A perfect example of open source software’s disorganization
A little less than a year ago, I posted a tidy little essay decrying the disorganization of open source software (OSS). Yesterday brought a perfect example of that disorganization. The Mozilla Foundation, catching its contributors and developers mostly unawares, decided to retire the Mozilla suite and concentrate instead on Firefox and Thunderbird.
Now, to be clear, I actually don’t care at all about this. It’s just an example. The point is that the open source software movement purports to be democratic, open, and free, and yet its true hallmark is disorganization. Allow me to qutoe the critical portion of yesterday’s announcement from the Mozilla Foundation.
The ongoing alpha and beta releases of Seamonkey 1.8 have suggested that the Mozilla Foundation itself will be creating a 1.8 final release. This is not our plan. … In addition, a set of people have done a non-trivial amount of work on 1.8 features, thinking this would be part of an official Mozilla Foundation release. This has been a major error on our part. These contributors have reason to be unhappy with us. We can only apologize, at the same time recognizing that apologies only go so far and can’t fix the error.
If Mozilla were a traditional, profit-driven company, the exact same thing could have happened. Developers could have been working on features for a new release that never materialized. Communication could have been poor. In no way am I saying that the organization of open source software development is worse than that of closed source development (although it probably is).
But here’s the difference: Who planned this? Who gets the decide? A company has a hierarchy, a pecking order, a built-in decision-making structure. If OSS is so democratic and free, then the folks who worked on the 1.8 release really do have a beef. If you’re working for a company and they never release the new product, you can be pissed, but that’s what your boss decided. Besides, you still got paid.