Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Tape 049
Tape 049
Tape 049
Tape 49
OK
Uh just sos you know if youre interested think the NSA has copies of the
interesting files in Libnet So that if they have any really really serious attitude they
could us Urn
yell at that has been two days ago and havent heard anything
back So Im presuming that theyre giving it some attention Its going to be really
interesting how this whole crypto thing plays out Weinsteins already telling like
zillion people Im sorry cant answer your technical questions That would be
...It doesnt sound to me like theres theres too much time in in this
any
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Now they have these big machines they have an unbelievable amount of memory
to it in in
operating system screw Theyre theyre memory not on disks
And these machines are going to be housed in the in the uh IS server room
One machine
...and they say they tell me that the FTP machines we use these days can handle
5000 concurrent users And but they never actually get up to that number of
The question is will the people be able to get mean these are these are what
And hopefully yeah hopefully there are lot less people who are interested in
downloading this source who dont have compilers You know theyre just not
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dont know
Well Bob was pretty happy when he did it Did you see his change
Whatd he do
Guess
Yup
About Bob
He did huh
LT Oh he did he put
LT Did he really
Thats great But thats the rule You have to actually modify the code yourself.
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Yeah he did he did it he figured out how it worked wrote the line of code the
whole bit
Oh yes we are
LT You know think we ought to think its kind of like knighthood you got to
Thats interesting
That that is good that is good Thats probably even better prize than giving
them CD of the source which was going to be the other you know
Do you want me to
stay
for this either of you
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CUT
Yeah IS well one of the things Lloyd has been really good at in the past
likeShe wrote Tinderbox and Bonsai which are these aPrHTML pages that monitor
our build process and all that stuff and and so hes seeing his job in Mozilla.org as
dealing with CVS and and checking in files and and all that sort of thing Urn think one
Mozilla.org as being very separate organizations think they have to be And Lloyd is
like trying to do two jobs Hes trying to look out for both of their interests at the same
time Um which is
great mean someone needs to do that but think the distinctions
between the two have to be really really clear And Im not sure hes them
like keeping as
clear as he should be but urn you know it is really hard job no about it
question
is shipping the Netscape Communicator product And these two goals have lot ins
common but theyre not the same and theyre going to have different schedules and
conflict sometimes
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Well thats really hard problem Thats you know one of the things that Lloyd is
worrying about is how do we make it not be just total disaster in the past people at
Netscape have as the companys grown its gotten gotten even hairier but its its
think it
basically works check it in see if it broke then fix it And you know that just
doesnt scale when youve got you know thousand one thing at at
develojne
another guess it was JG at at his previous company youve seen the buy sign And
they
had they had that up and theyll show it and it would splash message
whenever someone broke the build saying so and so broke the build so the the joke
weve been making is some guy in Idaho broke the build You know we cant we cant
Which is not rule that client eng has ever operated under before have
cheeks People
done it in in previous lives but its not how weve done here so the works
it
way that
developers
f04ctt
J- really
22S
strongly believe that if
Netscape gets special exemptions of any kind because
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say were trying to do theyll think theyre being conned Urn second if the only way
Netscape can get their job done is by being Netscape and having this magic relationship
were doing something wrong because were were going to our bigger
fail at goal
which is making it
possible for other people to do what Netscape has been
doin-1 5Z
This should be an to the culture in
interesting shift developing general
Yeah...its different world But mean at some level everyones always competing
with people outside right thats if you didnt have competition youd be Microsoft Uh
\\ 7\
Well Im kind of surprised that you say that because my impression going back year
and half or two years has been that the company is reactive to Microsoft And
just utterly
think thats disastrously bad And largely responsible for lot of the problems weve
been havingr though thinking about it think youre right and and its because the
free source thing is just you know so out there that its its not something Microsoft is
Microsoft you hear people ask that question in various forms all the timet ii Lj /i
Do you think that shipping the free source will help in
you competition
Ci
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wouldnt say its an unnecessary distraction you ignore whats going on in the world at
focus on making
overly
good product
focused
rather
on it is
than doing
bad.. is
slightly
-__
not healthy
better
you
than the
know
guy
you
next door
need to
-7
.---------------
you know Urn think another reason something Ive noticed about the environment
around here since we started doing this free source is is think there are lot of people
who are just kind of shell-shocked and and theyre suggestible think thats large part
of the reason that that weve gotten away with as much as we have in Mozilla.org is that
-C-
oh look the rules changed and dont what to do so Im just going to smile and nod
happening anyway -a1 have my reasons for why think the free source way of doing
things is you know the path to success or whatever Im sure other people have
different take on thatIdont Idont know what the motivations of you know upper
which would not normally be happening every day in in the steady state And the other
thing is that were on this externally imposed really tight schedule So that thats going to
make things bit more chaotic now then they would have been week month
ago or
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in the same way and its not scaling well and its going its were were on the
brink of getting lot bigger still So something needs to be fixed And part of what
Lloyds doing
innovation
Yeah Its definitely one of the hardest parts dont know if theres dont
something
know if it embodies some fundamental limit to the complexity of software or anything like
that but you know in our specific case its problem we have and problem that could
get lot worse if were not really careful about it Were to be involving
certainly going
lot more people So in this situation its really important Im not sure what think about
thatin general
QL4
Well Ive got lot of running around to do to to follow on the
get people through
conmiitments theyve made of documents theyre going to write and machines that are
be and make
going to up that sort of thing sure all that stuff is actually ready to go in time
get some answers to that in in the meeting hope that what happens is late Friday
night sit at home and make all the changes and the documents and
get ready to go
rth in the
morning Iget up and the switch and the site live and then probably
Ifljp oes
our is going to melt down there are going to be an awful lot of comments about_.a
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going to be lot of noise and lot of chaos and wont be atrain wreck
hopefully it
Tuesday morning
press release went out4 so it the the kind of work have to do leading up to to
flipping the switch is much easier for me to do home because know my machines
at
you
there and when Im accessing my machine remotely its really slow So if cane if
then Ill be able to flip the switch from here without any trouble to 2_S
And thats when the files go from client eng to Mozilla.org FTP site
Yeah itll
probably be some combination of of physically from one machine
moving files
Urn Mozilla.org is going to be accepting changes from the outside world and the
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the problem is the rate of change urn that urn you take various
at points in project can
you get towards the end its you taper down and you urn you you slow down
the...rate of change Jim was concerned that with Mozilla.org and Netscape having
two different ideas about what that rate of change should be could create real problern
and would would force Netscape to be frorn the tip of the tree for of
away long period
time Urn its my goal that that doesnt happen think would be bad thing
urn that for
Netscapes in
help shipping something and so for example if urn Netscape ships the 5.0
Whats the difference between branch and the tip of the tree
they take copy of the tree they make modifications to it and when those
they commit those changes back into the tree Or the tip of the tree And what
generally
ends up happening is that they they verify that those changes went in OK by looking at
and work on feature and that feature not be in state state thats done
rnay
enough for if youre working on if youre working alone then you can always work
on in
your own copy of the tree and then conunit it but if youre in
group sometirnes
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work on branch together and what this is is shared copy of the tree They go off and
they each commit into their of the tree and when theyre done. calIecanding the
copy .its
branch they take that entire branch and bnng that branch back into the of the tree and it
tip
\SS
Is landing
...Generally
brnch
groups
\S
are
riskier
as careful
than
or more
if one
careful
person makes
than individuals
change
you worry about What you worry about when you have somebody off on branch
they have feature theyre off on branch this is great new branch new feature
great
everybody should want it but the goal of Mozilla.org is to make something stable And
so the branch is forced to be orphaned out there for period of time until Mozilla.org
is...in position to accept new features Andifl and only then can that branch land
you would set back your stabilization date And so but that happens on just any on any
project So ..theres time for features and theres time for stabilization And ..youve
be careful
got to about when you accept things
01.15 1F t59
Well every feature has money riding on it OK So mean its. .money-driven right So
theres customer somewhere who wants this feature badly and theres
very marketing
person who very much who very badly wants this feature into released So
product
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stabilization mode Mozilla.org is going into stabilization mode and believe its
my
belief that
Mozilla.org will leave stabilization mode before Netscape does So Mozilla.org
will
say OK were done being stable now were coming into accepting new features
Netscape might want that feature in their release so they might actually drop that feature
4I% and j$theyll drop that feature into the stable into Netscapes stable copy But it
might be forced to go back to prior stable version from Mozilla.org and then cull pieces
out of it that he wanted He and thats thats what hes considering disaster scenario
Um believe that if we can keep our development cycles short enough in Mozilla.org that
happening is that were going to figure out what works for and work that
everybody way
it-iOir
So Mozilla.org has to be faster than in
always Netscape order for this to
work
L-1 i5
...highŁr than Netscapes or higher And think were
frequency equal to so...I
prepared
forthat ut
3t
Why is it so hard to create good software
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that the the large part of it the main problem with doing software in the that
large is you
in
room you trip over each other And urn so figuring out ways to keep the path clear
keep its also like any civilization if you have you have to have rules and if people
dont if there arent enough rules you end up with chaos You can have without
family
very many rules and it works pretty well you you start getting to be larger
organization you have to have rules and and the rules have to make sense because if
you have bad set of rules what you have is people doing the
wrong thing it forces
way. .for success So urn actually figuring out the the right set of rules is really
important
hJ ii
fb
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