If we don't have someone in the dev world that helps people like this get their feet wet, then we should make sure we change that. Who will help?
Posted by: Majken | April 9, 2007 8:01 PM
I'm just thinking aloud here, but perhaps a good method of outreach would be for Mozilla to contact various CS departments with ways for them to expose their students to the world of OSS as developers.
If just a few students out of those who received an assignment to investigate any Firefox bug proceed to become major contributors, it would be a win-win for Mozilla, students, and the academic and OSS communities.
Posted by: Sunil Garg | April 9, 2007 9:06 PM
Glacial code review. That's what I heard over and over. I can code c, c++, c#, python, JS, XML, HTML etc. But I've always been put off by the clique rumors, no one ever gets their code approved and into the project. I love firefox, but it seems that if you aren't in the right crowd, then don't bother. Which does kind of make it closed source? How open is it if average Joe Bloggs can't get his code into the project?
hm.
Still love it. Just wish SVG + animation was comming on a bit fast. Anyone seen a popular site that doesn't have a TON of flash in it? How come Firefox don't have anything to help out?
monk.e.boy
Posted by: monk.e.boy | April 10, 2007 12:34 AM
They recently added some code reviewers, but we'll see. So far the code has open-source, all right -- but basically open for READONLY.
Posted by: AnotherGuest. | April 10, 2007 7:56 AM
@monk.e.boy:
Ever heard of a word "fork"? It's really shocking to hear people complaining about "read-only open-source". If it's a true open source LICENSE, it is NOT read-only, no matter what anyone says. The project leader can disallow commits. But as long as the code is released under a real open-source LICENSE, it is 100% open-source.
If you don't like how the commits are handled, you can always start an official fork or a friendly side-by-side code tree (a la Linux kernel, which one "official" main tree, and many other semi-official trees that people respect and track closely for their servers).
If you have a real open-source LICENSE and if you can check out and build the code, you are more or less set. It helps if the project used a truly distributed version control software. For example, instead of subversion or CVS, use mercurial. (just an idea). That way instead of just "checking out" the code, you can get the entire history of the code into your own version control code repository.
Posted by: Leo | April 10, 2007 10:24 AM
monk.e.boy has it right.
I was one of the _thousand_ or so people who voted for bug 18574 (a hilarious read, BTW). There have been people working on this for literally years, but the bug's now marked wontfix or something. Why? Because someone in the clique didn't like it and decided to waste years of those contributors' time moving the goalposts repeatedly. I don't remember the excuses made for not fixing it properly, but I suspect any legitimate reason is long, long gone.
They did get something out of that wild goose chase though: a new, untested and possibly unstable image format with barely any software support. The same reasons MNG was originally removed for. Hmm.
Posted by: ant | April 11, 2007 12:24 PM
Certainly someone can easily reply to his blog with lots of links to our getting started pages, and IRC, I'll do that myself right now. Although the first sentence makes me wonder are you just asking us to get him started or are you wanting to start a discussion on making it someone's role to find people like this and get them involved?