John Welch wrote:
>
> On 11/27/00 5:28 PM, in article [EMAIL PROTECTED], "Stuart
> Ballard" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> > 1) Persuade Netscape to let these Netscape engineers write it for
> > Mozilla. Just because it's in Mozilla doesn't mean a Netscape person
> > didn't write it - most of Mozilla was written by Netscape people,
> > although this is gradually changing.
>
> To whom should I speak?
Ah, that's the 64,000 dollar question. Certainly not people here - if we
knew how to change NS marketting's minds, 6.0 would still be in beta.
Your best bet is still Netscape's feedback forms - I know that it's like
shouting into a black hole, but there is evidence that Netscape do pay a
small amount of attention to this information.
> > 2) Persuade someone who is not a Netscape engineer to write it for
> > Mozilla. This will be tough, because most of these people are volunteers
> > who write for mozilla because they want to. NOTE: this *will not* work
> > for people paid by Netscape. There are Netscape engineers who would love
> > to write this, but Netscape pays their salaries, so Netscape says what
> > they do. To change their minds, you have to persuade Netscape.
>
> This will be tough, face it LDAP ain't exactly cool. ;-)
Well, neither is mail transfer as far as I'm concerned, and yet we have
at least 3 major open source mail transfer agents. What's boring to you
might be a fascinating problem for someone else. The trick is finding
that person - ideally without pissing everyone else here off in the
process.
> > 3) Pay some money to Beonex, who are collecting a pool to fund someone
> > to do it.
>
> I'm offering help to them, and we are talking, they seem to be the only real
> solution.
Awesome. You'd be amazed how many people have complained, but then
refused to put their money where their mouths are.
> > 4) Write it yourself.
>
> If I could, I would have done it months ago.
I know, but I didn't want to leave that option out. There's also the
option, since you seem to be in a fairly large company with an IT
department, of actually hiring someone to write it.
> Ah, but by bitching, the issue stays on the front burner, and can't be
> easily ignored. Therefore, one of two things happens...It gets ignored
> anyway, and Netscape/Mozilla demonstrates that Corporate and Higher ed
> really don't matter to them, or it gets fixed just to shut us the hell up...
Actually, the issue is definitely on the front-burner and has been for
some time. Everyone here is *well* aware of the issue, and if they
weren't a week ago (they were, btw) then they *certainly* are now, after
your (understandable) tirade.
I have even seen posts from Netscape people in different groups which
suggest that LDAP may be on the feature list for the next version. As
others have commented, NS management and marketting is stuck in the
closed mindset, so it's hard to get definite information, but you may
find that Netscape is *already* working on this.
One or two posts on the issue would have been sufficient to keep
everyone aware of it. While your distress with Netscape is
understandable, you should be aware that Netscape's decisions are not
made by people in these groups, and many people (my impression is that
even many developers *inside* Netscape) disagree with some of them. But
the people here are entirely unable to change Netscape's mind, so
there's no use in bitching at these people. And there's certainly no
need to run a week-long flamewar with a lot of people who agree with you
in principle, but are powerless to make the change.
Stuart.
