Main difference between moz, oo, and helix != GPL [LWN.net]

Main difference between moz, oo, and helix != GPL

Posted Apr 19, 2003 17:58 UTC (Sat) by jensend (guest, #1385)
In reply to: Keep up the good momentum by coriordan
Parent article: An apology from Novell's CEO

I don't think the main difference between the success of Mozilla, the relative success of OpenOffice, and the quiet "this doesn't change all that much" reaction to Helix is the use of the GPL as a dual license. People not affiliated with Netscape did lots of work with Mozilla before the tri-licensing movement was started, and it is quite surprising how few the non-Sun contributors to OpenOffice are. The difference is in how open the projects are and how the products are percieved by the open-source community.

Mozilla is an extremely open project- they went to open-source largely based on Eric Raymond's "Cathedral and the Bazaar" paper and so went to a bazaar model. This does have its drawbacks- you get tons of clueless lusers ranting in Bugzilla and wasting developers' time- but it has helped Mozilla become a showcase for open source. Mozilla also started out with a product which many people in the open source community were excited about.

OpenOffice is working to become more open to speed development, and is trying hard to get people to help in the performance efforts. They have taken what is almost a cathedral style tack in development, and it has served them well in making a coherent and feature-complete suite. StarOffice was a product many users were excited about years before Sun even acquired it.

Real, on the other hand, has what is very obviously a cathedral style of development, and this and the fact that RealPlayer was not a product people in the open-source community were excited about (due to its reputation for bloat and closed standards) have made the Helix work a much quieter operation in the open source world than either of the other development efforts. However, Helix has been successful in its own way- the latest RealPlayer, based on the Helix code, is a lot leaner- and the bare-bones helix client is rather good. They'll need to open up more if they want more far-reaching results, though.

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Main difference between moz, oo, and helix == GPL

Posted Apr 22, 2003 4:50 UTC (Tue) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link]

Cathederals and Bazaars. What a crap book, it has more nutritional value
than educational value. heh ;)

> The difference is in how open the projects are

I agree, but I say that GPL *is* openness. The NPL was kinda
open, the MPL was pretty open, the GPL put an end to all closedness.

No company is going to hire a programmer to work on code someone else
releases under the NPL, or probably the MPL. Once it was announced that
Mozilla would go GPL, companies were no longer afraid to pay coders to
work on it. The GPL levels the playing field. Completely.

It's no surprise that OpenOffice found it slow to build a developer
community. It's 9 million lines of C++, and the file/directory layout is
hOrrIBle. Throw in a lack of modularity and you find few people can even
compile it more than once per day.

Mozilla is 1 million lines. I haven't looked at the code but the Netscape
guys had a pretty good reputation. Also, in 1998, a web-browser was *the*
most requested piece of Free Software. That made it sexy to work on.

As for RealHelix? Their business model probably couldn't stand up to
openness. Their main selling point is a monopolly on a data format.

Ciaran O'Riordan

Main difference between moz, oo, and helix != GPL

Posted Apr 22, 2003 16:09 UTC (Tue) by jensend (guest, #1385) [Link]

The GPL *is not* openness. Why do you think the GCC/EGCS saga happened? Because the GCC team was a fairly closed team, as were most of the GNU teams in the mid 90s.

If you look at the Mozilla project, the move to a GPL tri-license didn't change much at all. There was not a noticeable change in the number of people working on it when they moved to tri-license. Your comment that no company would pay to have people work on MPL licensed stuff doesn't make any sense at all. The MPL is almost functionally identical to the LGPL.

Linux-related forums are always clogged by people who think the GPL is some sort of cure-all, demanding that everybody in the world release under the GPL. These people don't have any idea what they're talking about.

Main difference between moz, oo, and helix != GPL

Posted Apr 23, 2003 15:50 UTC (Wed) by babrew (guest, #9862) [Link]

> The GPL *is not* openness. Why do you think the GCC/EGCS saga happened?
> Because the GCC team was a fairly closed team, as were most of the GNU
> teams in the mid 90s.

Why being GPL-licensed software means that developer team has to be closed ?

Is it GPL's fault ?

I have seen "fairy closed" developer teams on BSD-licensed projects...

Main difference between moz, oo, and helix != GPL

Posted Apr 23, 2003 16:37 UTC (Wed) by jensend (guest, #1385) [Link]

No, no, no. I'm not saying that using the GPL ensures closed development; that's obviously wrong. I'm just saying the GPL doesn't ensure open development. My statement that the GPL is not openness and counterexamples mean "not (GPL implies openness) and not (openness implies GPL)", not "GPL implies not openness".