Dale Dougherty's Weblog

HOME   Who Am I?   Discuss   Stories MEMBERS Join Now Login

Interview with Chris Nelson Posted by Dale Dougherty, 3/28/00 at 12:35:09 PM. I had a few questions for Chris Nelson, the developer of Mozillazine.org, our newest affiliate. Chris lives and works in State College, Pennsylvania, home of Penn State. When did Mozillazine get started? Tell me about yourself and why you started the site? MozillaZine got started in August 1998. When Mozilla became Open Source in the Spring of that year, I was very excited about Mozilla's potential, and I wanted to help the effort in some way. MozillaZine was the best way for me, as a non-coder, to contribute to the project. I felt Mozilla needed someone out there sticking up for it, and promoting it, and it also needed a way to bring the community together and help focus discussion. Soon after we started, we added content from a site called MozBin run by Jason Kersey, and integrated Steve Morrison's XULTool (in what was our original ChromeZone area). Jason and Steve play an active role in MozillaZine and in the Mozilla community in general. Obviously, there is Mozilla.org. What role do you see for Mozillazine.org relative to the "mother ship." Mozilla.org is a great repository for technical information regarding all aspects of Mozilla, but I don't think it was ever meant to be a community-building site. MozillaZine is essentially a complement to mozilla.org, with daily news and event announcements, contest promotions, developer chats, and reader discussions. The goal from the beginning has been to provide a dynamic site that spares no effort to get people involved with -- and talking about -- Mozilla. You must believe in Mozilla. What do you tell people who are about to give up on this project? Ah - an interesting question, and one that will expose a bit of my partisanship, and also a bit of my frustration at the coverage Mozilla has been receiving in the press. First, I tell people not to believe everything they read. I've read numerous press stories in reputable online publications by authors that refuse to peek under the covers of the Mozilla project. If they did, they would see a thriving community of developers, designers, standards hawks, international users and other end users all completely committed to the success of Mozilla. To see how well Mozilla has adapted as an Open Source project, one needs only pay a visit to the Mozilla newsgroups, or peruse some bug reports. There you will see an often passionate debate on every aspect of Mozilla's progress. For me (coming from a Windows background), being able to participate in a development project in this way and contribute to its success is a very gratifying experience. The press tends to frame Mozilla in terms of its relationship to Netscape, but I can honestly say that Mozilla wouldn't be as far along as it is without the amazing contributions from the Mozilla community. Part of the problem seems to be that people seem to think that Open Source development is all about the coders. But I think Mozilla has really shattered that myth, by actively courting contributions from many different sources. For example, Mozilla is now being localized into 45 different languages by volunteers, using tools developed specifically for Mozilla by "outside" developers. I'm not aware of any other Open Source project that has opened up so much of its process to developers and end users, and at the same time courts such a wide range of contributions. I don't want to neglect mentioning the significant development contributions from "outside" developers, however. MathML support and XSLT support are being done by volunteers. IBM is contributing bi-directional text support to the rendering engine. Intel is contributing disk-cache support. And RedHat and Be, Inc. both have full-time developers working on the Mozilla ports to Linux and BeOS. By any standard, Mozilla is truly a successful Open Source project. I also remind people of the importance of having an Internet in which future development is not dictated by any one company or organization. And I think Mozilla is currently the only browser project that can counter that possibility. There are a number of other browser projects out there, both commercial and Open Source, but Mozilla is the only Open Source project with a cross-platform focus, and it is also taking the lead in pushing for compliance across the range of existing web standards. Standards compliance and cross-platform interoperability will help to create a future in which every platform and Internet device can have robust and up-to-date browser technologies. Netscape recently announced that Netscape 6 is due in several weeks. What is the relationship between Netscape Navigator and Mozilla? It gets confusing. Netscape's branded product will be based on Mozilla, and it will have additional modules that aren't part of the Mozilla development effort (like Instant Messaging). Beyond that, I'm really not sure what else will show up in the Netscape-branded product at this point. I should point out, however, that this is a Netscape beta, and not a Mozilla beta. Mozilla.org has its own plans for beta, so while Netscape and Mozilla do have a common ground, their focus is different. Tell me about the ChromeZone. The ChromeZone is a new site that is devoted to all of the great extensions and "skins" that will be developed for Mozilla. Although in a "beta" phase, the ChromeZone has already received an enthusiastic response from the Mozilla community, and we hope to build on that in the months ahead with new features, sections, and tutorials that will promote the full range of Mozilla's capabilities.

Elsewhere