388354 - mozilla should be less bureaucratic and more open

Status: VERIFIED INVALID

(Marketing :: Business Development, task)

Description

[Francesco Montefoschi]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; it-IT; rv:1.8.1.4) Gecko/20061201 Firefox/2.0.0.4 (Ubuntu-feisty)
Build Identifier: 

The title is sufficient. However, I add some examples.

a) FIREFOX FEATURES
Firefox _was_ popular because tiny and just did browsing. And now?
Firefox is losing market share.. so please stop to add useless features, which are creating you situations [1]..

b) FIREFOX THEME
No one likes the Firefox2's theme. Yes, I know I will see replies like "all we like it". Yeah, just 20-30 persons here. And don't reply to YOUR USERS "if you don't like it, change it", is not polite.

c) HACKING THE CODE
A guy wanted to help you [2].. and you, what did you do? Just refused him.
He wasn't just the dude of the next door, one of the main KDE's hackers.


Can I call this regime?
Kind regards,

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1) go to forums.mozillazine.org and read some replies to the user's questions
2) say "it's not true, it's only in my head!"
3) go to bugzilla.mozilla.org and read some report
4) go to www.answers.com/democracy, listen, learn (but don't get involved ;( )
Actual Results:  
Mozilla is not an open community

Expected Results:  
Mozilla engineers should be more open-minded

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=311079
[2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=297788

Comment 1

[Shawn Wilsher :sdwilsh]

Um...DOM Inspector has nothing to do with Firefox...

Comment 2

[L Lawliet]

I agree with you, Francesco. But this bug does not require a common patch to get it solved: we seriously need to patch their minds...

Comment 3

[Jesse Ruderman]

> Firefox _was_ popular because tiny and just did browsing. And now?

Now firefox "does browsing" better thanks to features such as spell checking, even though some people perceive that as "bloat".  And it's more popular as a result.

> Firefox is losing market share

Not true.

> Please stop to add useless features, which are creating you situations [1]

We try not to add useless features.  If you think any particular feature should be removed, file a bug. Don't complain about "useless features" in general; we don't expect every user to use every feature.

The bug you linked to is a localization allowing Italian users to use DOM Inspector.  I don't think that's useless, but even if it were, the person who did the translation is probably not someone who would otherwise be doing coding elsewhere...

> A guy wanted to help you [2].. and you, what did you do? Just refused him.
> He wasn't just the dude of the next door, one of the main KDE's hackers.

That's not what I see when I read the bug.  I see that he was not granted full CVS access, but that's not the same as "refusing help"; plenty of people who don't have CVS access do contribute patches and have other people check in the patches (e.g. using the checkin-needed keyword) until they become trusted members of the Mozilla community.

It looks like he was offered access to the part of repository he'd be touching the most, so I don't see what the problem is.  Did he ever actually contribute patches?

> 4) go to www.answers.com/democracy, listen, learn (but don't get involved ;( )

Successful open-source projects are meritocracies, not democracies.

If you have specific suggestions about how we can be more transparent or more inviting to new contributors, that's great.  But this rant isn't a useful bug report.

Comment 4

[Francesco Montefoschi]

> Now firefox "does browsing" better thanks to features such as spell checking,
> even though some people perceive that as "bloat".  And it's more popular as a
> result.

I'm talking about microsummaries, who is using it?
90% of people neither knows what RSS is
Or this: http://people.mozilla.com/~faaborg/files/20070602-firefox3UIFeatures/contentHandling.jpg
my comment is: WTF?


> Not true.
a month ago - http://punto-informatico.it/p.aspx?i=2022788 -0.88%
(if you read on "punto-informatico.it's forum" you can see posts like "firefox? who is still using it?")


> That's not what I see when I read the bug.  I see that he was not granted full
> CVS access, but that's not the same as "refusing help"; plenty of people who
> don't have CVS access do contribute patches and have other people check in the
> patches (e.g. using the checkin-needed keyword) until they become trusted
> members of the Mozilla community.

> It looks like he was offered access to the part of repository he'd be touching
> the most, so I don't see what the problem is.  Did he ever actually contribute
> patches?

I think we misunderstood each other.
He ask for an account. Is a famous KDE hacker, you can check the references
But in your reply you used the right word: trust.

I report here a post that is very relevant for this discussion:

"I got a KDE account before providing any patches. We hand out accounts to any
who ask nicely and seem serious. There is a huge difference in the Mozilla
attitude and the KDE attitude. Even Apple hands out SVN accounts more freely
than Mozilla does."


> Successful open-source projects are meritocracies, not democracies.

maybe, I can't talk - i have no open source projects :-)


> If you have specific suggestions about how we can be more transparent or more
> inviting to new contributors, that's great. 

The KDE's community is like a family, but I don't think Moz will ever be like that: is just too big. Maybe you have to learn to understand who is "bad" and who is "good" to write code, and just trust him/her

And you should give a better feedback for who help Moz. That guy provided a translation for the DOM inspector and you refused it instead of saying "thank you"
A possible solution was to remove the DOMI from the installer (DOMInspector is not installed by default!!), and in a custom setup download it from the internet 


Sorry for the bad english. And for mistaked, I have not time to read it again.. is late in Italy :-)

Comment 5

[Justin Dolske [:Dolske]]

(In reply to comment #4)

> He ask for an account. Is a famous KDE hacker, you can check the references
> But in your reply you used the right word: trust.

CVS write access is earned when needed; not a right due to fame in other projects. Even full-time employees of Mozilla Corporation do not automatically get CVS access. Expertise in one project does not imply expertise in another, and access policy is a decision each project is free to make on its own.

I fail to see how this is a problem. 99.99% of the work involved in developing, testing, and reviewing a patch does not need CVS access. A large patch might takes months of refinement, and just a couple of seconds to "cvs commit." I think any project should be more interested in attracting active developers than prima donnas.

Comment 6

[Shawn Wilsher :sdwilsh]

(In reply to comment #4)
> And you should give a better feedback for who help Moz. That guy provided a
> translation for the DOM inspector and you refused it instead of saying "thank
> you"
I hardly refused the work.  If I had refused it, the bug would have been marked WONTFIX.  All patches have to get approval before being checked in.  Barrier to entry?  Sure, but it is how we ensure that the code that is in our tree is of the highest quality.

Comment 7

[Tim De Pauw]

(In reply to comment #4)
> I'm talking about microsummaries, who is using it?
> 90% of people neither knows what RSS is

Feeds are actually quite popular, and for people who don't use them, the UI is unobtrusive. People don't need to know what RSS and Atom are, just feeds.

Microsummaries are a work in progress and may still become as popular as feeds. You have to start somewhere.

> a month ago - http://punto-informatico.it/p.aspx?i=2022788 -0.88%

Those numbers are all based on samples, and there's a huge margin of error. Unless there's a substantial difference, it doesn't mean market share is slipping.

To quote Benjamin Disraeli, "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."