Mozilla.org evangelist quits

Jamie Zawinski, one of the founding members of Mozilla.org, the body charged with overseeing the open source development of Netscape Communicator 5.0, has quit. And the separation has been anything but amicable — Zawinski’s reasons for leaving, posted on his Web site, contain a barrage of complaints against Mozilla.org, Netscape, and its new owner, AOL.

Zawinski’s prime reason for resigning his post as Mozilla.org programmer and evangelist was the lack of support the project has had outside Netscape. That, he feels, is because of the perception that the Mozilla project was there solely to “serve… the desires of Netscape”.

“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 30 part-time outsiders, the project still belonged wholly to Netscape,” he wrote. “I’ve told people again and again that the Mozilla.org organisation 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.”

Zawinksi is at least honest enough to recognise his own part in all this. “We should have shipped Netscape Navigator 5.0 no later than six months after the source code was released,” he wrote. “But we couldn’t figure out a way to make that happen. I accept my share of responsibility for this, and consider this a personal failure.”

But if he’s willing to admit his own shortcomings, he’s equally willing to damn Netscape for whom he continues to work. “Netscape has been a great disappointment to me for quite some time,” he wrote. “The more people involved, the slower and stupider their union is,” he added.

As for AOL, Zawinksi said in a separate posting that it’s “about centralization and control of content. Everything that is good about the Internet, everything that differentiates it from television, is about empowerment of the individual. I don’t want to be a part of an effort that could result in the elimination of all that”.

Zawinski was certainly critical of AOL’s takeover of Netscape and what it might mean for the survival of the open source project, and clearly the online giant’s role has continued to concern him. Still, his resignation is unlikely to improve Mozilla’s chances of coming out from under Netscape/AOL’s shadow. AOL was keen yesterday to state that Mozilla.org and its work will continue. However, it’s clear that Navigator 5.0 isn’t going to appear before July in beta form, and many not make final release before 2000.

Both dates are way past Zawinski’s preferred release schedule. AOL’s stance is that once the beta is out, third-party development will really begin to ramp up. And there remains the possibility that Zawinski’s resignation will encourage open source supporters to re-engage with Mozilla.org specifically to show it really is a separate body from Netscape/AOL. ®