bmlk - Bernds memory leaks

Firefox code access

When you start at a new company, what is the first thing you will work on? You will be sent out to important customers to appear as the front end of the company. This does not happen in normal corporations, as it does not happen in mozilla. UI is mozillas front end, I believe its reasonable to limit access to it. So when a new employee starts, she/he will be send to different places in the back office to learn the internals or to make customer support (bugzilla). Mozilla does have a huge back office area (Gecko, Necko, ...), why not explain to new contributors, you have to learn the basics first, getting a full fledged CVS account does demonstrate the commitment to learn the basics before you are allowed to touch the fronted.

Annoyed Contributor FAQ

This is related to Gerv's blog entry. This is my personal view

1. If you are unhappy with a mozilla decision that has the word we somewhere mentioned, ask who is we.
   
2. If the answer contains one of the words firefox or aviary, thats it. Stop. Go for a beer, but stop to worry. 14+ million downloads should tell you that people steering firefox have made a couple of pretty correct decisions.
   
3. Once you passed that critical point, you have to ask yourself, why has that bad decision been made without asking you before.
   
   
   
   • Your oppinion does not matter as you did not contribute enough lines to the mozilla codebase (this is for all these weenies at the forums). Even if you have checked in several lines, did you look how many checkins people like dbaron, ben etc have made. Do you have the time to write that many code? Do you really want that?
     
   • Your oppinion does not matter as you don't live in MV. There are some people that have a say even without massive amounts of code checked in, but usually they are staff anyway.
     
   
   
4. If you bypassed both criteria as the thing that worries you is sooo urgent, can you fix at your own, or does the fix require others to act. Forget the latter.
   
   • Good: I want to be the owner of component xyz
     
   • Bad: Owners.html needs to be updated.



5. So at this stage you have allready a patch that stands on its own but can't move, its really time to ask mozilla.org

for reference

The day Microsoft makes a product that doesn't suck is the day they make a vacuum cleaner.