Beyond the Code
or, how to win friends, influence people and make a living by writing open source software. It's not just about the code.
Follow me on Twitter as @jonobennett.
Tuesday 3 March 2009, 9:57 PM
Flock not about to take wing
There have been a few reports that Flock, the "social media" browser, which is currently based on Mozilla's codebase, will be switching to Google's Chromium codebase for its next release. This would have been quite a coup for Google.
Unfortunately it ain't necessarily so. Thanks to Twitter, we can find out from Matthew Willis, a Flock employee that they're just evaluating the code, as well as more recent Mozilla code.
It would be an interesting move for a product to abandon one open source codebase for another, with all the work that would entail, rather that attempting to fix the shortcomings in the code it's already based on. There has been criticism of the Mozilla development team's reluctance to take patches from outside their own team in the past. Few developers want to fork a codebase, so if your alternative is to move to a different community that's more open to contributions, you could see how that would be more attractive.
Unfortunately it ain't necessarily so. Thanks to Twitter, we can find out from Matthew Willis, a Flock employee that they're just evaluating the code, as well as more recent Mozilla code.
It would be an interesting move for a product to abandon one open source codebase for another, with all the work that would entail, rather that attempting to fix the shortcomings in the code it's already based on. There has been criticism of the Mozilla development team's reluctance to take patches from outside their own team in the past. Few developers want to fork a codebase, so if your alternative is to move to a different community that's more open to contributions, you could see how that would be more attractive.
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