Development project priorities

Posted Feb 11, 2010 9:34 UTC (Thu) by liljencrantz (guest, #28458)
In reply to: Development project priorities by bronson
Parent article: Development project priorities

Deciding which platforms Mozilla as an organization will spend significant amounts of money on should not be something we criticize them for. They have given something of great value to a huge number of people and never charged us as much as a dime. They owe us nothing. Anyone who disagrees with the direction they take the project can fork off.

I would think that the obvious solution for those OS X 10.4 users who run Firefox would be to write patches to support 10.4 themselves. If Mozilla refuses to accept such patches, I will agree that they are highly unreasonable.

Development project priorities

Posted Feb 11, 2010 14:20 UTC (Thu) by felixfix (subscriber, #242) [Link] (1 responses)

The list of reasons why 10.4 support should be dropped is impressive to me. 10.4 requires older versions of code (gcc, java plugin, others listed in http://lwn.net/Articles/373818/), such that 10.4 support is not just a matter of some patches, but the tool chain itself. It looks to me like 10.4 support is actually holding back the dev process itself.

Development project priorities

Posted Feb 13, 2010 3:40 UTC (Sat) by mikov (guest, #33179) [Link]

It simply appears that 10.4 would have to be maintained as a completely separate OS. So the toolchain and the patches should not be a problem. Whether the users of 10.4 can maintain such a branch is not clear; but in theory there is nothing preventing them from doing it.

This shows once again that most users really want to treat free software as if it was simply cheap commercial software. The huge philosophical difference in motivation, responsibility, customer relation, etc, between non-free and free does not enter into the picture. Users want to get the benefits of both commercial and free at the same time - can't blame them for trying :-)