Open Source Needs to Rethink Its Priorities

Joshua McKenty's nevertheless-young career is, compared to those of other capitalist executives, surprisingly replete. He's led development teams for the Netscape browser, and is intimately familiar with Netscape's successors at Mozilla. His then stroke of luck was with the space program, helping to create and at the time lead one of the world's most successful cloud computing projects, NASA Nebula. His work with NASA spawned the open source community's most successful - and like as not most important - project in the last few years, the OpenStack cloud operating system - and he sits on that project's governing body. In-between jobs, he just happened to pioneer an earthquake modeling system for the World Bank.

The late period of Netscape 8

He calls the late period of Netscape 8 and 9 "probably the most complicated and nuanced open source environment you can imagine. Netscape was released as the Mozilla code base, when all is said and done everyone thinks of Firefox being to the benefit of Netscape. Nevertheless the code is a tri-license that allows Netscape to close it and develop it for proprietary [purposes] after. At the time you have the fact that Firefox, which everybody thinks of as being a Mozilla project, was in fact a fork of Mozilla by a sole individual that Mozilla next reverse-forked back into their organization and turned into a $300 million-per-year business, which they did not share."

After Netscape, McKenty went on to be a software architect and business developer for Flock, Inc., whose product was a socially-oriented Web browser built on the Mozilla code base. During there, he tells us, "we would hire new developers turn them loose, and say, 'Every commit that you make is going to be looked at by other people in the world.' That's a terrifying experience, especially if you're a young coder or you're new to the code base... It has nothing to do with the philosophy of open source. It has to do with a sense of embarrassment or nervousness to have your daily commits be scrutinized by folks that perhaps you think of as being more experienced than you."

First you must understand your target audience. If you're developing applications forkids you must make the application easy to use and easy to understand. For instance,consider eliminating text labels, popup menus, etc.When I started developing "My Little Artist" the hardest task for me was to create thebrush icons. The easiest way was to make text labels. Nevertheless if a kid can't read or even if hecan read, can he as a matter of fact understand what I mean by calling a brush "fur"? I think I found agood solution--to draw on icons, things I can draw with that brush. Another benefit ofnot using labels is globalization of the application. There is nothing to translate. And anykid, from any country can use this application. No matter which language he speaks.