>This implies that you are opposed to the existence of Thunderbird, Seamonkey, Songbird, Miro et al.

What I wrote implies no such thing. What logic are you using? I’m sticking with Modus Ponens.

Modus Wild-ass-guess is more my style. I thought you were trashing the idea of client-side apps (as opposed to web apps), but upon rereading it’s clear that I misunderstood. Oops.

I’m suggesting that a pure client-side widgets plus rich web layout/graphics platform play is a bad idea, untethered from a web service, or a meta-service that can talk to multiple user-chosen services. Now what do you think?

Dunno. Why doesn’t the web itself qualify as a “meta-service” in your nomenclature? What domain restrictions make your approach more viable than a “pure play”?

What’s your view on mozpad now?

See http://www.allpeers.com/blog/2007/12/22/whither-mozpad/ and my comment to shaver (up there ^^^). Maybe I’m too impatient or lazy or something, but I now believe a full-time focus is necessary to achieve anything useful. My experience with Mozpad made me skeptical that a volunteer organization is up to the task. Probably a small core of full-time participants would create enough momentum to get others involved on a volunteer basis.

But you guys have way more experience with this than I do! I’m interested to know what you think.

Part of what I’m postulating is that it’s always going to be hard to get app developers (who are in the throes of intense release stress 90% of the time, by definition) to spend time on issues that force them to stray from their critical path. So why not provide them with great tools and support, make them pay for it, and use that money to hire a team to upstream patches and otherwise give the platform the love it deserves?

Matt: what’s your view on mozpad now?

/be

> The Mozilla platform, which of course is being starved by MoCo by having gutted the platform development team and making no forward-looking and app-independent investments in the platform itself

Clue to the new: he’s being sarcastic.

/be

>> In this light I hope you can see my point that competing with TrollTech is not the leveraged move for the Mozilla platform. Weave widgets and lighter-weight add-on models are more like it.

Matt wrote:

>This implies that you are opposed to the existence of Thunderbird, Seamonkey, Songbird, Miro et al.

What I wrote implies no such thing. What logic are you using? I’m sticking with Modus Ponens.

I’m suggesting that a pure client-side widgets plus rich web layout/graphics platform play is a bad idea, untethered from a web service, or a meta-service that can talk to multiple user-chosen services. Now what do you think?

/be

This is clearly of benefit to Firefox to the extent that these projects contribute to the development and maintenance of a more robust platform.

Happily, it’s of benefit to more than that extent, as with the exception of SeaMonkey the platform contributions (esp. long-term maintenance, vs. initial feature addition) from non-Firefox app communities have been pretty small; contributions that are beyond scratching their own itches even smaller. The Mozilla platform, which of course is being starved by MoCo by having gutted the platform development team and making no forward-looking and app-independent investments in the platform itself, benefits indirectly by simply being _used_, but that there’s a benefit doesn’t mean that all costs in service of that benefit are reasonable, bearable, or leveraged.

I don’t see a lot of other projects going out of their way to fix bugs for Firefox, or usually even to contribute to the code, which is fine — it’s their right to allocate their time as they see it best-aligned with their goals. The Mozilla Foundation believes that the best alignment with its goals remains a strong, though not exclusive, focus on Firefox, and will allocate its resources there primarily. As Sam said in that thread, working on tests that help everyone — even if they are only testing things that Camino depends on, and only in their areas of extra-Gecko expertise — isn’t as interesting to Camino developers as working on their own app-level bugs or features. No news there, but it’s a good thing for everyone who builds on the platform, from add-on authors to venture-backed companies, that the Mozilla Foundation doesn’t position its resources as exclusively along those terms. And Firefox and Thunderbird could certainly use the help; it’s not like we don’t have to postpone or drop features or capabilities that are likely to help tens of millions of people around the world because of lack of resources, on virtually every release.

When Mozpad was briefly a going concern, and needed to be independent from the rest of the Mozilla project for some reason, I offered some of my team’s time to help people, including getting their contributions in. We didn’t get a lot of uptake on that, simply because the vast majority of the things people talked about were what _others_ “should” provide for them, not what would help them help themselves, or others. Who will bake the bread? (Flock, I should point out, is definitely baking some bread right now, and I’m sure they wouldn’t describe their involvement as an act of charity.)

In this light I hope you can see my point that competing with TrollTech is not the leveraged move for the Mozilla platform. Weave widgets and lighter-weight add-on models are more like it.

This implies that you are opposed to the existence of Thunderbird, Seamonkey, Songbird, Miro et al. Or I am totally misunderstanding you. Can you clarify?

Firefox is the lever. If we drop it in a mad reach for platform nirvana, we lose.

A wise man once said “making this a black/white, your way or the highway thing is false.” Oh wait, that was you. This isn’t about dropping Firefox vs. dropping the platform. Increasing the independence of the platform is going to have an impact on Firefox. The relevant questions are: how big would that impact be? To what extent can it be mitigated? Would we gain enough to make it worth it?

I’m repeating myself, but I see compelling reasons to think that the answer to the last question is “yes”. In particular, if Gecko were a broadly adopted independent development platform for which Firefox were one customer, there would potentially be a much larger community contributing to the platform. I’m crystal ball gazing, I know, but personally I believe this could be transformative for future versions of Firefox.

Firefox is the lever. If we drop it in a mad reach for platform nirvana, we lose.

/be

As for tollgate vs. sucking, tollgate => monopoly (natural or unnatural) => mediocrity => competition. We’re well along in that cycle with browsers, but not with OSes.

Dropping off my wife’s car the other day, I was chatting with my service associate at the dealer about how he had to set up a fake business just to get XP instead of Vista on his six-month old Dell laptop. He was through with Macs, after a Macbook “experience”.

Users are not moving to Linux, they are simply trying to pay the last toll, since the new toll is too high.

You may have more upbeat Linux news in Europe, but really, the desktop OS is not the contested ground at this point. Server OSes, sure — commodity with opportunities for Enterprise support businesses (Red Hat, undercutting Sun’s higher prices; how long can that go on?). Mobile OSes? No, the phone with carrier tether (or in spite of the carrier) is still the draw.

Platforms are for apps to stand on. What are the interesting new apps? They’re user-facing “web apps” (whether they target browsers or similar “RIA” clients) with increasingly intertwingled “mega-data” on the server side, in the cloud.

In this light I hope you can see my point that competing with TrollTech is not the leveraged move for the Mozilla platform. Weave widgets and lighter-weight add-on models are more like it.

/be

And anyway I’m a big proponent of beefing up the platform side of things, in case that wasn’t obvious, and my *real* point was that despite any potential cost to Firefox, the benefits would far outweigh them. I’m pretty sure we’re actually on the same side here.