Browser World

assault and bartery » Flock, Firefox and open source

In recent weeks, several folks have asked why Flock is building a browser, not an extension, and about our relationship to the Mozilla community.  Let me try to address some of these questions. 

Some background info
I’ve been a member of the open source community for about six years now.  Before Flock, I’ve contributed to the GNOME project, Eazel, two Linux companies abroad, OSAF and Mozilla, so I’m familiar with how open source works.  I’ve also written several articles on open source on the desktop.  In sum, I am a firm believer in the power of the open source development model.  So it’s always been obvious to me that Flock should leverage existing open source technologies and contribute most, if not all, our enhancements back under an open source license.  And I’m not the only person at Flock who’s familiar with the open source way of doing things: most of us at Flock have years of experience working in the open source community.  We’ve been in semi-stealth mode for a while, but starting with our upcoming developer preview release, expect us to operate in a very transparent manner.

Forking
Flock is not interested in forking the Mozilla code-base.  I have worked for the Mozilla project and know first-hand that the project has attracted some serious hacker talent.  One of the most appealing aspects of building on the Mozilla platform is that we can build on top of a platform that is designed, developed, and maintained by top engineering talent at Mozilla, IBM, Sun, Red Hat, Google and hundreds of community volunteers.  Flock is a small startup, and our business model is premised on being able to build on top of all that work.  In architecting our software, build systems and engineering processes, we have given considerable thought to how our code will be able to evolve alongside the Mozilla code, without forking it.  We are trying to pay particular attention to this in areas where we are doing things slightly different from Firefox.  For example, in the area of bookmarks, we implemented on top of the Firefox bookmarks architecture, while integrating social bookmarks. 

Of course, time will tell how successful we are in avoiding unnecessary divergence between the Flock codebase and the Mozilla code.  This ultimately depends on the thousands of engineering decisions we will make in the coming months and years, but also on the level of communication between folks here and the broader Mozilla community.  For our part, we are very serious about becoming active participants in and contributors to the Mozilla community, starting in the very near future.  We are also very open to working with folks at the Mozilla Foundation, the Mozilla Corporation and elsewhere to minimize the risk of platform divergence and have taken the first steps to start that conversation.

There are any number of open source and commercial browsers built on top of the Mozilla technology base, including Firefox, Seamonkey, Camino, Netscape, Epipheny, Galeon and K-Meleon.  The Mozilla licensing scheme was designed explicitly to encourage people to use the code, and we’re confident that Flock will prove once again that any number of browsers can co-exist on top of the Mozilla technology platform.

Why not an extension?
We too love Firefox.  We spent several months investigating (and writing code) how to deliver what we want to do in the form of a Firefox extension.  In the end, we concluded that we needed to release our code in the form of a full browser.  We want to be able to offer our users a complete end-to-end user experience, including a single browser download, an update service, technical support…. the works.  Further, we don’t want to break anyone’s Firefox experience, or have our browser break, due to updates either way that have not been fully tested propagated.  In the short term, that means that fewer people will play with our stuff, but over the long term we believe it’s the right way to go for us.  Of course there will be many people who are perfectly happy with Firefox and are not interested in trying a new browser.  The good news for those folks is that there are already hundreds of Firefox extensions, many of them aimed at integrating social services into the browser.
 
So how will you contribute?
Of course we will contribute all our modifications to Mozilla files back to the community.  We plan to release other code to the Mozilla community as well.  When new partners join the Mozilla community, they contribute not just code but also new ideas, and new people with fresh perspectives.  We believe those are important benefits to Mozilla, the community, and its millions of users.  Because we are a small startup that doesn’t have to worry about maintaining and growing a user base of tens of millions of users, we have the freedom to experiment and explore interesting new ideas and features that are not ready or appropriate to be incorporated into Firefox.  We hope that some of the crazy ideas we develop here at Flock are ultimately incorporated into the core Mozilla code base. 

Will Flock be open source?  How will you license your code?
Yes, Flock will be open source.  We may incorporate some proprietary technologies into our browser and releases some features under a commercial license, but all of our initial code, and the vast majority of our code going forward, will be open source.  In fact, we’re just days away from releasing the source code to everything we’ve developed so far.

We currently plan to license open source code that’s created by Flock under the GPL license.  Modifications to Mozilla files will of course be made available under the MPL license.  We plan to ask that community contributors to our code assign copyrights to us, so that we will be able to license code under the MPL/GPL/LGPL triple licensing scheme as appropriate.

What’s taking you so long?  Get the code out already!
Give us a few more days.  We’ve invited several thousand people to play with nightly builds and help us identify and fix the most embarrassing, egg-all-over-your-face issues so that when we put our code out there, the thing won’t wipe out your hard drive. While we’re eager to jump into the open source fray, we also want to make sure that we don’t make a terrible first impression. OK.