Peter Trudelle wrote:

> There seems to be some misconception about what open source is.

Yes. But I'm not sure on which side.

> The code is controlled by module owners, who are under no compulsion 
> to do what 'the community' wants

IMO, the Mozilla community is the highest authority for Mozilla code. 
The community is composed of those involved in the development, be it 
coding, QA, bug triaging, UI design etc..

If somebody devotes substantional amounts of time to sort out bugs to 
make coder's lifes easier and so to help Mozilla, I belive they do have 
a right to influence what Mozilla is.

Similarily, it makes no sense for me to contribute to Mozilla on one 
part just to see my goals being defeated by checkins in other parts. 
(Which is the case in the favicon bug.)

> The owners deal in code, not opinions

They do have to deal with opinions, for the reasons mentioned above.

As mentioned in the discussion with mozilla staff and you, development 
has to be collaborative, or it will fail. Modules are no isolated bits 
of code, they all form an application which will be percieved by the 
user as one.

How do you determine what you do? Doesn't you go to meetings where you 
decide what Netscape 6 should have and what not? The newsgroups and bugs 
are Mozilla's "meetings".

> and they only have to answer to mozilla.org.

And mozilla.org answers the community.

And I assure you that mozilla.org staff lost credits in the view on many 
contributors when approving the favicon checkin.

> No amount of opinion is ever going to cause or prevent a checkin

I completely disagree.

I start to see where all my unhappiness with Mozilla's state roots...


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