'll really see the increase in development effort."

The lack of outside developer involvement was a key point in Zawinski's parting critique.

"The truth is that, by virtue of the fact that the contributors to the Mozilla project included about a hundred full-time Netscape developers, and about thirty part-time outsiders, the project still belonged wholly to Netscape," Zawinski wrote. "I've told people again and again that the Mozilla.org organization does not serve only the desires of the Netscape client engineering group, but rather, serves the desires of all contributors to the Mozilla project, no matter who they are...But the fact is, there has been very little contribution from people who don't work for Netscape, making the distinction somewhat academic."

Zawinski denied vehemently that the shortcomings of Mozilla.org were inherent in the open source model.

"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," Zawinski wrote. "Let me assure you that 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."