[documentation] Some thoughts

[Steve Dondley]

> and as to the $$ issue: Firefox has money because it wasn't the geeks deciding what was a product good enough for marketing and brokering > funding deals like the one they have/had with Google.

Read up a bit on the FF history:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Mozilla_Firefox

1) Firefox started with commercial funding as Netscape Navigator. All
the heavy lifting was done with serious cash and paid employees. It
was open sourced in 1998 but still received commercial funding after
that.

2) Firefox took off when 2 uber geeks, Blake Ross and Dave Hyatt,
made some fundamental changes about decisions about how Firefox should
be packaged. If you read their bios, they both come from heavy
programming backgrounds, not product development or marketing.

3) Firefox was, and still is, a highly strategic piece of software. It
was in Google's best interest to fund it to break MS's near monopoly
on the browser market. That's why Google threw money at it, not
because they thought it was a cool project that would be really fun to
support.

> case in point: WordPress

You compare apples to oranges. WordPress, from the beginning, had very
modest goals: build an easy-to-use single user platform for blogging.
It did what it did well and therefore met with early success.

Drupal has much more ambitious goals, to become the most powerful,
flexible content management system out there. When you try to be all
things to all people, yes, t's going to take it a little longer to
ripen.


>
> /liza
>
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> Liza Sabater
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>
> On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 2:47 AM, Steve Dondley <s at dondley.com> wrote:
>>
>> Firefox gets in the neighborhood of $65 million per year to help
>> maintain that project. If memory serves me correctly, they have over
>> 200 employees. Drupal has 0 employees and any money that does make its
>> way into the project gets injected sporadically and under no central
>> command.
>>
>> So while your idea to create a "a system that would better identify
>> the non-user ready modules that need further testing and/or
>> documentation" is admirable, it won't happen without a large group of
>> volunteers.
>
> --
> Pending work: http://drupal.org/project/issues/documentation/
> List archives: http://lists.drupal.org/pipermail/documentation/
>



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