Interviewed by CNN on 5/2/2010 02:59, Rufus told the world: > Where I get confused is that I read a lot of posts here that fall back > on - "but we're just all volunteers, the other guys are paid"...which > comes off sounding like I should expect less. > > What I really think is that everyone involved is equally competent - > paid or not. And when things all start looking the same or similar > between products, it starts looking like you are all working together in > any event. So...just what should I expect? >
Seamonkey reuses a lot of stuff (like the entire innards, and parts of the user interface) which was originally written for Firefox and Thunderbird. So, yes, you are going go see similarities in functionality. Also, there's a matter of general style -- Seamonkey considers itself as part of the Mozilla "family", so SM borrows some styling cues from FF&TB. As has been mentioned, the Mozilla Corporation (responsible for Firefox) and Mozilla Messaging (responsible for Thunderbird) have actual budgets, with money coming part from grants (they are both owned by the Mozilla Foundation, which is a registered charity) and part from business deals like the Google advertising thing. So they can hire people to supplement the volunteer developers. This is important for two reasons: 1- Paid developers can give eight-hour days, five days a week. Volunteers can give one or two hours a day, and perhaps not even every day. So the hours add up. 2- Some kinds of expertise are hard to come by in a volunteer basis, because the job can't be easily split among a lot of people. User interface design is a good example. You want a consistent UI, not a patchwork, so you need somebody to head the whole project -- that means a lot of hours, way above what can be reasonably expected from a volunteer. So Firefox has full-time paid UI guys, and Seamonkey doesn't. That's why Mac users are impressed with Thunderbird 3 -- a lot of work went into making TB3/Mac mesh well with OSX. SM doesn't have this kind of resources, so SM/Mac does not mesh as well -- the SM/Mac look is less customized, more similar to the SM/Win and SM/Linux looks. -- MCBastos This message has been protected with the 2ROT13 algorithm. Unauthorized use will be prosecuted under the DMCA. -=-=- ... BOFH excuse #134: because of network lag due to too many people playing deathmatch *Added by TagZilla 0.066.2 running on Seamonkey 2.0.2 * http://xsidebar.mozdev.org/modifiedmailnews.html#tagzilla _______________________________________________ support-seamonkey mailing list support-seamonkey@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/support-seamonkey
